Artist Virginia Overton: ‘I wanted to be useful and to add to the world’

When Virginia Overton was invited to create a site-specific work for the new Delta terminal at New York’s LaGuardia airport (opening on June 1), she remembered her father’s tales of flying in low over the rooftops when he visited the city in the 1960s. She sought a symbol for the process of transitioning from ground to air and came up with 12 diamond-shaped sculptures evoking iconic New York landmarks suspended from the ceiling, inspired by the idea of a skylight. Large-scale and lit from within, these pendants will draw the eye up and down the terminal’s four-storey atrium.

The LaGuardia piece is Overton’s first permanent public commission. For an artist who often dismantles existing pieces to make new work from them, the notion of forever is unsettling. “Permanent was a concept I had to grapple with,” she says when we meet at a solo show of her work that opened in early May at Goldsmiths Centre for Contemporary Art in London.

Everyone wants a piece of her right now, it seems. In Venice in April, I sat on an Overton bench to eat my lunch, as I surveyed her tulip-shaped concrete sculpture embedded with pink glass and a row of fishing net-covered buoys. Both works are part of the Biennale’s central exhibition.

The child of intellectual but intensely practical parents, Tennessee-born Overton, 50, grew up on a farm. It took her a long time “to say out loud” that she wanted to be an artist. “I wanted to be useful and to add to the world,” she says. “And I hadn’t wrapped my mind around the idea that art could be that thing.” But art kept “popping up” and finally she gave in, completing an MFA at the University of Memphis, before moving to New York.

Today, she makes work from timber, metal, water, glass, stone, plastic and piping, spying energy and aesthetic potential in discarded or forgotten objects. Recently, the colour and shape of an abandoned slab of concrete had her “out at 5am with a dolly and a bunch of ratchet straps” to lug it back to her Brooklyn studio. Overton is in love with her materials and, if it is an obsession, she can see the funny side.

For a 2012 video piece which she plans to rescreen at Nashville’s Frist Art Museum in October, she reworked a 1970s anti-litter television ad in which a heavily tattooed man drives through the countryside hurling rubbish from his car. “I was so enamoured by that commercial as a kid,” she says. “When I saw it later and people joked about my using trash in my work, I ran it backwards . . . so he’s picking up the trash. It’s a clear illustration of what I do in a way, picking these things up, that gesture . . . ” And the fact you recycle? “Yeah, totally!”

At Goldsmiths CCA (a Victorian bathhouse made over as a gallery in 2018), Overton was invited to respond to the varied nature of the building, which ranges from super-distressed bricks and tiles through a pristine, light-filled white cube to an inky-black den inside what was once a water tank. New pieces by the artist incorporate steel that was stored by the late British sculptor Anthony Caro at Yorkshire Sculpture Park for use by future generations of artists.

Overton spent a week at YSP making “a visual and a physical inventory” of Caro’s steel, looking to take away pieces she could integrate with other material “to make a conversation between the two”. For “Untitled (chime for Caro)” (2022), the most enjoyable piece in the show, she sorted Caro fragments according to their weight and has hung them on a gantry opposite a row of aluminium pipes. As visitors we can “play” them, offsetting the ding of the aluminium with the cowbell-like sound of the steel.

Her work is in constant dialogue with a long line of almost exclusively male sculptors, not just Caro, but also Carl Andre, Richard Serra, Tony Cragg, Dan Graham and Mark di Suvero. “Those artists are important to her,” says Sarah McCrory, director of Goldsmiths CCA. “But she is a woman stepping into a room that is occupied predominantly by men and moving the conversation in a different direction.”

Reworking minimalism for the contemporary world, Overton’s feminist practice meanders thoughtfully, finding connections between industrial materials and the natural world. For “Untitled (Late Bloomer)” (2021), a ravishing piece on show until the autumn in Milwaukee, she has planted lotuses in the back of a pick-up truck. Everything is intuitive and experimental. “I don’t want to assert too much will,” she says.

As ever with her work, there are stories within stories to be found in the Goldsmiths show. “Untitled” (2015), a “sculptural painting” composed from brass tubes, looks a perfect fit for London’s White Cube gallery, a gentle play on the idea of abstract art. But look closely and you notice bird droppings and rain- and insect-damage: the tubes were once part of a 500ft pipe that ran across the fields of Storm King Art Center in upstate New York. Handprints on the work are a reminder that people could communicate through the pipe without the need for auditory amplification.

Equally unexpected is her incorporation of a tiny brooch that once belonged to her great-grandmother into the disco-lit darkness of her tank-room installation, while Richard Strauss’s Also sprach Zarathustra rumbles ominously around you.

Ever since a 2012 exhibition at The Kitchen in New York, for which she turned up empty-handed and set about making a show from scratch, Overton has been known for her spontaneity. Does she still abandon plans? “I did it here in a modified way,” she says, admitting that such an approach can at times induce panic in collaborators. The exhibition’s title, Animal Magnetism, alludes to the fact that she can never quite pinpoint why she does things and lives easily with the mystery.

The Caro steel has prompted Overton to reflect on the sculptural canon. She is proud of her place in art history, but art history isn’t the whole story. When I mention land artist Robert Smithson’s fascination with crystals as a reference in the LaGuardia skylights, she agrees that he was a “strong voice” in her head. “But I would say my grandfather was a land artist,” she says. “He terraced his fields so he could grow corn. It was so beautiful. I feel like they are equal.”

‘Animal Magnetism’ to July 31, goldsmithscca.art
LaGuardia installation from June 1, laguardiaairport.com