One of my favourites: PAUL MCCARTHY
The artist that has made rounds in the news has been, to my reading pleasure, one of my favourites – the eccentric Paul McCarthy. The irony and deprecation of the green “butt plug” that he recently erected on the Place Vendome did not invoke libido but quite a considerable amount of serotonin which led to the artwork and artist being savagely assaulted. No one has been coerced into giving it try on the “Tree”, the preferred euphemism, but the anger might not have been an impetuous spur to take a swing at the artist. In fact, Paul McCarthy has long been a provocative clown, who painted with food, ketchup, mayonnaise, and his own feces. Compared to his grotesque book of works, Parisians were lucky to get a stream-lined, simple in geometric shapes, a green butt plug because it really could have been worse.
Take the “Santa Claus” statue for example, for which McCarthy received a permanent spot in 2008 to display a Gnome holding up a 3 leveled butt plug with suction base in the Dutch town of Eendrachtsplein. It was never met with malicious attacks like “Tree” but polite invitations for it to relocate. How the butt plugs were received revealed more about its audience and their capacity to tolerate than how the artist was assertive. The Parisians appeared to be a bit more anal on what constitute contemporary art it seems.
The Brits however as one would expect love McCarthy. The Phallic Pinocchio, aka, Blockhead was a subversive interpretation of a Disney Character that stood outside Tate Modern for a solid 5 months. As a Guardian journalist has noted that “Britain is muffled by a middle-class, bland consensus of approval” for modern art, we have lost our rights to be offended. The over exposure of manipulations of iconographies and the tiresome gimmicks of blending the sacred and the profane have made us into products of lethargy.
Coming back to the artist himself, I’ve always appreciated the eccentric behaviours of them regardless of what critics think of their art as from formal aspects or maybe I’ve just given up on resolving the problem of not knowing what my own taste is. But for a guy like McCarthy who once threw himself around a ketchup spattered classroom until dazed and injured to eventually throw up and shove a Barbie doll into his rectum, just like how Damien Hirst put out a cigarette on his penis during an interview, that makes me like them.
Jockum Nordström Celebrates His Solo Exhibition at David Zwirner London
Represented by acclaimed David Zwirner London, Swedish artist Jockum Nordström boasts a celebrated and undeniably modern body of work.
Featuring eclectic collages, exquisite watercolors, detailed drawings, and architectural sculptures, Nordström’s ouervre is diverse yet aesthetically unified.
Through January, the gallery will proudly present For the insects and the hounds, an exhibition featuring new sculptures and works on paper from Nordström. Inspired by the artist’s experiences in Gotland, Sweden’s largest island, For the insects and the hounds conveys an innate focus on nature and evokes the rusticity of the island’s rural landscape.
To coincide with the exhibition, David Zwirner London will also host a book launch celebrating the reprinting of Who is sleeping on my pillow, a book by the artist and his wife, Mamma Anderson. Both artists will be in attendance to sign copies of their charming book, which features 200 full-color plates depicted “alongside favorite family snapshots and source materials”. Co-hosted by David Zwirner Books – the gallery’s stand-alone publishing house – and the London Review of Books, this exciting event will take place in the gallery space on Friday, 28 November, at 6:30 PM.
Be sure to check out For the insects and the hounds, on view from 28 November though 24 January 2015 at David Zwirner London!
Upcoming talk:
Special event: Talk by curator Marc Donnadieu
Saturday, January 17, 11 AM
Free and open to the public
RSVP to Naomi Chassé at naomi@davidzwirner.com or +44 203 538 3165
Visit the gallery for a guided tour of the exhibition, For the insects and the hounds, and a talk on the artist by Marc Donnadieu. Donnadieu curated Jockum Nordström’s recent major European survey, All I Have Learned and Forgotten Again, which was on view in at the LaM, the Lille Métropole Musée d’art moderne, d’Art contemporain et d’art brut in Villeneuve d’Ascq, France. The exhibition later traveled to the Camden Arts Centre in London.
