20/02/18
Threesome: In Conversation
Artists Roxana Halls, Sadie Lee and
Sarah Jane Moon in conversation with critic and invited curator Anna McNay
New Art Projects
9 February 2018
Anna McNay: Let’s look back at how this project
came about. You approached me with the idea fairly well conceived. How was it
initially born?
Sarah Jane Moon: In a nutshell, a couple of years ago,
I organised an exhibition of 12 women painters at the Menier Gallery called ‘12
@ Menier’, which Roxana was also involved with. I thought that as independent
professional artists it would be really great to pool our resources to hire a
space, rather than hiring one independently, which is quite pricy. I picked
artists whose work I admired and we all got together and we really just exhibited
whatever we wanted to, so it wasn’t curated in any sense, it was just about
pooling our networks and coming together to organise a show. I came away from
that thinking it was really great. I loved that we’d made space for women to
take up space. I would have loved it more, however, if it were politically more
in line with what I see my work as addressing, and I wanted it to be queer
particularly.
I’ve always really liked Roxana’s and Sadie’s work and so I sent them an
email and asked them if they’d like to do something together, not really
knowing what it might be. Then we had a few meetings, where we came up with the
idea of painting ourselves and each other, and also of working somehow with the
idea of the female nude.
Sadie Lee: That happened quite quickly, didn’t
it? I think it was the first time we met in the pub, actually, that we just
kind of threw that one out there and it happened. Quite swiftly we came up with
the general theme for the show. A one-pint decision.
SJM: We didn’t labour over it for a long
time. I can’t remember who came up with it exactly but…
SL: I think we wanted it to be quite
structured and not just have work that we’d made before or just sort of cobble
things together. We wanted it to have a very clear identity, but also to make
work in response to this theme. It’s all completely brand new work just for
this show, which we all found quite exciting. We didn’t know what was going to
happen. For a long time we were talking about this hypothetical show,
hypothetical images, and it was much more about the concept. I mean, we
literally didn’t see the work until the night of the private view. We were
working that much in secrecy. We obviously sat for each other, but then we had
a big reveal. We came down those stairs and saw it for the first time 10
minutes before everybody else did, which was quite shocking.
Roxana Halls: The question about the nude, and what
it would mean to paint a nude, as a woman who identifies as a lesbian, was
something I’d been mulling over and that we had a very good chat about too. We
realised that none of us had painted that many nudes, actually, certainly women
in states of undress. I’d painted male nudes before, but the question about the
female nude was one that we were all puzzling over.
AMc: And that became a key part of the
show, and it’s something we’ll come back to later for the wider discussion.
You’ve mentioned
why the exhibition came about specifically in your life right now, Sarah Jane, but
also there’s a particular moment for it in the current climate. Last year was
the 50th anniversary of the Wolfenden Report and the partial decriminalisation
of homosexuality, and a lot was made of this in terms of exhibitions across the
country. The report referred, however, to male homosexuality, and this
certainly seemed to be at the centre of the majority of the shows. Was this
part of what made it seem timely to step forward as three lesbian painters?
SJM: Yes, we really thought it was timely
with Tate’s ‘Queer British Art’ show, and we had initially thought it would
have been a bit earlier than it was, but these things always take longer to
organise than you imagine. So we then had the idea that it would be a good
follow-on from ‘Queer British Art’, which cut off at 1967 and, as such, had
prioritised gay men and their painting, and so we wanted to have something that
was very female and lesbian-centric.
AMc: You’re all very much figurative
painters and you’ve all painted your friends, families, and people of varying
sexualities before. How much of a factor would you say that sexuality plays in
your work?
RH: I think in the way that it’s at the
core of your being, it’s at the core of everything, but it may not necessarily
mean it would be obvious. I think, with my models, I look more for people who
are feminist over anything else. That’s really at the core of things for me. If
I were looking for a criterion, I think that would be more important.
SJM: Our work is all quite different but
there are these very strong similarities – there’s a sensibility there and a
kind of a queerness for me. That is what I really liked about Sadie’s and
Roxana’s work, and why I initially approached them was because they’re very out
about who they are, and that does quite heavily influence their work, I think.
That’s definitely important for me.
SL: Sexuality has always been very important
in my work – my early work in particular. I started painting about 25 years
ago, and I started out by making self-portraits – self-portraits of myself with
lovers – and I worked in clubs so I documented the people that were coming to the
clubs. It was just about people that were around me. And then I gradually moved
into other areas, like older people and the representation of women in art. It
was still about sexuality, but it was about the sexuality of the sitter, not
necessarily in relation to me and my sexuality. But it’s always been there in
the background. There’s always been some reference to it.
