John Costi interrogates his fractured psyche with new Somerset House show ‘Bapou’s Bubbles’

In the basement of Somerset House, through a warren of white corridors littered with cardboard boxes and similar detritus, John Costi’s studio is an explosion of colour and creativity. On the floor is a taped-together collage of images of citrus fruits and eye-popping balloons, while the walls jostle with artworks and found objects: between two bright abstract paintings, there’s a gold Gucci logo on a piece of a faux-leather watch box.

Thanks to his tumble of silvery, shoulder-length corkscrew hair and multicoloured cap, you’d have no trouble matching the artist to the space. The remainder of the watch box, the 38-year-old explains, 'houses incense which has olive leaves from my village in Cyprus that my ancestors would have planted – we burned them in Cyprus to keep away the evil eye.'

Costi’s latest show, Bapou’s Bubbles, due to open at Somerset House later this month, finds the multimedia artist grappling with his Irish and Greek-Cypriot heritage – or, rather, his displacement from it. Born to a working-class family in Finchley, north London, he’s always felt at a remove from these cultures. Soundtracked by fractured grime beats, the performance-art piece takes the form of a TV talk show, with Costi and several other actors playing different aspects of his psyche. Across the two events, he’ll also interview different artists and experts from a cross-section of society (such as social justice advocate Lord Hastings).

Ultimately, it’s a journey of self-discovery. Bapou derives from the Greek word for grandfather; bubble is Cockney rhyming slang for both a Greek person and having a good time. 'I think that I make art to get closer to my family and those that came before me,' Costi says. 'The splitting and hybrid versions of me come from being part of a diaspora. The version of Cypriot culture that I have isn’t the version that you get in Cyprus. It’s via north London. It’s a language of distortion.'

Bapou’s Bubbles features an onstage exchange between Costi and his mother, Bridget, as they recite the letters that they wrote to each other during the artist’s prison term for armed robbery from 2007. At 18, Costi received a six-year sentence at west London’s Feltham Prison and Young Offender Institution (last year it was named the most violent prison in England and Wales, with a report finding that inmates had refused family visits to protect relatives). He’d targeted five branches of William Hill, the bookmakers, with a 9mm handgun.

While he was away in Feltham, it was suggested that Costi partake in art therapy, as he’d previously attended an art and design course for students who’d been expelled from mainstream education. This meant he was granted access to the institution’s art room, where he discovered a colourful book on Jean-Michel Basquiat, who was similarly interested in street art and marginalisation. 'There was a kind of mania that I recognised,' Costi says. 'There are a lot of Basquiat copies now, but I had never seen it before.'

Inspired, he created a huge-scale abstract artwork that drew on the muddy red and black hues of ‘Untitled (Angel)’, the painting that appeared on the cover of the Basquiat book. Costi shows Wallpaper* a photo of his younger self posing next to his artwork, which was displayed on the wall of Feltham’s healthcare wing. Arms outstretched, he’s grinning for the camera. In the bottom right-hand corner of his painting are the words: 'Tick tock.'

It's an image that makes you think of the young people in your own life. Full disclosure: Costi was briefly my next-door neighbour and, to the delight of my children, once decorated the pavement outside our houses with chalk drawings of paw prints that grew bigger and bigger, as if some unseen creature had magically reached gigantic proportions. This playfulness runs through Bapou’s Bubbles, though Somerset House’s online listing for the show also carries a content warning for references to 'sexual violence and suicide.'

At 13, Costi was subjected to a terrible act of violence in an underpass, an incident he describes as a catalyst for his subsequent criminality and 'risky behaviours.' As an adult, he returned to repaint the inside of the tunnel bright white, like the walls of a gallery. He documented the project in a short film and has on his phone a 3D scan of himself standing in the underpass: 'The place of complete pain and upset is now in my pocket and I can go there whenever I want. I call it a museum of injury.'

During his first year at Feltham, Costi discovered Koestler Arts, a charity that helps inmates to nurture their own creative talents. When the organisation’s annual awards rolled around, he submitted two poems, for which he received a Commended Certificate – a prize recognising their quality. This was a sign, he says, 'that I was doing something right for the first time in a very long time.'

Thus began an ongoing correspondence with Koestler, who assigned him a mentor upon his release. A former textiles tutor at Central Saint Martins, she was 'the first posh person that I’d ever really interacted with,' Costi explains with a smile. Through a combination of Trench’s guidance and his own tenacity, he successfully applied to study fine art at Saint Martins. He graduated with a first.

Nowadays, Costi works with prisons and probation offices, encouraging men to see 'that they’re allowed to engage in art practice', a pursuit he previously believed to be for people 'with loads of books in their house, or who went to museums.'

The UK’s prison population has doubled in the last 30 years, with overcrowding a critical issue and associated violence on the rise. Costi, though, says the system isn’t ‘broken’: 'I would argue that it’s meant to do that. Does anybody honestly think that if we get all the most – and I use this term sensitively – damaged among us and put them all together, they’re going to get better on their own? Logically, that would never happen. And then you have bad newspapers that get wind of some kind of drama therapy happening in prison and call it a ‘holiday camp’.'

Last year, in an implicit riposte to this way of thinking, he joined Jeremy Deller to co-curate No Comment, the Southbank Centre’s exhibition of over 200 artworks submitted to the Koestler Awards. The pair struck up a friendship in Venice in 2013, when Deller and the British Council invited six artists with lived experience of prison to attend the Venice Biennale. Costi was already a big Deller fan, having admired The Battle of Orgreave, a 1000-person reenactment of a 1984 clash between police and striking miners that the Turner Prize winner staged in 2001: 'I thought that was a real mass act of group therapy. I was into how he managed to heal a social wound.

'In the same way that he’s interested in people that aren’t artists in the traditional sense, I’m interested in convincing people that they can make art too. One thing he said to me, which I still live by, is that when you’re working with groups of people, they will always surprise you.'

This, he explains, is why Bapou’s Bubbles is such a collaborative show, a personal interrogation that is reliant on its disparate players and interviewees. Like The Battle of Orgreave, it’s also a testament to the healing power of creativity. 'In the system at large,' says Costi, 'including mainstream education, art is the least prioritised thing – but it’s the thing that can really save you.'

‘Bapou’s Bubbles’ takes place at Somerset House on January 30 and 31. Tickets are available here