FILIPPOS TSITSOPOULOS: Kage-where K for kott
Photos by Sonia Arias
Filippos Tsitsopoulos is a painter, installation, video theatre and performance media artist who has worked in the field of interactive theatre installation art, exploring the limits of performance and painting since 1990. His practice engages the spectator/participant to a new theatre or rather a system of including theatre as a catalyst of our daily life. This is precisely the case for his latest project, Kage – Where K for Kott. We had the chance to speak with Filippos and gain more of an insight into his intriguing background of work.
To begin, could you give us a brief background into your work?
Well even if I’m not working with painting, I consider myself a painter who decides to use other artistic disciplines as canvases; like video theatre installation, traditional repertory theatre and performance. I have worked in the field of interactive theatre installation, exploring the limits of performance, as well as in painting since 1990. My practice engages the spectator/participant to a new system including theatre as a catalyst of our daily life. How theatre can change our reality and ourselves.
I use concepts that belong to the theatre, traditional and modern. These concepts are applied to visual arts, observing the effects that they produce. With the use of self-made masks produced from living materials, animals or plants, I construct parallel equivalents that enclose and juxtapose temporally disproportionate elements.
The dialogue with the history of Art is always alive in my works and in my life, due to the fact that I was part of the external collaborators of the educational department of the Prado Museum in Madrid from 2005 to 2012. I held workshops related to drawing and art aesthetic, with the theme ‘Irony in Art’ almost every day during that period.
‘Irony in Art’ was also my research theme during my Doctorate studies in Fine Arts at Complutense University of Madrid from 1990 to 1996. Before that I studied in Greece, painting at the Aristotelian University of Thessaloniki in the Faculty of Fine Arts from 1985 to 1990.
This relation with the theatre, with history of Art, with a big personal loss combined with my childhood memories, makes me create a system of works as independent ways of thought and reflection, on concepts derived from the performance and the theatre.
What inspired you to move into the realm of video theatre and performance?
The impossibility to communicate the issues that happened to me was the main reason. Although I studied painting, theatre came up, it was inevitable, and the love of all the masks, ‘layers of onions of an actor’s visibility or invisibility,’ make me jump through painting and performance.
The most unforgettable story for the development of this performance system was this one:
Long ago, back in the year 1993, the day that my mother died, I was still a student. My father, a professional actor, was interpreting Polonius in Shakespeare’s Hamlet in Athens. I must say that this performance was memorable and imposing. My father, completely destroyed by the loss of his wife, buried the same day, dedicated his entire performance to her. It was obvious that all his gestures that night on the stage were speaking about her. The climax was when Polonius had to say, reading the letter of love from Hamlet to his daughter Ophelia, the words “Doubt thou the stars are fire, doubt that the sun doth move, Doubt truth to be a liar, but never doubt about my love, my love, never doubt about my love, my love…”
My father repeated “never doubt about my love, my love” so many times that the other actors on the stage remained astonished, and knowing that the very same day my mother had passed away, they decided to remain inert looking at one another. The public did not understand what was happening and they began applauding, touched by the text and its constant repetition and the emotion of the interpretation; so much so that they finally had to stop the performance for a few minutes because the people were continually applauding. And without understanding why this scene had upset them so much, they kept on applauding.
I CONSIDER MY ART AS A ‘SABOTAGE OF MY OWN REALITY’
Later on, it was the first night that my mother was not at home waiting for us… and while I was heating my father’s meal for dinner, he told me, “That was for her (for my mother) you know”. And he continued: “And you like Laertes, (his son in the scene) please try, in your life to be honest with yourself and with it, as the night continues to day, you cannot be false to anybody…”
It was obvious that he carried on interpreting the role at home, believing or trying to convince himself that the reality we live in, the ‘truthiness’ of life, can be inverted in the theatre and extend into art. The reality we live in, brought back to the theatre; the theatre representing life, with all of our belongings part of a big stage and scenery of life.