RH: I think the queerness and otherness is
there, it’s as present in your work as it is in yourself, whether or not you
are explicitly dealing with it as subject matter, it’s intrinsically part of
you.
AMc: Was that a theme that you perhaps
focused on more in this project than you have done in previous works, given the
concept of the show, and given the sitters as well?
SJM: I think that that was something we
were really aware of – the commonality of all being women, all being painters,
and all being lesbians. We were definitely aware that it would be a show that
would have various conversations around those themes. But thinking about my
portraits particularly, they’re queer and they’re feminist and they’re lesbian,
but I’m not sure how that comes across. I don’t think I heightened that
specifically for the show. I was really just aiming to make a portrait of us
all individually.
SL: I heightened it! I was all about the
sex! Obviously we’re all painters, but the thing that I felt was really cool
was that we all identify as lesbians and I really wanted that to be very, very
clear in the work. I know and respect Sarah Jane and Roxana, but we’re professional
colleagues, we don’t really hang out, so, for the images that I made of them, I
projected quite a lot on to them. In a way, it’s about my sexuality and what I want
them to be acting out for my sake. I very much directed them and decided how I
wanted it to be, and then they played the part of themselves in that project,
if you like. I was drawing on my own experiences in my own fields about my own
sexuality and then just applying it to them. I don’t know whether it actually
applies to them or not, but I wanted it to be really clear that that’s what
it’s about.
RH: I’d say there was a lot of overlap
with me also. This is the first time that I’ve really explicitly dealt with
other people’s visual imagery of lesbians, representation of lesbians, and have
used that as part of my work.
AMc: You’ve worked with theatrical stagings, narratives
and mannequins before, but this time chose to examine the relationship between
male film directors’ representations of lesbian characters and how this imagery
is absorbed by audiences. Why was it important that the directors in this
instance were male?
RH: Because it is so much more discomfiting,
because of the strange disconnect that you have with the work, which is often
beguiling, interesting, arousing sometimes, and yet often problematic. So many
of the films that I’m drawing upon are films which have inspired me and which I
greatly admire. I’m very influenced by film. I respond to film quite a lot in
my work, although it’s not often explicit. But often I find that with the representation
of lesbians there is a strange, disquieting sense that although the imagery can
be really enticing, it often goes hand in hand with really problematic
character trajectories. The narrative arc is often really difficult, and the
same tropes come into play. We have suffered very similar fates over and over
again, and we’re portrayed in very similar problematic ways. So it’s something
about that discomfiting feeling that you have from that material. As much as
you love it, often we meet dark ends, and I wanted somehow to deal with that
material and deal with my own problematic feelings around it.
AMc: How did you select which films, and which
characters, to give to each of you?
RH: I chose three characters for each of
us, relating to the threesome theme. I wanted there to be some kind of distinct
element within each of the paintings. There’s a lot of overlap with the kinds
of narrative arcs that take place within these films. But I wanted to loosely
put them into strands. So Sadie – lucky her – got the sexually depraved S&M
characters. I got people who were involved in murder and who are mentally ill,
which suits me, and Sarah Jane got some innocents. I was using us as material,
you know, we are ourselves, we are physically ourselves. They’re not comments
about us, we become part of them. In the imagery, in the positioning of our
hands and our bodies, I rather wanted to suggest that we are somehow emulating
them, but we are other. So there is this sense that we are both human and yet
we are of them, and so we are either turning into mannequins or we are
potentially mannequins. The use of mannequins was very deliberate. As objects,
I use mannequins a lot in my work, they interest me greatly. I never reveal
when I use them because I really like that sense that you don’t know what is
real and what isn’t. This is the first time I’ve used them explicitly, and that
was really important. Mannequins recur in male cinematic representation of lesbians.
Sometimes it’s really obvious, like in Fassbinder, and then, in response to
that, Peter Strickland, who made The Duke
of Burgundy, which I had to give to you, Sadie, because I know it’s a
particular favourite of yours. Petra von
Kant is a really important film to me, it inspired me hugely, so I had to
have that one. I don’t know which is your favourite, Sarah, so you got what you
got and I hope you’re happy. But mannequins recur. Why? There’s been a lot of
critical discussion around that, about how, by likening us to mannequins, it’s
like saying we are somehow not quite yet to be, or somehow not quite fully
alive. It’s no accident. To make the paintings I recreated those characters in
my studio, using mannequins, and I recreated their costumes. So currently Petra
von Kant and Countess Báthory are in my studio, they’re still there. I haven’t
had the heart to disrobe them yet because I like their outfits.
