My work is interdisciplinary - I just have always wanted to kind of do everything.
I use existing materials, and existing genres to crawl inside a subject,
or a set of references, or a set of options, and pick it apart - kind of twist it,
poison it curdle it into being able to say something that has not yet been said
[electronic music]
I think maybe the primary thing I want in my work and I think my work does is friction.
It's about finding ways to talk about these kind of complicated and sometimes half-formed, unformed,
thoughts and feelings when you don't have a full palette with which to do it.
You pull a bit from a Victorian novel, or you pull a bit from a Greek myth,
or you like pull a bit from a filmmaker from the 60s, and you kind of mould them all together
until you have this very fractious complicated thing which starts to say something
that doesn't have its own language.
[pulsing, bright electronic tones]
I like working with reference, and it's partly because of just- I'm just an enthusiastic person
about- about artwork, and about other people's artworks.
but generally, actually, the stuff I make work about is not stuff I just like.
If i like it i tend to not have that much that I want to do with it.
It tends to be stuff that I feel conflicted about that I'm- I want to work with.
[bright scratchy electronic notes]
If i'm doing literary references and these kind of cultural references
it can err on the side of of seeming exclusive -
there's a kind of like intellectual threshold or something going on,
which is not my experience.
I'm not coming to a Victorian novel because I studied Victorian novels at university.
I'm coming to it because I found a Wikipedia page.
I've found that a way to express, or contradict, that high culture stuff
is then to have stuff that is very rough and very amateurish,
and I feel like I've got closer to that as time has gone on
[pulsing oscillating musical notes - in time to fox's breath]
[bright scratchy notes]
I- I am trans, I'm queer -
so a lot of work has been around histories of queerness and histories of transness
partly cos that's the, the histories I feel entitled to work with.
It's like me following the trail to revisit these, um lineages
that I'm part of, because of my identity. This is how- how I've pieced together identity
uh- for myself, is from these kind of all these different cultural products.
I used to make work that didn't really use myself in it.
The time when i really feel like my practice started, and I kind of kicked in
was when I started just melding something that seems very outside me,
and something that's very, very intimate to me.
Using my image in the work is difficult for me, also a little bit fascinating for me.
The combination of closeness and distance that I feel from myself in various ways.
It's risky to- to not be present and not be in it, and it's risky to be seen and be consumed by viewers.
How you balance kind of protection of yourself with also opening yourself up,
kind of protection and the risks and rewards of like both those things.
The reason I think I keep coming back to it is it just keeps being relevant to the work.
[sound of slightly discordant strings]
In Pastoral Drama I was thinking a lot about the kind of violence of representation
and the risks of visibility.
[discordant strings
For that work it was very important to me that I make a film about trans people
without ever either showing a trans person or directly talking about trans people.
[pitch shifting strings as object rotates]
It was really just the same set of thoughts that went into Ashley,
except with like the polarity reversed so that it was like:
'what happens if I like hyper charge it and go the other way, and really really show it?'
Audio from Ashley: 'Something had happened'.
Jamie Crewe: I wouldn't feel comfortable doing the film I want to do with anyone but me.
Audio from Ashley: 'Something had happened to me'.
[curtains frantically being pulled closed]
Jamie Crewe: When I am working in a particular medium I like to be specific to it.
I really like the specificity of saying, 'okay this film's a documentary, this film's an animation.
This film's a- an adaptation, this film's a- yeah like a horror film'.
So then the ways in which it is weird, and the ways that it maybe is kind of artistic, or experimental
are all contained within the kind of, um, the conceit that it's a horror film.
It's another way of using that friction to like, um, have a practice that isn't consistent,
and a practice that is um kind of wide-ranging.
As much as, in an exhibition, like things to rub up against each other and sit awkwardly
there's also a sense in which I want the whole practice to do that.
I like the idea that there are secret harmonies between them
that you only see when you see the practice as a whole.
To get a full idea of what i'm doing you have to hold a lot of contrary things together at once.
That's- that's how I like to make work.
I probably think a lot about the archive, and looking back and leaving the trail of works,
and the trail of- of versions of myself and the trail of thoughts,
and where I was, what I was thinking at the time,
being able to kind of look back across those like breadcrumbs.
and think about the mystery of how much we change.
You know, there's things I look back, like, 'oh I don't relate to that at all.
I don't remember even feeling that, I don't remember saying that,
but I can see that it's part of what I've left behind me.
It's really interesting that I can- I can look back on old works
and- and look at them and be like:
'oh, I was talking about my transness', but I wasn't- I wasn't able, or ready,
or I didn't feel entitled in some ways to- to say it directly.
So I found ways to say it at an angle and to kind of infer it.
And say it, but maybe I'm joking. Say it, but maybe it's ironic.
Say it, but maybe it's a quote.
There was something I was just looking back on recently where-
where I'd kind of called myself a woman in the work,
but before that was something that I would actually say face to face with a person.
before it was something I would even kind of let myself say
there were these works where I was- I was kind of already talking about it
and already articulating something.
One of the things that- that an art practice, and for me my practice does
is let you like test thoughts, and let you say things with ambiguity and with nuance,
and with distance and closeness in all these sorts of ways.
For me, making artwork is a way to think that feels most nuanced, and generous,
and capable of having contrasting difficult things next to each other.
Capable of saying stuff that you can't verbally or directly access.
And that's what I really love about it, and that's why I do it -
is because it's the kind of most- the most appropriate way
to think and talk- begin to talk about really kind of inchoate difficult things.