Untitled (Ducoli), 2006
Pencil and gouache on paper, wooden frame with brass plate, 103.5 x 138.5 cm
this is a continuation from my last post thinking about my work right now and Charles Avery's lifelong project 'The Islanders' + with the transcript of the BBC interview with writer Lavinia Greenlaw at the end:I first saw his work in Taipei and it definitely made an impact on me, the drawings and sculptures, I remember feeling like I am encountering something very strange, visually already, like the curious bright shapes on the sculptural heads, or the pool of very realistic looking eel-like things... and the huge drawing with the very stark contrasts of black and white and flashes of colour. it was all very signature.
https://www.taipeibiennial.org/2014/en/artists/16-charles-avery-en2c65.html I found the link of where I saw it...
Untitled (The Qoro-qoros), 2012
Acrylic, pencil, ink and watercolour on paper , 260 x 360 cm
Untitled (Empiricist), 2010
Bronze, cardboard, gouache, acrylic, 50 x 28 x 30 cm
Untitled (Pool), 2013
Bronze, metal, hand-blown glass, water, 330 x 350 x 54.7 cm
As the centrepiece of his presentation at the TB2014, Avery will insert an ornamental bronze pool into one of the galleries. The pool is transported from the Jadindagadendar, the municipal park in the town of Onomatopoeia – capital city, port and gateway to the Island – a Cartesian garden where every specimen embodies a mathematical idea or primary quality or phenomenon. These botanical gardens are formed not from living specimens, but rather from artificial trees and flowers which the Islanders understand as a refutation of Nature. Within the pool stir the Ninth – sacred eels (whose meat is a bastion of the Islanders’ economy). The most primitive, linear and directional of beings, the eels represent will.
The city itself is contained by a fortified wall, along which at regular intervals are towers, atop which fires burn, illuminating the gloaming and acting as a deterrent to the unknown threats that inhabit the rampant emptiness beyond. Generally, the inhabitants of Onomatopoeia keep resolutely to the city limits and the well lit environs just beyond; however, there is a brand of adventure tourism whereby young men and women come to the Island to risk their lives in search of a solitary beast called the Noumenon, which is held to dwell somewhere in the wilderness: a being which has eluded each previous generation, yet still they come by the boatload, undeterred.
Those citizens of the Island of a rational bent prefer to argue the (non) existence or the singularity of the Noumenon from the comfort of the bars and salons in town. This endless argument is known as the Eternal Dialectic: a philosophical discussion that has diversified into a complex system of different creeds and sub-factions, each one sporting a particular kind of headgear representing their individual allegiance.'
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'In 2004, Charles Avery embarked on what will be a lifelong project titled The Islanders: a painstakingly detailed description of a fictional world that functions in parallel to our own universe, realised in drawing, painting, sculpture and text. These large-scale, narrative drawings and sculptural installations question our ideas about the nature of time, place and being.'
https://grimmgallery.com/artists/charles-avery/
'Since 2004, the Scottish artist Charles Avery (1973, Oban, UK) has dedicated himself to the invention of an imaginary island, new corners of which he continues to chart through drawings, sculptures, texts, ephemera and (more rarely) 16mm animations and live incursions into our own world. Known only as ‘the Island’, Avery’s wave-lapped realm is not only a vividly realised fiction, teeming with sights both strange and strangely familiar.'
.Parasol unit is delighted to present The Islanders: An Introduction, the latest instalment in Charles Avery’s epic project which began in 2004. For the past four years, Scottish artist Avery has created texts, drawings, installations and sculptures which describe the topology and cosmology of an imaginary island, whose every feature embodies a philosophical proposition, problem or solution. Previous exhibitions have presented chapters in this ongoing endeavour, revealing individual aspects of the Island. For the first time, the whole project thus far will be brought together including several new works. This major exhibition at Parasol unit will be accompanied by a large-scale publication.