AMc: Sarah Jane, you’ve put mannequins in
your portrait of Roxana.
SJM: Exactly. We all sat for each other,
and we all worked from photographs, so there was a photo session for each of
the paintings. I knew that I was going to be in my pants in Sadie’s picture,
but I had no idea whether she was going to do a close-up of my eye or what she
was doing with those photos. But knowing that Sadie often works with people in
a state of undress, and on a bed, this very intimate sort of space, and knowing
that Roxana was going in a more theatrical direction, I knew we had this light
on us and we were wearing a boob tube…
RH: That’s all you knew!
SJM: That’s all I knew. But knowing your
work and your penchant for cabaret and theatrical motifs… My work is very much straight
portraiture – well, not straight
portraiture, but it’s quite blatant, I suppose. I wanted to really prioritise
the fact that we’re all painters, so I wanted to set each portrait in the
studio, and so the photos originally are taken in our respective studios. Obviously
I’ve taken massive licence with the colours. There’s a part of me trying to get
back to a more intuitive approach to colour and mark-making, as I feel my
painting has recently become somewhat more controlled, and I wanted to loosen it
up. So Roxana’s portrait is from her sitting in her studio. There’s a wonderful
sofa and there are stretcher bars below her feet, and the mannequins, which I
know she uses an awful lot in her work, were there in the background. The photo
was taken the week that you thought you were going to have to leave the studio,
and so there is a sort of heaviness to it perhaps. It was quite a frantic time.
RH: It was a desperate time.
SJM: I wanted the mannequins to reference
something about Roxana’s work. Similarly, the paintings behind Sadie were in
her studio space, the one on the left being a self-portrait, and the one in the
middle being a work-in-progress. So I’ve taken licence, but it was very much
about us all as painters and our having that agency. The things we’re holding,
as well, point to that.
AMc: How much were you referencing the
history of portraiture – specifically women’s self-portraiture – by putting the
tools of the trade in each of your hands?
SJM: It happened quite accidentally. In my
20s, I thought I would be a curator and I was organising exhibitions and
running galleries in Australia. I have an art theory background and when I’m
painting I really try and forget that totally. So I just turned up, took the
pictures quite intuitively, and then noticed that in Sadie’s she had the mahl
stick and Roxana had the brushes. I thought that was quite nice, really, and so
in mine, which is slightly more constructed, purely because of the pragmatic
elements of making a self-portrait and having to photograph yourself, I had the
palette knife. I wanted to redirect the gaze, so have the object, the
objectified, the one who’s being looked at, return that gaze, while pointing to
something that expressed agency and our collective ability to create and to
picture and to author images.
AMc: Sadie, your subjects really seem to be
objectified as well as subjectified. Is that a fair comment?
SL: Yes. I set them up. I think I should
probably just explain that the one of Sarah Jane was the one that I did first
of all. I went to Sarah Jane’s flat – this is her actual bed – and I said: ‘I
want to do it at night, I want it to be really dark’, and I brought some little
angle-poise lamps, very domestic, and put them very low down, so it’s an incredibly
raking light, from underneath, which catches every single thing. It’s really,
really harsh and not in any way flattering. I just said I wanted her to wear black
underwear and invited Roxana to wear black underwear as well. Apart from that,
I didn’t really tell them how I wanted them to be, so that was the only thing
that they really got to choose. I wanted to base the paintings on Venuses and
started out by thinking I’d do them on specific Venuses and call them things
like Sarah Jane Moon after Botticelli.
But then I thought there were so many similarities in the images of Venus that
I was looking at – they all tended to have their arm raised, sometimes the
other arm being across their bodies in a slightly protective way, but also
exaggerating their curves, and generally they’d be looking away – so that became
the continuing theme. I did the one of Sarah Jane first and I wanted the others
to match, because I was aware that they were going to be a trio. The one of
Sarah Jane set the template, if you like. I positioned myself quite low down, so
not only is the light from underneath, but your vantage point is from
underneath, so you’re not directly on top of her, you’re down somewhere between
her legs. It’s the view that a lover would have – a very, very intimate view – and
the words that I gave to Sarah Jane and Roxana were ‘sexy awkward’. That’s what
I was going for and I wanted that intention of it being like the first time
you’ve undressed in front of somebody.