A few years later in 2006 when my father died, I decided to watch all of his videos and performances, read and remember all of the roles, study all of the monologues, in a kind of obsession to understand my infancy and adolescence in my house full of theatre and interpretation. I constantly read essays from Harold Pinter to Gombrowicz and from Berry to Brecht and Beckett, to Peter Weiss and Marat Sade and began to articulate an enormous work of more than 72 videos of monologue performances.
I began interpreting Polonius for my father. I transformed my face with living elements, creating a flexible mask according to the face muscles and the movement of the mouth, imitating the red beard of the Danish Polonius. I played my first text for him saying exactly the same words as the ones he said for my mother. I transformed myself to communicate with my deceased father. The conclusion of a lifetime, the impossible answers to questions of our zeitgeist, how can you play or act in life and in theatre and what about if these roles could be inverted? Was this a starting point or the beginning of a philosophy for my father as actor and person — and my philosophy too, about life, religion, death and love.
I consider my art as a ‘sabotage of my own reality,’ and the reality of others as well. I use my face and my body in a concise and clear forefront. My face is like the vehicle that serves to transmit the message. And the message is a question or many perhaps: What would happen if the theatre could be used in our life to replace the reality? What would happen if our everyday life were transformed to tragedy?
I refer to all physical and mental consequences of the tragedy, including the sacrifice and the Oedipus blindness: To ‘see’ will let you blind? And the most important: How might we continue a stage play if one of its personages goes crazy, or simply it is not necessary, the zeitgeist that we live on, has replaced him or overcome it?
If there is an absence of tragic figures in our life why then do we not do the Oedipus tragedy, without Oedipus? Are theatre and its archetypes sufficient to answer to the current human existence and its questions? Or is it only a theatrical archaeology?”
Your father was an actor and you also speak a lot about famous literary figures. Have artists across different disciplines always played a part in your work?
If there is an absence of tragic figures in our life why then do not we do the Oedipus tragedy, without Oedipus? That is the question that someone must ask, wondering where all the famous literary figures go. I really care about the issues that come up when someone is looking at tragedy for instance. I don’t care too much let’s say about Euripides life, but I’m passionate about Oedipus. This became the purpose of my work.
As Jan Hoet, director of the Documenta IX in Kassel mentioned about my works “Filippos is working with art as subject. Art itself is capable to create Art.” To speak and express myself with borrowed words, brings me near to the behaviour of an actor who learns and studies an already observed and analysed reality and embodies someone else’s face, but beneath my face lies memories from reality.
I use my face, destroying it with pixels or masks, to recreate a natural disaster. The human suffering behind that mask and feeling of an impassive nature to human suffering is inverted through dramatization and theatre.
In Greek vases, almost all the figures are looking sideways, except figures that should face death; who are the only ones looking in front. So all my video portraits are figures who mentally are dealing with Hades. In Ancient Greece, before performing a tragedy role, the mythology says that Greek actors must ask permission to play from Hades, the kingdom of death.
I USE MY FACE, DESTROYING IT WITH PIXELS OR MASKS, TO RECREATE A NATURAL DISASTER
This is where the Greek tradition is placing the actor before the play. To find a specific image to respond to in one of my monologues is like juggling in the circus between nothingness and wholeness. The circus contains specific images. Everything in the circus is happening ‘for real’. The dancer dances with ‘real risk’ in a real rope, and the bear tamer shows only the spectacle of wild-domesticated animals. When ‘something happens’ really means that the image is at a ‘precise point’ or a ‘thing’. The actor’s face and the ‘garment’ is an image. If the actor interprets himself, though he remains an actor, it is a ‘precise point’. But, if he identifies himself with the person he interprets, then the images produced are ‘mimetic symbols’. Looking at the passageway between actual time and theatrical time, imagined space with the real, is my aim.
Where did inspiration for your latest project, Kage – Where K for Kott, come from? What will the performances consist of?