Avery’s mapping of the Island, to be completed over a projected ten-year period, can be interpreted as a meditation on making art and the impossibility of finding ‘truth’. The artist is characterised as a bounty-hunter, retrieving artifacts and documenting scenes from the subjective realm. Some of the works on show will focus in absurd detail, on particulars such as the sale of pickled eggs in the marketplace. Others present mysterious landscapes, such as the Eternal Forest, a place no one can ever reach but where a prized beast called the Noumenon is rumoured to live. A specimen of the Island’s wildlife will also be on show, having been realised in the form of a large taxidermy sculpture. These vivid and intricate works invite the viewer to recreate the Island in their own minds, and to use it as an arena for exploring philosophical conundrums and paradoxes.
Avery’s art is imbued with a formal beauty, humour, and a spirit of philosophical enquiry. It has roots in the work of such diverse figures as William Blake, P.G. Wodehouse, Jorge Luis Borges, Joseph Beuys, Joseph Kosuth and Ludwig Wittgenstein, but above all contains echoes of Avery’s own life, such as his upbringing on the Isle of Mull. Once this sprawling project is complete, Avery plans for it to be encapsulated in several large, leather-bound encyclopaedic volumes.'
https://www.widewalls.ch/artist/charles-avery/ some description of the island
https://zorosko.blogspot.com/2012/04/charles-avery-texts-drawings.html very detailed descriptions of the books/writing accompanying the project: 'Avery concludes The Islanders with a tantalising direct address: "I cannot tell you how this world really is - I have no idea - I can state only the facts as I perceive them. You must be satisfied with this or you must travel there yourself sometime, and see these beings in their natural environment, for this place is utterly subjective". - Alison Gibbons.'
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'Lavinia Greenlaw has published six collections of poetry, including The Built Moment which reflected on her father’s dementia. Her novels include In the City of Love’s Sleep, about a relationship sparked by a chance encounter in a museum. She also writes about art and music, including a book on how pop shaped her young identity. She was the first artist in residence at the Science Museum, and her immersive sound work, Audio Obscura, won the Ted Hughes Award for New Work in Poetry.
Charles Avery grew up on the island of Mull. For more than 15 years, he has worked on a single project – the invention of an imaginary island, creating its people, settlements, landscapes, forests and creatures through paint, sculpture and text. The main town is called Onomatopoeia, and it’s rumoured that the island is home to an elusive beast called the Noumenon.'
(after /// is my thoughts)
(after /// is my thoughts)
- He says drawing for him is about the possibility of adventure /// which I think is so true, and relates to the idea of space exploration, which is an adventure seemingly stretching to infinity with its endless risks and payoffs. and a more local sense of adventure too, constrained in this house and exploring without moving, adventuring with these new mediums etc. I like the playfulness of it all despite not always having the merriest of subject matter.
- 'I’m gonna spend the rest of my life, I’m gonna describe this island because I just needed somewhere to sort of, isolate myself, not in a negative way, just take a bit of control, protect myself from the forces of the art world at large, take the territory of art making that thinking and exploring rather than just making pieces.' and then she says that her world is more of an escape than protection and he laughs and says it's both. she says 'My place is a place where it’s possible to be when being here can seem pretty impossible.' /// I like how this place can be both an escape and protection simultaneously.
- he longs to be on Mull (the island he grew up on), 'not all the time but, I long for the sea, that longing is inspiration, it’s not being on Mull, it’s just, ‘brilliant, we’re here.’ the utterly physical contact (fishermen, farmers etc) is inspirational for him but it ‘certainly doesn’t happen while I’m there, it happens when I’m back in London'. /// which is really interesting because it suggests that sometimes it takes being away from somewhere to long for/appreciate it more (like in this pandemic)
- ‘if I had never seen your drawings or read your descriptions, how would you describe it to me?’ ‘The island has no scale, it has dubious borders, you know, wave-lapped, to the north it’s infinite, to the south pole it’s infinite, but materially speaking, visually speaking, what people take from it it’s got a little bit of my life’s experience in terms of the characters and places, it’s a little bit of the western isles, a little bit of Rome, where my wife and I lived for a while, it’s a lot of hackney, it’s not a fantasy land, it’s just another place. It has it’s own idiosyncrasies developed from its creole culture, but nevertheless it has its own uncanny familiarity as well. It has trade with that which is outside of it, it’s not mechanised, couldn’t be bothered drawing cars (laughs) but there’s lots of modern things in there.' /// I liked the way he described his island first in terms of scale, and the idea that his own life is scattered in there too, inevitably. 'it's not a fantasy land, it's just another place' really spoke to me because that's the type of place I want my place to be, though not without a playful fantastical element.