When I came out to my mum, the first thing she said to me was: ‘You’re a
lesbian, you know it’s a very lonely life’. I think people hear that a lot and
it really stuck with me. And actually I have been quite lonely a lot of the
time. When I first started going out to clubs and working clubs, I would be on
my own in the corner, looking at people and, for the most part, fantasising
about them, then going home on my own. That stuck with me and I now just look
at people for a living. I’m a professional voyeur. But it’s that sense of
looking at someone, and the thoughts that you have, and maybe the thoughts that
they’ve got in their mind, and not necessarily having any kind of physical
engagement, but just that whole longing and the distance between you and the
connection between you… I wanted to get a sense of that into the paintings, so
it’s a very, very intimate view, it’s not flattering. It’s as if from candlelight
or a bedside lamp or something like that.
I’m really sick of women always looking at pictures of themselves and
other women and saying: ‘Oh, it’s not very flattering’ and ‘Obviously you’re
much more beautiful than that’. I hate the fact that we’re supposed to make it
flattering. It’s a woman, therefore she’s attractive, so let’s make her as
attractive as possible. That’s bollocks. I hate the fact that we have to be judged
by the way that we look and the way that we present ourselves and whether it’s conventionally
beautiful or not. It’s just so irritating. So I wasn’t interested in that at
all. I was interested in the dark of the night, the whole drama of the
situation, the sexual tension of the situation, the fantasy of whatever is going
on in that person’s mind. That’s much, much more important to me than a
flattering likeness of somebody.
AMc: What about your self-portrait?
SL: That’s a whole different kettle of
fish. That one is specifically referencing an actual painting. The painting is
probably not recognisable in it, but it’s Giorgione’s Sleeping Venus of 1510, which was one of the first reclining
Venuses where she’s in a pastoral landscape. She’s lying in such a way, again
with her arm behind her head, and her hand is supposedly covering her genitals
for modesty, but actually she’s cupping her fingers in such a way that it
really looks like she’s pleasuring herself. Maybe that’s just me! Originally I
tried to recreate that with my hand down the front of my pants but then I
thought it was much too full on, much too bawdy and funny. It just looked
comical. So, I thought: ‘I wonder what would happen if I turned my back and the
view of it was still clearly doing that?’ And it became much more disturbing
for people because you know what’s going on but I’m not doing it for the
viewer. It’s not for you. I’ve got autonomy in what I’m doing. It’s actually
about the act and turning my back on you. But I still know that you’re there.
So I’m performing, but for some reason not doing it in view, which makes it
much more private and threatening for people. And I really wanted it to look
frumpy and boring, with the little label of the bra sticking out. It’s so not
glam, it’s not Agent Provocateur underwear, it is what it is. And, again, I haven’t
flattered myself. I look quite porcine in it. I’ve really exaggerated all the
creases on my back and my dimpled arse. It’s just about the mundane boringness
of that.
AMc: The three of you have also all painted
a nude portrait of the performance artist and cabaret diva Ursula Martinez, who
is here in the audience somewhere. Do you want to come and join us up here?
Thank you. Thanks for joining us and thanks for being part of the project as
well. I want to know how it was for the three of you to be painting a nude in
this context, but also it would be interesting to hear from Ursula about how it
was being painted as well. The paintings obviously belong to your respective series,
but they’re distinct as well. Was there anything in particular that you were
trying, any of you, to catch in your nude painting, that perhaps was something
that wasn’t so present for you in your other paintings?
RH: Mine was something really specific. Many
years ago, I saw a photograph, an advertisement for one of Ursula’s
performances, and found it incredibly striking, and it really stayed with me. I
wasn’t sure, when we met, whether or not you [Ursula] would be okay for me to
use it, and we had a long discussion about it, because I was really concerned
that it was another artist’s work and that it would be cannibalising her work
if I referred to it. But you said no, the set up was your idea, so it was okay
to go with that. I had a backup plan just in case is wasn’t okay, but I really
wanted to refer to that image because it had stayed with me and I found it a really potent image of agency and
self-possession and a hotness. I thought it was fabulous, and so I thought it
would be wonderful to paint a version of that, that was my own, using this new
technique that I had developed. I’d never painted like this before, using all this
neon malarkey, and I thought it would be really interesting to paint Ursula
using the same palette as it was so powerful. But I thought it would be really
interesting not to look at the original image before painting the picture, but just
to refer to my memory of it. And, when we had our discussion, my memory of the
photograph was that you were showing your sex, but you said that you weren’t in
the actual photo but that your original
intention for the image had been to show it.
UM: In the actual photo that was taken, I did show
it, but then I decided that for the publicity shot for the show that I’d made
the photo for it felt too much, so we photoshopped the curtains into cardboard
theatre cut-out in the photo. But it’s interesting – and it makes sense – that
in your memory it wasn’t there.
