Between a photograph and a sculpture, between fact and fiction, between presence and absence — that is where Tom Lovelace works. The London-based artist has spent his career investigating the spaces that other practices tend to skip over, and what he finds there is consistently unnerving and quietly beautiful. We sat down with him to talk about emptiness, photograms, workaday objects that stop people dead, and why three brothers behind a lens haven't made anything together yet.

There is a phrase Tom Lovelace uses that lodges itself in the mind. The possibilities that lie in between things. It sounds almost casual when he says it — the kind of thing an artist says to avoid saying something more definitive. But spend time with Lovelace's work and you understand it isn't evasion. It's a precise description of a practice that has always made its home in the gap.

Photography, performance, sculpture. Three disciplines that most artists treat as distinct rooms in a house. Lovelace knocks down the walls and works in the rubble — and something compelling lives there.

The moment it clicked for him was 2004. He walked into Art, Lies and Videotape at Tate Liverpool, a group show that carved into the shared histories of performance and live art, the ways photography and film collapse the boundary between fact and what we decide to make of it. It left a mark. Not as an influence in the derivative sense — Lovelace isn't interested in citing what came before and reproducing it — but as a permission slip. A confirmation that the intersection of media was not a compromise but a territory.

His reference points read like a particular kind of syllabus: Eva Hesse, Robert Mapplethorpe, Helena Almeida, Walker Evans, Yvonne Rainer, Alina Szapocznikow, Helen Chadwick, Mona Hatoum. These are artists who each, in their own way, refused the comfort of a single medium, a single register, a single reading. More recently: Cathy Wilkes, Philippe Parreno. And running beneath all of it, like a structural current, minimalism — not as aesthetic preference but as language, stretching from Malevich through Agnes Martin and Dan Flavin.

"Minimalism as a movement, as a set of ideas and as a complex language within visual culture continues to inform my practice."

It is worth sitting with that word — language — because it tells you something about how Lovelace thinks. He is not minimalist in the sense of stripping things away for the sake of it. He is interested in what the language of minimalism says, what it can carry, what it can't.

Photography, he will tell you, is the pivotal ingredient. Without it, everything might fall apart. And there is something revealing in that phrasing — might, not would. An artist certain of his own foundations doesn't hedge. Lovelace hedges because the uncertainty is the point. He intentionally seeks out what he calls slippery areas, the unpredictable and compelling moments that occur precisely in the gaps between disciplines.

But ask him what he is proudest of and the answer is immediate, and slightly surprising: the photograms. Not the large-scale installations. Not the works that have toured the institutions. The photograms.

"They continue to keep me up at night," he says. "I think they offer wonderful possibilities and encounters for the audience, whilst significantly they contain emptiness and silence."

Emptiness and silence. Two qualities that sound like absence but function, in Lovelace's hands, as a kind of gravity — pulling the viewer in, holding them there.

The counter-evidence for anyone who might underestimate the power of humble objects: Sweep, from 2015. First shown at the Victoria and Albert Museum, then the London Art Fair. Lovelace admits he feared ridicule. What happened was the opposite: visitors overwhelmed, spellbound, by workaday objects. His words. There is something almost wry in how he tells this story — the slight disbelief that it worked, and the pleasure he takes in the fact that it did.

The pandemic, when it arrived, cracked the world open in the way it cracked open everyone's world. For the artworld, Lovelace describes it plainly: a tornado. Conventional access to culture — galleries, theatres, performances, bodies — simply denied. And then, on top of that, the reckoning demanded by the Black Lives Matter movement. Every responsible creative, he says, was forced to reassess. Practice, structures, participation.

What he found in the rubble was nature. New to him as a subject. Occurring, as so much occurs for artists in stillness, through lockdowns and socially distanced living — through enforced looking at what was immediately around him, rather than what he had chosen to seek out.

An exhibition in France is the horizon. The work is driven by what he describes as the transformational and fluid qualities of the natural world — qualities that sit, interestingly, in direct conversation with his longstanding interest in the gap, the in-between, the moment of becoming.

"I think art and artists have never been so important. It feels as though a spotlight is on the artworld in anticipation of what will evolve."

What will evolve. Not what has been made. Lovelace, typically, is looking forward into the uncertainty rather than back at the record.

There is one more thing, almost an aside, that opens up something larger. Tom Lovelace is one of four brothers. Three of them spend the better part of their lives behind a lens. His brothers Will and Ed are both film directors. They have not yet collaborated.

"Perhaps that needs to happen sooner rather than later."

An artist who works in the space between photography, performance, and sculpture. Three brothers. Three disciplines. Three lenses pointed, so far, in different directions. The possibilities that lie in between things, indeed.

Tom Lovelace

Tom Lovelace is a Tutor at the Royal College of Art, London. Residencies include Yorkshire Sculpture Park, London South Bank University, and the Anna Mahler International Foundation, Italy. His work is held in public and private collections internationally. Discover more artists chosen for their ideas, not their visibility, at Antakly Projects.

Interview by Leila Antakly