- 'that’s why it spoke to me as poetry as such, because of its precision in articulating states of uncertainty. So I look at one of your drawings, say, The Marketplace, the people are in different states, dress/undress, action/in action, the buildings are in different states of smartness and degradation, and the main town is called Onomatopoeia, sounds like it means, and you’ve got this wonderful slogan on bags and t-shirts, ‘it means, it means’ and I just love all the ways I’m being made to think but I’m not allowed to settle in a thought. - the island changes all the time, people say to him, everyone looks so sad (when he feels sad), always balancing. //// I love the way LG words things so readily in this interview and hearing her describing his work makes me see it very clearly what it looks/feels like.
- [on his essay in The Islanders: an Introduction] very much in the style of the traditional, male, discovery, the whole idea of ‘discovery’ is a problem, isn’t it, as if somethings waiting there for us to go and name it, and otherwise it can’t exist. CA:’Yes, and that’s relevant to what it's like when you’re a young artist and you enter the world of ideas, and people say you should look at such and such and you realise rapidly that there’s already so much that’s gone on and every single part of the territory of ideas, owned, re-owned, and actually the only way to engage in that, and you making your own pathway through that.. LG: This idea that, why is it so important for us to feel that we are the first, that we are doing something that no one’s done before? CA: I guess it’s like, what’s the point, I suppose.. /// I do feel that sometimes - when I'm researching into this and that and I realise people have already written essays and done artworks looking at exactly what I'm looking at, and you get that thought like, what's the point of me doing it if it's already been done? but I have to remember that I am doing this for me too
- LG: it’s creating the conditions and what I do need, is a set of tensions, and they’re rather like yours in that, living and working in two places, city and sea, being at home and away, here and there, alone and in company/family.. CA: and the physical, societal limitations of our lives as well. We all have to negotiate those don’t we. /// the 'set of tensions' really spoke to me because I really think it is the contradictions/contrasts in anything that you do in a work that sparks it alive, and we are constantly being pulled apart living in these contradictions.
- LG: I’m interested in why you chose drawing in this investigation, because it is very much a method of investigation perhaps more so than other mediums? CA: I’m glad you asked that, I definitely didn’t choose it, I just always did it, as most people do, as children do, just didn’t stop doing it. My mum was an artist as well, and she drew a lot and she encouraged it. My dad too, is an architect, drawing was definitely a thing. Sometimes what perplexes me is that, it gets described as a traditional medium, which is completely absurd to me, it’s like describing words as a traditional medium. It’s just there and it’s the most immediate form of inspiration for most people. But I’m aware, very much aware of its diagrammatic properties. So when I think of drawing, I’m not thinking of pencil, paper, and all those things, I’m thinking about the diagrammatic, so it’s not trying to be the thing in itself. It’s referring to something that is elsewhere. And as such, what I try and do is only describe what I need to describe, so if I draw a picture of somebody sitting in a chair, I don’t need to draw the chair, because as soon as you draw the chair you get bogged down in concerns of what kind of chair to draw, is it a breuer chair or is it an Ikea chair, all those things come in meaning. But just to describe the act of sitting you just don’t need to draw the chair, that’s what I mean about diagrammatic. With the island it's about creating a sort of structure, a way in for the viewer to make their own voyage, their own trajectory, through a territory that is elsewhere. The artwork is simply that sort of vessel which is this structure for this ghost to adhere in. LG: That sounds exactly to me like a description of a poem, it is a vessel, it is a place in which you hope the reader will have something activated for them rather than enacted for them that they will enact them themselves and be their version of whatever it is, so there is that feeling of a place already being there and you’re there to wander. CA: exactly. LG: Wandering is quite an important word because it’s not systematic or preplanned and there’s a sense of responsiveness or unknowing CA: yes, which I feel like as a writer, will be a more natural tendency, it’s more naturally structured to be able to take advantage of all the material that life brings you, would you say? /// I've never thought about the medium of drawing in this way before - as a method of investigation, not being the thing itself but referring to something that is elsewhere... allowing the viewer to make their own way in... definitely something I will be thinking about when drawing. before I did get bogged down about what it looks like visually and if it looks realistic or believable but I see now that that's not the point at all... it's opening up a whole new realm of meaning in drawing I've never thought about in detail before.