RH: Maybe I was channelling your original
intention! But I thought actually there’s
something really interesting about that. That this is an image I’m basing my
painting on, an image that I saw many years ago, but now, at this point, your
original intention is there, and mine also. I didn’t tell you, but later, once
I was painting the picture, it suddenly occurred to me that that photo inspired
me to paint another painting some years ago, that was in a show I did for the
National Theatre, of a woman who has enormous underskirts with puppets. Her
skirts are a theatre, and the small cut-out theatre that you had, that you held
in that painting, is one that I used in my other painting.
Mainly I wanted to refer to Ursula in the only sense in which I know her
– as a performer. You are such a powerful performer and I didn’t want to
shoehorn you into some other image of my own, some other image of my devising.
I wanted to refer to the image of you that you choose to project.
SJM: I suppose I was trying to go for
something confident and self-assured and powerful. Unfortunately I hadn’t heard
of you before the project – I’m not from this country, so that’s my defence! It’s
obviously my loss and I’ve missed out on a huge amount. I was heading off to
New Zealand to visit my family and it was all quite hurried. I mean, the
painting of all the portraits, for all of us, was quite intense, and over a
pretty short period of time. I remember I went round to your flat, took these
photos, and then I had this time away, so it was quite a quick undertaking for
me, less time than I would usually have. Partially because of that, and partially
because I really wanted you as a figure, on the canvas, to make a bold impact,
there’s no background detail. And I didn’t feel that I knew you well enough. I
tried to do a bit of research and came along to your very wonderful Wild Bore show at Soho Theatre, which I
loved. But, other than that, I didn’t have the same knowledge that Roxana and
Sadie had of your history of performance. So I really wanted it to be about
that encounter that day when I first met you and we took the photos.
UM: Yes, ‘Hi, I’m Sarah Jane.’ ‘Hi, I’m
Ursula.’ Okay, and then five minutes later I’ve got my clothes off!
SJM: I think there was coffee involved as well!
But my overwhelming impression from that encounter was how confident you were
in your physicality, and I wanted that to come across, and I was very admiring
of that, and you seemed pretty self-assured. So that’s what I was going for
really.
UM: Presumably that was part of the choice
in choosing me as a subject – because I am self-assured and comfortable with
nudity and with my body?
SJM: I think so, definitely…
AMc: Had you posed nude for artists before?
UM: I used to do a bit of life modelling
as a student just to earn some money. But, you know, nudity is very present in
my stage works. It’s not obligatory, but it tends to be very present.
SL: I’m a fan, I’m a massive fan. I was so
excited it was you. I think you’re the perfect person for us to respond to. I
really admire you so much. I’d seen you going back a long way…
UM: 20 years…
SL: Yes, I think the first time I remember
being aware of you was when you were appearing at Pride. I saw you, you were
quite a long way away, but you were on stage and you were dressed in this
Spanish outfit with a big round hat and you were playing, what I now know is a
classical guitar, but in my mind it was a ukulele, and you were singing Guantanamera, which is a Cuban song, but
you had changed the words to ‘wank on a mirror’. I just remembered that and so,
when you were nude, I had that in my mind. I guess it’s quite literal. Roxana
said earlier about how she was looking at male directors, who made films with
lesbian plots, and I completely agree, because I’ve long been subverting images
made by men, which feature lesbian couplings, for which I know I was not the
target audience. But, when I was growing up, that’s all there was, so, you
know, I had postcards by Helmut Newton on my wall. Anything. I was hoovering up
Vita and Violet on the telly, straight actresses kissing, I find that quite
thrilling, because I couldn’t find myself represented in things that were made
by people like me. So I would take things…
UM: Take whatever you can get?
SL: You do. Well, I did. I find things
that were not made for me and find myself within them and change them and put
myself there.
RH: Isn’t that rather what we do? We
repurpose what is available to us.
SL: Absolutely.
RH: Whatever the material may be.
SL: Completely.
RH: And it’s cinematic and televisual
images that we are most exposed to, that are most readily available, that are more
immediate. And we mainline these, much more readily than necessarily painted
images.