It is very common for an artist to use his home ground as a canvas. Having a repertory actor as my father, makes you inevitably a silent witness of his rehearsals at home. This fact can change you forever. Endgame, Hamlet and Othello, Berry, Bart, Beckett, from Jerzy Grotowski to Giorgio Strehler and from Ibsen to Calderon, to Peter Weiss, Suzuki Tadashi, Peter Sellars, Heiner Müller, Tony Harrison, and Thomas Murphy, to Kafka’s “a cage went in search of a Bird…”
If this is the conclusion of a lifetime with your father, then you must close to a religion called “Ionesco” and the person to swear, as Peter Brook’s said, is “in the name of the Bible of Jan Kott”. Theatre is the medium through which to understand the world. Jan helped me understand what it means to find the non-evident in the evident, and the evident in the non-evident.
The project is related to a big forgotten person: Jan Kott. A series of filmed performances in public spaces and monologues/reflections based on his two books, Shakespeare our Contemporary and Theatre of Essence, (which are actually closer to literature than to essays), will be used as theatrical texts for my monologues, to reconstruct the imaginary life of Jan in London. Like Joyce’s Ulysses which revisits “payments” of a day time mythology, the character who is playing Kott, will revisit all his main theatrical subjects from Ionesco to Gombrowitcz, his relation with art and life, to his beloved and magical actress Ida Kaminska, well known from her Oscar title but also for her awesome interpretation of Mother Courage in Brecht’s play.
I had the good fortune of seeing a performance similar to this from the Greek actress Katina Paxinou when I was six or seven years old. Jan Kott knew Paxinou well and several times saw that play to include her in his specific book about Drama. My father, a repertory actor, was acting the role of the priest in Brecht’s play next to Paxinou. I barely remember Mr. Kott now, but his smile, his black shirt and he enjoying like a child the cakes Paxinou offered to both of us backstage. Almost every night after school I was in the theatre backstage doing my homework, watching Brecht’s play, enjoying my father’s acting, as every kid would do, every afternoon, until my mother, who usually finished work later would come and take me home.
Well, this project starts mentally from my home ground and is transported to the theatrical ground of London, creating performances in public spaces, scenarios and monologues, and reflections about theatre and life, as if I was metaphorically wearing the skin of Kott. In my works is living in London, walking the streets, watching galleries and Museums, sleeping on a boat by the river, approaching nearby strangers and talking with them and using masks as Kott’s favorite element of his Verfremdunseffekt (Distancing effect).
Acting is putting on other faces and embodying someone else’s soul. This journey was inspired by Kafka and “a cage went in search of a bird”, which became “Kage- where K for Kott”; video- filmed- performances and monologues all over London. This work will be displayed in a Gallery as a photography and large-scale multi channel video installation and will have several exhibitions when finished.
How important is the role of spectator/participant to your work? How much of a part will the spectators play in this piece? What is the final goal of this piece?
As a Joycian Ulyssean journey, where Homer’s Ullyses embodies the Joycian one and vice versa, as the Marquis de Sade and Marat in the Peter Weiss play shift into the other, there is no theatre without spectator. The only difference is that in theatre language we see things opposite, as well as in my works, from the end to the beginning from left to right. All this is like the classic theatre paradigm of the mirror, when Hamlet tells his actors to pull up a mirror so that they may view themselves, and if a theatre is a mirror then “the right is left in and the left is right. In the mirror, our heart is on the right side, we cross with our left hand”. And if we ask ourselves what is real in the theatre, then probably we will answer: the chairs. Yet these chairs when taken from the auditorium and set on the stage, they are no longer chairs but representations of chairs or “spots” in theatre language, like Ionesco`s empty chairs are waiting for the viewers to come. I also aim to convert the audience into actors.
The second part that I am now developing in London, is called The Grimaces Competition Bus and is drawn from an essay by Jan Kott about an incident that took place during the Second World War in Poland. During one long night of constant bombing, two Warsaw actors are trying, during this awful night, to fight and win a strange competition:
“The ugliest and most horrible grimace of the world made by the muscles of a human face”.
