A DEEPER RECESS 009: an interview with Jeremy Deller
We speak to Jeremy Deller about his National Gallery 200th birthday project, rituals, land art & other big ideas
15 July 2025
Welcome to the 9th edition of A Deeper Recess, the recessed.space newsletter where we speak to a leading creative. Lots of exciting interviews down the line, but for now let’s get on with this interview with Jeremy Deller — with huge thanks to subscribers of this newsletter strand who make it possible.
An interview with Jeremy Deller
Exhibition details available at: https://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/exhibitions/across-the-uk/the-triumph-of-art
We visited Llandudno on the north Welsh coast to speak to Jeremy Deller the day after he had led a curious, playful procession through the seaside resort town. It had begun at the town’s museum where characters performed by young company participants at Frân Wen Theatre Company carefully carried Neolithic items in glass display cases.
They eventually wound up at Mostyn, the leading contemporary art gallery where an exhibition, Carreg Ateb: Vision or Dream?, from Deller alongside local creatives exploring real and imagined Welsh cultural history and myth opened in spectacular fashion. Along the route, which followed the seafront promenade, dancing and music picked up a sizeable crowd, all who ended up at Mostyn for tea and cake.
It’s part of The Triumph of Art, Deller’s contribution to the National Gallery’s 200th birthday. Similar, but locally-themed processions had already taken place in Derry-Londonderry and Dundee, while one in Plymouth followed the Llandudno offering, before it all concludes in London’s Trafalgar Square on 26 July with a huge, immersive, suitably-Deller-infused, free party — to which you are invited!
The conversation picks up on Deller’s interest in land, history, and place, while speaking to some of the artist’s well-known and celebrated projects, including: The Battle of Orgreave, a re-enactment of the 1980s battles between striking miners and police; Sacrilege, the 2012 bouncy castle reimagining of Stonehenge; It Is What It is, a journey across the US carrying the remains of a car used as an Iraqi suicide bomb as a device to instigate conversation; and We’re Here Because We’re Here, the collaboration with Rufus Norris that saw 1600 volunteers dressed in WWI uniform appear across Britain as a ghostly and uncanny memory on the centenary anniversary of the Battle of the Somme.
