I think one of the thing’s that’s interesting for an artist, is that if you look at lots
of different things across a huge span of time, I think we get these images embedded
in our consciousness.
They become culturally significant, and we don’t really realise that they’re often
recycled images that have been going on for centuries.
There’s no narrative in my paintings – they don’t tell stories .
They’re more about how you might represent a figure in an age where we’re flooded with
images of people in different sorts of digital ways, and I think to create a still image
in a painting is a very different thing.
You know, I go on holiday to remote places in Scotland, and what I do when I’m going
there, I’m kind of looking and storing things up – even though I wont necessarily put
them in my own paintings, there’s something about how things sit in nature that is surprising,
you know – the colours of things, the scale of things.
Many of the collages – to begin with – had a very low horizon which actually is a reflection
of being here by the sea, and seeing that low horizon and a huge sky.
It’s like a format, I think, which creates a lot of space in it that I can locate the
figure in.
I think I want them to feel like believable places without actually representing anything
specifically in the real world.
Quite often I work from an idea of an archetype, an archetypal figure like Eve, or a heroine
for instance, and that might relate back to ancient Greek culture.
I might take someone like Aphrodite and research about her, and then find some contemporary
parallels – not only in her story, but also in how she might have been represented in
the past, and what an equivalent representation might be now.
There is an element of chance in the collage.
On the table there are hundreds of different heads and eyes and so on, and – somebody
suggested to me I should have different boxes, and put all these body parts in, you know,
the legs box, or so on – but I said ‘no, that would be awful’, because then you would
never use something that wasn’t a leg to make a leg.
It’s a question of keeping alive to what’s happening in front of you, and capitalising
on those chance elements.
I generally paint the space first, and it suggests things to me about the size and scale
of the figure and what else might go in it.
The painting is completely different because there’s this aspect of painting which is
to do with the material it’s made from, and the material it’s on.
And whether it’s on a board or a canvas – it’s an object, which is very different
from a piece of paper which has very little material quality.
Pina Bausch interested me from seeing performances of hers, and finding representations of women
that were not the usual, you know?
The women were often aggressive in their movements, or confused, or expressing a kind of complex
picture of an individual.
One of her famous quotes is that she’s not interested in how people move, she’s interested
in what moves them.
Sometimes you cant tell whether it’s reality, memory, or a dream – you’re not quite
sure which state you’re in, and whether you’re in the past, present, or the future,
and in a way that’s something I’m interested in is trying to bring all those things together.