SL: Completely, and I did that with the
reference images that I used for the portrait of Ursula. I looked at The Origin of
the World, which, if you look at the image just in the reflection of the
mirror, if it were just that, it has a similarity. But obviously the main composition
is based on Velázquez’s Rokeby Venus,
and it didn’t slip my mind, the sense of irony, that that was also the image
that was hacked to bits by one of the suffragettes, who entered the National
Gallery with a meat cleaver and attacked it. I quite liked that. It’s been
subverted so many times, it’s almost a cliché, but I thought that by taking it,
and reframing it, and Ursula recreating it, it’s not appropriation, it’s not
that I’ve just taken it and re-presented it without changing it in any way. We
recreated it and I wanted to know what it felt like to be the artist in that
room with that person, that close, in that position, but with the sense of
empathy. It was also a collaboration, it was referencing what Ursula does in
her work. And I have to say what athletic prowess you have, actually getting
into that position, and holding that really heavy mirror in that position so that
I could see the reflection. You actually couldn’t see what was reflected in the
mirror yourself. It was for me, and that’s why it’s called the Venus Effect. It
was killing your wrist, wasn’t it, but you persevered… So I’ve taken those
images and we’ve rephrased them, if you like, and re-presented them with a
feminist twist.
AMc: You’ve touched on something else I
wanted to ask about, which is how different is it when the person looking, as
the artist or as the audience, but in this case the artist, is a woman looking
at a woman? You said about the suffragette slashing the painting because of its
representing the male gaze, but this is the female gaze, and even the queer
female gaze. How different do you think this is? How much of a difference does the
gender of the artist make?
SJM: I think it makes a huge difference. You
mentioned empathy just now, and I think the female gaze is more than just in
opposition to the male gaze. It is different, it’s not just objectifying men,
not that we would anyway necessarily, but it embodies some kind of empathy with
the other, whether that is your sitter, or, if it’s in a film or literature,
with your protagonists.
RH: I’ve been really puzzling over this
one. I think there is an inherent difference but I can’t put my finger on it,
and I always think that to try to find an answer to this question could
slightly do us a disservice in a way. There are so many multitudes of
reflections of what the female gaze may be. It isn’t the male gaze, I know
that. But all of these different reflections, they come together, and sometimes
they reflect one another, but they reflect so many different perspectives. Something
is very different in it, but I can’t put my finger on what that is. It’s very
difficult. I mean, it’s partly what these paintings are about. It’s so hard to
tease out the part that is yours. But actually what you’re doing is you’re performing
a kind of alchemy using the materials that are available to you. How do you
tease out what is the truth? It’s like the peeling of the onion to find your
core self. All of these things that I find really problematic. It is different.
I think empathy is involved, and kinship, togetherness, truth, I’d like to
think. But to try to quantify it simply, I can’t do it. There are so many
multitudes of reflections.
AMc: And do you think it’s complicated
further by the fact that you are three women who like women? I mean, you’re
looking at women in a potentially different way than a straight woman might…
RH: Yes, and do we want to ask ourselves:
‘Are we looking like men?’ I don’t even want to ask that question. I’m not, and
so I’m not. We’re so steeped in existing material. What is ours? I know that we
remake what we find and hopefully find something true in there and hopefully
the fact that we love and respect women, that we adore women, is there in the
work that we make. This respect is really crucial. The kinship is really
crucial. But if I try to put my finger on what makes that different, I don’t
think I want to try to find an easy answer to that.
AMc: It would be too facile?
RH: I think, maybe, yes.
AMc: Ursula, for you, as the person being
looked at, did it made a difference that they were women artists?
UM: Look, if three straight white men had
come to me and said: ‘We want to do a project and we want to paint you naked’,
I would have absolutely said ‘no’, because I wouldn’t have understood the
intention, it wouldn’t have made any sense to me. I can’t speak about the end
product. Is the end product more a product from a female artist? I don’t know. But,
from my point of view, yes, I wouldn’t have been interested, I wouldn’t have
trusted it somehow, I wouldn’t have trusted the intention, I wouldn’t have
understood why they were doing it, or why they’d chosen me. They would have had
to have presented a very, very good argument.
AMc: Do you feel that that trust that you
placed in them was borne out? Are you happy with the results? Are you happy
that you chose to do it?
UM: Absolutely, yes. What’s not to be
happy about? Definitely.
AMc: One of the things that was written in
the original brief about the project was that any eroticism is deliberate. Did
you seek to make your portraits – your portraits of each other, but also of
Ursula – erotic in some way? Was there an erotic element that you were trying
to pull out?
RH: There was in mine, absolutely, yes. You
come across as being incredibly self-possessed and attractive. Why shouldn’t
you be that? In your performances, you have enormous sexual power, and I wanted
to try and get some of that to come across. I’d like to think some of it does.
I’ve had good reports!
SJM: I think likewise I’ve emphasised the
things that I appreciate in women and the things I find attractive – that
confidence and self-assurance – and I’ve emphasised some of your muscular tone.
To me, all of that’s quite sexy.