Finally, we don’t know who was the winner of this absurd expressionistic behaviour, but it was used as an example by Ionesco later on to his students of how performance could push boundaries and limits and how opposite the so called theatrical truth is from reality. The Grimaces Competition Bus is the digital and technological reconstruction and adaptation in a modern life and public art form of that incident.
In a Hackney central 38 London bus are installed 120 screens in its exterior façade and lateral, as well as in the upper outside roof. People are invited to get in and make a grimace and then give the reason for the horror or the joy of their feelings, and or any personal or political disappointments.
In every stop of the bus new people will come up and new grimaces will be added in the timeline of the day. Every grimace will be filmed and streamed on the flat television screens on the exterior of the bus. This event will be collecting grimaces all over London. Older ‘grimaces’ (from the days before) will be added on hard discs and streamed in some of the outer screens of the bus, while on other screens, the new ones will be performed totally live.
EVERY END EMBODIES EVERY BEGINNING
The inside part of the bus will be removed to include a space with one camera, waiting to record the reaction of a passenger to a memory or to something related to a grimace. A video edition and streaming team of volunteers and people explaining the action and the artist will be there to help and give them guidance points. Every day the artist will perform a two hour sequence of grimaces streaming them directly on one outer screen of the bus.
The Grimaces Competition is an adaptation a modern life form of that Warsaw incident but in an outside inverted shape. The metaphor of the attack of the commercial markets, art markets, social markets, art war, ‘the constant bombing of the human rights and work’, as well as the cuts of all type of benefits due to the new order of things, which embrace with indifference the unprotected citizens, makes critical the reaction and activation of the series of primary feelings and interior nerve mechanics, spasms and expressions and the use of them as the possible theatrical Utopia. In the exterior of the bus, as well as in Ancient Greece feasts the Eleusinian Telesterion (initiation hall) and Ex Amaxis events will turn too into a live structure society performance.
It can be considered as a collective absurd comedy drama viewed live but in video. In the outside part of the bus there are nearly two hundred or more connected and adapted flat television screens. In our theatrical modern theory, the fact of the two actors competing for the most horrible grimace under the sound of bombing Warsaw is translated to London reality.
This work will perform from the inside and will criticize with grimace and absurdity, the world of nowadays. This theatre bus will not stay hidden but will reveal the expression of the inner protected or unprotected presence of territorial freedom and the mechanics that arise in the human being in order to defend himself psychologically and physically from an external pressure, defeat the fear, as well the sadness. Grimaces as the weapon to face the impossibility, to formulate coherent actions and thoughts is doing exactly the opposite if we invert it.
Will these works be exhibited anywhere?
The idea of the Opposite, mentioned before is the matrix of this project. The works will start in galleries and institutions, filming myself there with my masks in places such as The Serpentine Galleries, The Whitechapel and Frieze art fair and will end in a social project where the Bus will be the final destination. When this overall work is finished, it will be exhibited one more time in several galleries. At this moment a map is being created to get all the locations, from museums and galleries to theatres and pubs that are taking part in this journey. To work with the Opposite, to bring the end and the purpose of something in the very beginning of your investigation or a project, is philosophical. Every end embodies every beginning. This reminds me of Gotthold Ephraim Lessing 1729-1781 and how prophetic his words were about how art shapes are translated, and with this I would like to finish with, “Poetry finally is spoken painting, and painting is poetry who remains in silence” from Laocoon.
Letting the silent speak: SUNARA BEGUM & DUNSTAN PERERA
Visual artists Sunara Begum and Dunstan Perera host their new exhibition at The Crypt: Retracing the Eye: Giving a Voice to the Voiceless.
Here, Sunara Begum and Dunstan Perera create a visual exploration of the work of influential photographer Margaret Cameron. Positioned in the stunning location of The Crypt; the 18th century architecture and brick vaulted ceilings will serve as the perfect atmospheric backdrop for this new exhibition.
