Interview to the artist by Rachelle Gryn Brettler, from our Anniversary Book
I went to a Steiner Waldorf School and once a week there was a watercolour painting class with wet on wet watercolour painting. I still use that technique to make the piles of sketches before I make prints.
There was a grumpy technician on my Foundation Course at Hereford Art College called Roger Biggs who taught me how to make a collagraph and how to make an etching. And grumpy though he was, he was fantastically encouraging. At art school, I was taught in that nineties tradition to really consider rules as part of the end result and their significance to the concept of the work that I was making. Leaving art school was quite liberating in that you could leave all that behind. I found that the painters that I really liked — such as Prunella Clough, ignored those kinds of rules.
I use very basic materials. I am a printmaker, I make prints and I make editions, I am very classically trained in that respect. I was a printer for other artists for a long time. I know how to make a perfect edition of the print. On the other hand, my plates are often made by cheating the collagraph process and use very basic materials like cardboard and house paint. I scratch into them with a pin on a stick to make all of the textures that then hold the ink. Sometimes people dislike the fact that things are not made in the alchemic way that that you have with etching — there is something totally magic about that process, and I still use an etching press.
I use standard paper — I always print on this nice heavy Somerset paper made by St Cuthberts Mill — in Somerset, which is very dependable.
I am irritated by my palette. I love the colours, they are absolutely intuitive colours for me to use but I am always trying to fight it a little bit and try to change them. I was noticing them when I went away to Pembrokeshire this year, on this amazing island called Skomer Island, the lichen there with an intense kind of yellow orange colour, it is wonderful.
Whilst travelling, I take tiny plates with me and make basic studies. Back in the studio, I translate them sometimes directly and sometimes indirectly in quite a roundabout way, into prints. I have piles and piles of those works.
Often literature or poetry, or a documentary will trigger an interest. Recently I have worked on things that were inspired in part by something that Georgia O’Keeffe said about looking very closely at things that were not obviously significant “...nobody sees a flower — really — it is so small — we haven’t time — and to see takes time, like to have a friend takes time...” The Georgia O’Keeffe observation has made me occasionally stop and allow a little more time to look at the smaller things. Observing the daily changes on my allotment during lockdown and focusing in on drawing, filtered out the visual and literal noise of the city.
My project Inside Is Dry Land was prompted, rather than inspired, by a programme about coastal erosion. It made me think about what happens if your life is connected with these buildings that have then been consumed by the sea — imagining how that would feel if something was literally swept away — that place that you had made or inhabited, built memories in, and had disintegrated with the land that it stood on. It began with a simple idea and then that triggered the work.
I love making maquettes. When the kids were small, I was in the house a lot making things, little structures, little houses, things to draw from — just as visual aids. Some of them ended up being made into installations and then I made a couple of artists' books.
The structures that have featured in my work are seen from the angle that they are fallible and fragile, like our environment — even though the environmental thing is not at the front of my mind. Those were always very fragile skeletal structures with walls that were sort of membranous and easy to permeate.
I would never call myself a conceptual artist, but I do always have a research base which is highly convoluted but it does underpin all of the things that I am making.The better things come out of a lot of thinking and probably more planning than I realise.