SL: Well, obviously Ursula uses her body
in her art a lot. She puts herself in a position that could be vulnerable, but
she’s in control, and it’s really interesting the way that she uses the
audience and maintains control of the situation and it really provokes a lot of
thought, it’s very challenging, really brave, and I just think it’s actually
brilliant. But in handing over your body to someone else to do what they want
with, that was really amazing that you did that, although I see it as being a
collaborative piece, and we discussed it beforehand – which was excruciating. I
had to explain what I wanted you to do and you said: ‘Oh, right, so you want me
to look at my vagina in a mirror, that’s what you’re going paint?’ You thought
about it and you said ‘okay’, but you were handing control over to me, so it
was slightly different from what you do within your work.
UM: Yes, and that’s where it comes back to
the trust thing. And I don’t think I would have been able to do it in the same
way in the hands of a straight man. I just wouldn’t have had that level of
trust.
AMc: You said earlier that some of you had
painted nudes before but had felt a little uncomfortable about it. Do you feel
differently now having been through this? What were some of the key feelings
and thoughts that arose for you during the process?
RH: Before, I almost felt like I don’t
wish to paint them unless I have a very good reason for doing it. It’s not
something that I could just do because I feel like it. There had to be a clear
rationale for it.
UM: I’ve not always had a very clear
reason for taking my clothes off…
RH: No, but if you’re painting yourself,
which I have also done, then that is different. You don’t need necessarily to
indicate what your rationale is. You have it, and it’s your body, and you may
use it as you wish. You don’t have to justify anything. In a sense, maybe, I
don’t have to. Everything in history says this is a male domain, so just the
fact of doing it yourself, maybe that’s enough. But I did feel, and this is
part of what our conversation came out of, we all felt, we want to know why
we’re doing this. In a way, we were waiting to have a discussion around it, and
for other people to be party to that discussion, for something to grow out of
that. It is odd actually. I have since then been thinking about doing more
nudes, yes. I know the question of licence – the licence that you give
yourself, the permission that you give yourself – is something which comes up
again and again for me and I wrestle with that and encourage other people to
wrestle with that. Students and so on. And I feel I give myself licence now, if
I wish to do it. Maybe I posed the question and I don’t need to answer it
again. I can just do it.
SL: The subject of the female nude is
something you get throughout art history. Generally a nude is just a faceless,
nameless, series of shapes that just is a nude woman that people can look at
and enjoy and consume. I teach life drawing at the Wallace Collection and we’re
just responding to the figure and getting her to move and looking at the light
on her body. I think that what we were doing here was very much a portrait of
someone who has a sense of their own identity and an autonomy, and that’s very
different from just some decorative female shape that’s there just to be adored
and exploited and appreciated for her idealised form. I think what we’ve done
is a much more politically charged exercise. It’s a known person who’s in it
with us on an equal billing.
RH: And the collaborative element is
really key to it. We’re not just posing someone like a doll, like a mannequin,
they are part of the process. That’s a crucial element.
AMc: I think this might be a good moment to
open proceedings out to questions from the audience, if anyone has any…
Audience member 1:
The initial
discussion you had when you came up with the idea of painting each other and
painting yourselves, you glossed over that quite quickly, but it seems quite
central. How did you reach the decision to paint these paintings?
SL: I think Sarah Jane had decided that we
should have the show, and we all thought that was a really good idea, and then
we thought we need it to be something that’s really structured, so we threw a
few ideas out and… I can’t remember whose idea it was…
RH: I can’t remember who said what…
SL: …but we thought maybe if we all did
this, and we all did that, and then we all did this, it might actually be a
really interesting concept. So we just bashed a few ideas out and eventually,
through conversation, we thought, well okay, a self-portrait, a portrait of the
other two, and then a portrait of somebody else is probably a nice concise
idea.
RH: And then immediately on the back of
that we had the conversation around the nude and how you deal with a female
nude and our discomfort around that, our questioning around that. It was all
part of the same conversation and it did happen very quickly.
SL: It just seemed quite neat, you know,
like a nice idea for a show, and we all, when we were discussing it, got quite
excited and thought: ‘Wow, actually, yeah, I can imagine it and I really want
to see that now’.
RH: It’s a nice structured way to emphasise
the difference between us as artists. We’re representational artists, we’re
lesbians, but beyond that we are quite different.