Begum engages with culture in all her work, desiring to tell stories through her visual interpretations and in doing so, forming connections between the past and the present. These two artists collaborate together to re-awaken the meaning behind the images of this influential English photographer.
Julia Margaret Cameron was born in Calcutta over 150 years ago. This exhibition explores the photographs she took in her later life whilst living in Ceylon; as she captured people forever in a frame of silence. Begum and Perera let the silent speak once more, exploring these photographs and their subjects and setting free the unspoken narratives within.
Displaying not only photography but etches and wood-cuts, these visual pieces once again inject life into Cameron’s work, tracing the past and relating it back to the voices of the present. Blurring the boundaries of time, the artists cast new perspectives and interpretations on to Cameron’s collection.
The exhibition runs from the 29th September to 12th October at The Crypt Gallery, St Martin in the Fields.
Interview with RACHEL GOODYEAR
Sufficiently sticky from twenty-six degree heat, I was more than pleased to be invited into the cool and creative rooms of Salford-based independent arts organisation Islington Mill, by Rachel Goodyear. With her bohemian-like attire and relaxed demeanour, she seemed very much a part of the place. Her studio is her scrapbook; here you can find magical traces of her imagination such as odd clippings about fungus, her mascot ‘A Girl with Birds Inside Her’ mask and a collection of gothic figurines in a glass cabinet. In her darkly fairytale work you’ll find relentlessly dancing devils, humans wearing beastly masks, young doppelgangers, the trappings of vulnerable animalistic stances, and even a couple feeding each other like birds. Yet her world is her own; these are not archaic characters, but slightly skewed versions of her everyday experiences and observations. Her most recent exhibition work at London’s Pippy Houldsworth Gallery differs significantly from her previous work, and now she’s in collage-style experimental mode. It was a privilege to hear her talk so openly, especially about her collection of drawings ‘Unable To Stop Because They Were Too Close To The Line’ which were her diary while she was undergoing chemotherapy in 2006 for Hodgkin’s lymphoma.
Where did you train as an artist?
I did my BA at Leeds Metropolitan University. It was quite a long time ago now! I was in a really productive year, so I think as a year group we all got along well. There was a lot of support and enthusiasm, which helped a lot.
What has made you stay in Manchester – what is it about the art scene that has made you stay?
Predominantly this place (Islington Mill) – I do sometimes wonder that, especially being in the same studio for so many years and watching everything change around me – even the view out of the window is changing. It does come back to this place. There are some really fantastic places in Manchester as well; it’s a brilliant support network. There’s the International Three Gallery, Castlefield Gallery, Manchester Art Gallery…It’s a good city to be in, but the Mill is definitely my creative home.
“It’s a kind of in-between, sleepwalking state, real but not real. that’s the kind of state i’m interested in.”
Much of your work is like a twisted folklore, a darker version of Alice in Wonderland which sucks all the cliché out of the Disney adaptations. Were you read fairy tales as a child?
Yeah I was read fairy tales, but also my Mum was really into Norse and Greek mythology, there was always these peculiar story books lying around – a lot of them were really old. Also, my great aunty was a mischievous old storyteller – she was quite a character – she would look after me quite a lot and just sit and tell me loads of stories. Some of them were true, others she just made up. I grew up with a lot of tall tales!
Are there any particular figures which feature in your work?
