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I think people who really like surrealism are the ones who don’t feel it’s particularly surreal at all. I don’t think of my art as being strange, erotic, uncanny or violent, though I know it is. Each painting seems sensible almost to the point of being mundane while I’m making it. When I first read Angela Carter’s novel, The Night Circus, I remember this great wave of feeling ‘ah, someone who is similarly normal’. It’s this sense of being with other reasonable and conventional people that I love most about looking at the surrealists.
There are a few different times that have had an outsized influence – doing my MFA in sculpture in New York and how much I learned from my teachers and peers comes to mind first. But I think the most honest answer is age 14 to 16. I moved to London from Albuquerque, New Mexico when I was 14. All of a sudden my life was filled to the brim with this outstanding access to culture, and empty of friends. I had a bad case of abrasive teen personality, so I didn’t have much of a social life for those first two years. I wanted something to do on Friday evenings, so I went to drop-in sketching offered by the National Gallery and Wallace Collection. Most weekends were spent at the Prince’s Drawing School life classes. I lied about my age to get in, and the great tutors there lied about believing me. Eventually, I went to sixth form and made more friends and the streak was broken. But those two years kickstarted a technical foundation I rely on every day as an artist.
I can’t choose between my babies. The biggest series so far has been the twelve 1.5 by 2 meter ‘Uteroverse’ paintings. I think it’s the first time someone has painted a cycle of History Paintings which depict the misadventures of sperm inside a powerful vagina. Finishing a project that on canvases larger than me made me feel like a real grown-up.
I think being a figurative painter in this century is hard. When I was doing my undergrad at the Ruskin, there was this sense that figurative art was easy because, unlike smashed bits of a computer, figurative paintings are this tidy, likeable bourgeois product. The trouble is that a figurative painter is contending with a thousand years of art history and still needs to find something original*. Add in photography and post-modernism and Sam fucking Altman, and it can feel like the globe of possible paintings has been mapped and completed. What, then, could be more exciting than among this packed and anatomized landscape, finding a fresh overlooked piece of ground to call your own? I think painting is the hardest medium to excel in, and that makes it the most exciting. Painting in this tradition is the ultimate rejection of low-hanging fruit. But doing it well is such a high bar it can make you want to take a baseball bat to your laptop.
*I think any artist who says they aren’t interested in originality is lying, cowardly, or zen.
I love the films of Peter Greenaway, the fashion photographer Steven Meisel, and the novels of Penelope Fitzgerald. Each of these artists took their medium and cross-pollinated it till it was a whole different strain of pea plant. It’s obvious when you look at their work that they were each intellectual omnivores, combining a vast world of influence into something distilled and original.
I was applying for this residency* in rural France, and as part of the application, was trying to think of how to make the best use out of being somewhere very secluded, medieval and french. At the same time, I came across images of an unfinished sketchbook made by a manuscript illuminator, Stephen Schriber, in 1494 and from this got interested in the Book of Hours – the most popular type of medieval prayer book. Everything about medieval Books of Hours spoke to me: the casual combination of whimsical, beautiful, scatological, religious and violent imagery on the same page, the fact that these books were an early form of wealth women could hold and were made for a primarily female audience, the implied obsession with how to measure our time, and what it means to spend time well. The 20 paintings I made for the show are my own sort of ‘Book of Hours’, an odd chimera of personal-life vignettes, weird animals, and violent power play. All surrounded by the historically accurate adornment from that 1494 unfinished sketchbook.
*GIRLPOWER, run by Marcelle Josephs and Kimberly Morris. I ended up making some of the last paintings of the show there.
A few things are coming up! I’m in a fab little group show in NYC opening feb 6th curated by Danica Lundy and Alexi Worth, later this month I’m part of a three-person show curated by Marcelle Joseph at Ione and Mann, opening Feb 12th, and a group show this summer with Kristin Hjellegjerde. Anything else new will be on my IG.
Photography: Benjamin Deakin