SJM: I think it was also about making a
space to investigate the female gaze. Part of the problem with defining the
female gaze is that there just hasn’t been enough female representation
generally, or lesbian representation specifically. Culture is saturated with
male voices and male paintbrushes, images by men, that reference the world from
a male standpoint. We all just really wanted to open up space to see what might
happen. We didn’t know what the work would be. We didn’t know who we were
painting. We didn’t know what was going to happen really, but we wanted exactly
this event to happen. We wanted to make the work and then have it be discussed
by other people, open it up. There’s going to be an event with some writers as
well, further on, and to have the work be an impetus for these sorts of
discussions, and for other work to respond to in return, was crucial to the
main idea. It seemed like a nice concept, a nice number of paintings. There was
enough to get to grips with – self-representation, the representation of the
other, and the nude.
I had been struggling with the idea of painting a nude. As Sadie just
said, we all teach, and I teach at Heatherley’s in Chelsea, and we do still
life, landscape, portraiture and the nude. It’s quite traditional. And, through
my teaching, I’m seeking ways to disrupt that and to do it differently and to
do it with a feminist contemporary ethos. I’m not sure you can in that setting,
where it’s an academic exercise, and that bothers me, and, in my own work, I’d
wanted to paint the female nude and, as a lesbian, I thought: ‘This is
ridiculous. I love women. I should feel celebratory about that fact.’ And yet
it was complicated because of its history. The picture on the easel behind me
in my self-portrait is an example of my attempting to paint a female nude, where
I took a number of pictures and, in the end, the one topless with the jeans on
was more powerful or interesting for me, and more queer, more ambiguous. It’s
not clear whether she’s undressing or getting dressed, and there was something
I liked about that, and something with agency.
Audience member 2: You
said earlier on it was really stressful and intense from the moment when you
were given this project until the moment you finished. How long did you actually
have to do it?
RH: Not nearly long enough! It was partly
our schedules. We had so many other projects. I’d just had a solo show and we
are all just endlessly busy. It actually, in a way, ended up becoming part of
the project. We were bolstering each other up in our studios. We knew that we
were all going through the same thing. We were painting them at the same time,
for the same length of time, and there’s something rather lovely about that
also. I mean, had one of us finished, you know, that would have been terrible,
really awful. There’s something really lovely about the fact that we made these
works with the same intention and we made them together in a sense. There were
lots of emails…
SL: …sent at four o’clock in the morning…
RH: It was rather lovely, actually.
SJM: I started in about October. I think we
all started around then, and there was a lovely solidarity and camaraderie. Painting
is a very solitary pursuit and you’re there in your studio for hours on end. Knowing
that other people were creating these images of us, that we didn’t know about,
was kind of exciting. And obviously the show was scheduled and I definitely
work well to a deadline. It was a really productive impulse for me.
AMc: Any other questions? No? I was going
to ask why it was that you decided not to reveal anything to one another until
the final moment.
SL: We’re weird like that, aren’t we?
SJM: I’ve got a habit of showing things part
way through though and I don’t know if it was you who came up with the idea of
not doing this…?
SL: Probably.
RH: I can’t bear people seeing things
before they’re finished. I’m very secretive.
AMc: You didn’t feel at any point that you
wanted to ask the others which film characters they might like in their
pictures?
RH: No, because it was nothing really to
do with them! And I do like the element of surprise.
AMc: And how did it feel when you all came
in and saw yourselves?
RH: It was exciting, it was really
exciting, and shocking. And it also rather foolishly was 10 minutes before
everybody else came in for the private view, so we didn’t have very long to
process it. I was really excited to do it like that and, I suppose, if we’d
shown each other the work in progress, we would have felt then that we were in
dialogue with that person, and we might have felt obliged to change something
or to gauge their response to it, and so it actually just meant that we did
what we were going to do and that was it.
SL: We gave each other the freedom to use
each other as material. We trusted one another and that was really crucial. There
was no ego, no flattery, nothing. We placed no expectations on each other at
all. We let each other do whatever we needed to do. I think part of the
pleasure of it was the thrill of the reveal, actually.
SJM: It was wonderful painting other
painters, because there was such a trust. I do commissions for various people,
portraits and things, and I wasn’t nervous to the same extent that I usually am
about revealing a picture to somebody.
RH: We’re
not going to make the standard issue comments…
SJM: But I thought you’d be looking at the
technical aspects and various other things and you have an appreciation anyway
and a knowledge of that process of what it is to struggle with and grapple with
a painting and create something.
RH: We’re going be looking very
differently.
SL: I have real trouble with people seeing
my work initially from reproduction, so if there’s the opportunity to see them
in the flesh, then I’d much prefer that anyway.
SJM: I was just so pleased and proud of us
all – proud that we had done it in the timeframe and proud of what we’d produced.