There tends to be more of a serendipitous meeting of characters. Whenever I make work I never actually think about fairy tales or folk tales. What I tend to do is look at the everyday and twist it slightly, perhaps using the objects as metaphors. Because a lot of folklore is built upon those lines as well, I think you get a crossover of old characters and beliefs. I start to notice little similarities there. A few years ago I started to look closely at the trickster character in mythology, mainly because I started reading about the trickster from various different mythologies and cultures and started to notice so many similarities between the characteristics of the trickster and those in my own work. There’s mischievousness, deception…
Explain your use of white space… It seems to correspond to your artwork titles which are simple and devoid of excessive allusion – it’s as if each one encloses a moral or a secret which can’t quite be pinned down the same way as conventional fairy stories…
Right from when I very first started bringing the drawings out of the sketchbook, I saw them as being fragments almost like if you extract something from its natural surroundings, or a sentence from its usual context. If you just strip everything else away it just heightens that ambiguity of who it is, where it has come from, what it’s doing. That white space becomes a charged space even though there’s nothing in it, making you question what could be there. When there’s a lot of space around something it can become quite bleak and maybe appear to be quite vulnerable. It can be like a sinister character in the mist.
Have you ever considered book illustration?
Not as such. I have had people come to me, and if there’s a particular drawing they like that already exists which they think will really suit the story then that’s fine, but it’s more a meeting of creative minds. Robert Shearman, who has written collections of dark short stories, has used some of my drawings in this way. I’ve also done album covers for close friends; when I really like their music and they like my art work, we put the two together and it just kind of works. But it doesn’t happen very often, I can’t illustrate other people’s ideas! I find it quite peculiar when I’m labelled as an illustrator, because I can’t!
There’s something addictively uncanny about your work, which is both familiar and distancing at the same time. Is this intentional?
In a way. Sometimes more so than others, I will have an idea before I put it on paper and it will be quite deliberate. The other way I work is more like a stream of consciousness. To be honest, I prefer the stream of consciousness, but it does tend to take a little longer for things to happen that way, it’s more of a process that’s ongoing over time. There are definitely things you can recognise in my work, because of the way it takes in what’s around, sometimes very ordinary things and twisting them – putting things together that might not necessarily go together. Kind of just screwing things up a little bit! It’s a kind of in-between, sleepwalking state, real but not real. That’s the kind of state I’m interested in.
“I love horror films that create a sense of anxiety from very little at all”
I loved seeing your animation ‘Girl with birds inside her’ – I felt she was inescapably trapped, in comparison to the characters in your drawings…
That’s pretty much what I want the animations to do. When I first started getting interested in animation it wasn’t to make a story. The girl with birds inside her is a long standing character for me, even my studio mascot is ‘the girl with birds inside her’. It’s a sketch which I’ve been doing for years and years. I always imagined she would have all these birds inside her; she would cough one up and another one would take its place so she could never get her breath or be given her voice. But then again I had this idea that she was guided by the fluttering, and the birds’ compass direction was working inside her.
The scenarios I draw on paper tend to show characters caught in a moment, so you could imagine anything could happen next. I had ideas for characters caught in a cycle, which I knew could only be achieved through movement and creating a loop. That’s when I got interested in animation. Most of my animations work as an inescapable cycle, but this was my most ambitious. I underestimated the amount of work which goes into them!
How did you make the animation?
Alex Hindle, an animator from the group Soup Collective, assisted me with all of the technical stuff. I told him what I wanted to do and he gave me quite a bit of guidance, but I also wanted to keep it really DIY. First I made hundreds and hundreds of drawings, then he helped put these into animation programme After Effects and played around with timing/loops. Sound artist, Matt Wand, did the sound for me – most of one day I spent coughing out tomatoes in front of a microphone!
Your artistic repertoire is one of abject substances, claws, teeth, whips, masks and cloaked identities. Art critic Cynthia Freeland notes that art in recent years has shown an obsession with horror; would you say that the contemporary Gothic realm is a spectacle, rather than a physical presence?
Horror has become such a broad term, as has Gothic, and I struggle with them as labels for genres and cultures with so many layers and subtle differences. I think that contemporary Gothic Horror offers both the spectacular and physical presence and I do tend to dip in and out of it. I am a huge horror film fan, particularly silent films such as The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari and Nosferatu, and really enjoy a good zombie or monster movie, but I love horror films that create a sense of anxiety from very little at all. I really enjoyed ‘Under the Skin’ for these very reasons – I still keep thinking about it.
