Interview to the artist by Rachelle Gryn Brettler, from our Anniversary Book
With the paper cuts, I always work on my own. It is my hand that does all the cutting. I cut with a scalpel so to me the scalpel blade is equivalent of a pencil so I am drawing with it. Then I have got two shapes - the shape that is taken out and the shape that is left – it is an obvious characteristic of collage but it is something I utilise.
With the ceramics, if I am working with vessels and vases, I always work with one particular ceramic maker. My making the vessel is not integral to the piece – it is working across the surface that is key, that is where my hand and my imagery take shape.
I am very conscious that when I work on a piece of ceramic, that history and that language of a plate or a vessel is completely different from when I am working on a two-dimensional piece of paper or surface. That is what I like - that the two histories inform each other - so when I bounce back from the ceramics, back to the work on paper, those references - the references of decoration, of ornament, feed back into the two-dimensional work. They interlink very closely, and also the methods of working - even though the substrates are different, my working methods – notions of cut and paste, of layering, actually are the same.
I always draw to start with. Always freehand, usually with a pencil or a pen, and quite linear. And I will trawl references in a quite idiosyncratic, hit-and-miss kind of way. I am always collecting imagery. I might take some photographs or make some drawings from cuttings that I have taken and collected.
When I am working on a project, at any certain moment there is always a myriad of images that are feeding that project and some do not suit that project, but they get stored, or start to reference other potential projects.
For imagery the camera phone is amazing because it is much more like a sketchbook than a camera. I use a lot of historical archives - from particular collections and museums that I have researched. But I am a believer in serendipity, as I think all sorts of things come your way. As I start drawing, usually one image eventually triggers ideas, particularly around the figure and its movement. One has to believe that the images will trigger ideas and they do eventually. I do have a skeletal sense of what I need to do - about the mood, about what the figures are going to do, how the silhouettes are going to operate within space. And I respond as I go along. Step by step….it is the action of hand-cutting and actually making the work that starts to trigger a sense of what I want to do next. It is the process that leads me through and gives me the clues.
There are two papers that I use and they are a particular weight so that I can hand cut them without damaging my hand, because if it is too thick, I cannot cut easily. Around the studio I have lots of different papers – it gives a contrast of physicality and surface. I get quite fine-tuned to the different papers. Some papers I hand paint and some I acquire that are already coloured, and I sometimes handprint my own papers. I like to use a lot of colour and different bodies of work have different colour ranges.
I was brought up in Hertfordshire. My mother was a painter, she had fought hard to be a painter and attended the Slade. She had a period of being taught by Oskar Kokoschka when he was in London, and he had a profound impact on her work. I was not particularly encouraged to take that route. My parents probably wanted me to take a more academic route. As a child, I drew the dog endlessly. I think I did it intuitively. It was during my postgraduate at the Slade, when I met Paula Rego – as one of her first tutees - and she has been a huge influence on me. She was amazing. She was always very supportive, and she was really good fun. At that time, there weren't that many women artist role models.