Describe the works Art Gazette has recently acquired from you:
Art Gazette has recently bought some of my monoprints. I have been making monoprints ever since I learned how, from an artist I met at Vermont Studio Centre in 2013.
I find it a ‘sculptural’ technique - you make a drawing on an inked up piece of perspex / glass and when you turn over the paper, there are always surprise marks left on the surface.
More recently, Art Gazette has acquired some large embossed prints I made during my postgraduate at the Slade School of Fine Art. Taking advantage of the facilities on offer, I had laser cut some perspex parts to make sculpture. I wanted to use the left-over templates, so ran them through the printing press to emboss the paper surface.
The process was not kind to the printing press but I liked the way the paper picked up the detail and ripped the surface in the process. In the end, I much preferred the prints to the sculptural work. They had more potential.
(Source - Wikipedia)
If you could be transported inside any art work, which would it be?
A couple of summers ago I visited the Palais Idéal du Facteur Cheval in France with my boyfriend and his parents. The palace was built by Ferdinand Cheval, a French postman who spent thirty-three years of his life (from 1879) constructing the palace with stones he collected from his round. It is extraordinary. I found his commitment moving. And visually the place is a maze of delights.
He was inspired by the introduction of postcards, so there are so many different cultural references. He also got ideas from the stones themselves. I think I would always discover new parts if I were transported inside the palace. It would be endlessly stimulating.
If you weren’t an artist, what would you be?
Miserable! I think when you are an artist it is impossible to imagine life any other way. Making art, looking at art, and thinking about it is all-consuming. In a good way.
Where would your dream studio be and what would it look like?
Is it greedy to ask for two?! I would love a large studio in the country. I always see large industrial farm buildings near by parents’ house in Scotland that I fantastise about owning! I would retreat there in the summer to make larger work. But I would still really like a studio in the city. Like all sculptors, I am always wishing for more space.
Ideally, I would like four separate spaces! A large messy space for sculpture making. A cleaner space for drawing and print making. A viewing space where I can see sculptures afresh. And finally, a separate space for storage. Louis Bourgeois’ advice to young emerging sculptors was ‘buy good storage’. I couldn’t agree more.
If galleries exist in 100 years, what will they look like?
Hopefully they are still places where people can enjoy looking at visual art, for free. It has been amazing seeing the art world adapt to the virtual world during the pandemic. But it has also highlighted how some work cannot be replicated on screens.
Art’s strength is the experience in reality. The gallery model can provide that experience to anyone.
I hope galleries work hard at ensuring they get a wide demographic of people through the doors. It might help if viewers were treated warmly when entering. I don’t agree with the frosty approach. So I hope they are inviting and generous places.
What item in your studio could you not live without?
So I am going to say my hands. I would be really stuck without those!
What do you listen to while working?
I find it distracting listening to music when I work, so I normally work in silence. Unless I am doing something repetitive which does not require as much head space.
Then I listen to podcasts - ‘in other words’, ‘talk art’, ‘desert island discs’ and more recently my friend, the painter Emma Cousin’s ‘Chats in Lockdown: artists talking’.