“…it’s really unhealthy to just expect everything to happen in one room”
Looking at your portfolio, your style has changed. This is especially so in 2012, and in your work exhibited at Pippy Houldsworth, where your pages seem to have become fuller of activity, in comparison with earlier drawings. Do you ever feel like the world you’ve created is growing or simply changing?
It’s changing constantly. I’m now in another period of change. I’ve just finished my show at Pippy Houldsworth, so I’ve been thinking about some new techniques and directions. More recently I’ve been looking at a larger landscape and at what would happen if I put multiple characters together. I have noticed in the most recent larger drawings that there seems to be quite a lot of overlapping going on, so one character’s set of activity would create a platform for a parallel activity. Now I am looking at how I might be able to develop that and see where the drawings can go next. I’m allowing myself a little time in the studio to be playful.
Is your sculpture a tangible extension of your drawings? These are like nothing I’ve seen before, in their combination of pencil drawing with materials like porcelain.
Yeah. I wouldn’t ever call myself a sculptor, although I did do sculpture at college. These porcelain works came from a desire to play with what a drawing can be. With my works at the Yorkshire Sculpture Park, in combining 3D objects with drawing, I saw the 3D elements as drawings which had fallen off the paper. I got the idea that if the drawing escaped it would be all floppy and unable to hold its weight. This mixed in with the figure of the trickster – kind of creeping out, then suddenly in uncomfortable territory. It wasn’t about making sculptures, but extending what a drawing might be.
Is there a place for drawing as a medium in the contemporary art world?
The contemporary art world certainly seems to recognise Drawing as a medium in its own right and there is a lot of discussion around the importance of drawing and what it can be. Some institutions focus predominantly on Drawing in its widest sense, notably The Drawing Room in London and The Drawing Center in New York. Drawing can be so extensive and this is something I am thinking a lot about at the moment. I mostly work with pencil on paper, but I am open to the possibilities of what it means to ‘draw’ – with different materials, maybe even the body…
If you had a twin what would they be like?
I think of myself as a double personality anyway. I can be gregarious one day and insular the next, depending on where I am and how I wake up that day. Dressing up can change how I feel too! I like how with a mask or a wig, you can completely change your personality. So my twin would probably be one of them! There have been times where I turn costume into performance, the mask ‘the girl with birds inside her’ was originally part of an art performance I used to do with my friends where I just used to skulk around and hide in corners – I made myself into a strange illusion.
Do most of your ideas come to you in your studio, or elsewhere? The countryside in this area is beautiful…
I’m always looking for ideas. It happens in different ways, sometimes a lot will come together in the studio but then I have to remind myself it’s really unhealthy to just expect everything to happen in one room. Recently, I went on holiday to Scotland. My boyfriend and I just got in my car and drove up to Scotland, all around the Highlands right to the very top. We went to some of the most remote, beautiful places. That definitely got under my skin; when I got back it got me thinking of a whole new body of work, maybe even a new way of working. It was a different jolt to what I would get in this room, or in the city.
I’m visiting Fairfield Hospital to see your series ‘Unable to Stop Because They Were Too Close to the Line’. Were these a kind of diary you kept whilst you were there?
When I was ill, I kept these really intense diaries. The stuff I was drawing in those tended to be really loose scribbles. About half way through the treatment I started to translate these images into more coherent drawings. Even though this is the most personal body of work I have ever made, the final drawings were more about unrest and a period of struggle, rather than about Hodgkin’s disease itself.
There’s a UK based charity called Paintings in Hospitals which uses visual art to create environments that improve health and wellbeing for service users, their families and staff…do you think that art be used as therapy?
Yes, definitely. Art can play a very important role in therapy.
What are you working on at the moment?
I’m giving myself a bit of time to put some new ideas together. I’m pulling back a little bit from the fantastical and looking a little more closely at the everyday and playing around with combinations of images and installations. So rather than try and get too bogged down in narrative, I’m taking more of a collage approach and exploring new techniques.
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