- LG: I think there’s quite an important first step of not knowing where something has come from that I’m beginning to work with. Feeling my way at first, later on being very precise about things but, drawing it up as from under the earth or underwater. And that problem of description, it seems to me to be something you’re looking at again and again on this island because you walk this incredible knife-edge between the familiar and the unknown. And one of the things that I try to address again and again or find myself addressing over and over again is describing the unknown because we can only describe the unknown in terms of the familiar. /// this blew my mind a bit, it is like having dreams with elements you've thought about or seen, whether you remember it consciously or not. that's why it's so strangely familiar or familiarly strange.
- LG: one of the great joys is realising that just as the work announces its laws as it begins to take shape, as we go on as artists, we can realise the ways in which those laws can be extended. And it feels to me there’s something in that what you’re doing CA: I really feel like I’ve gone on a similar journey, I particularly identified with the model, I wouldn’t describe as a novel but cluster of entities which is how I imagined the islanders project to come and might be doable for me cause making it doable is a big important thing for me when I’m in crisis how do I actually do this /// this spoke to me because I feel sometimes I want to do something that I can't do or always feeling like I'm not doing enough with the material, I'm just always in crisis in some way. and realising the ways in which those laws can be extended feels like you're growing this world as you go along, wandering, unplanned, unknown.
- [on the drawing ‘dilettantes eel hunting in the memory of consciousness’ LG: there is this eel, really beautifully precisely and finely delineated so it’s utterly present, and you give us also things like these very watery reflections of the bright yellow boots, and I’m just wondering that, decisions you make about where to invoke focus are conscious, or felt? CA: I think they’re felt, yeah. I think as an artist, one of the main tools is contrast. So for me, to delineate that eel in this vivid and visceral way, while trying to keep the energy and life in there, and thats always a great struggle how do you keep the energy but have that control as well, keep the vitality under control. But then the moving sands and reflection that’s bashed out in a couple of minutes, very little control and I wet the paper and I mask a couple of bits off, the pool where the ink can do its thing, and the ink can just move and you’ve got no control of it and I love that kind of contrast between control and non-control. And also I masked these areas, I know full well and I use this tape which is completely inadequate for this purpose, that the ink will leak underneath it and you get these crazed patterns, and it’s just that thing seeping over the edge as things going wrong that’s really important to keep as a sense of imperfection, era and medium in the work because if everything was perfect the outline and the background the foreground stood perfectly everything is right and correct the drawing would be dead and its about keeping things alive so this sense of the provisional which I feel is something that you have very much as well, keeps this thing vital and moving and shifting all the time. LG: I love that idea of leakage and letting the ink do its thing because it’s easy when you’re moving words on a page to stay in that room of the page and it’s like you’ve got a room crowded with furniture and you just keep moving the chairs about and it still doesn’t work. Whereas what you really need to do is step outside that room and loosen it up and knock down the walls, and leak. CA: how do you- that’s really interesting - do you talk about those words on the page or do you achieve that leakage? LG: I’ll take what’s got stuck and move it on to a piece of paper and just start writing incredibly freely not thinking at all, to kind of trust that the impulse that brought those words which got stuck, is still live and that I just need to revisit it and find a different way forward from it, if that makes sense. /// I completely agree with the contrast between control/non-control with ink as well, that's why I enjoy 'relying' on ink so much. I am not able to do this with the digital medium as much and this is nudging me into a completely new direction in which to create these forms. this has also made me think about the decisions of focus and non-focus...
- LG: There’s a description in your introduction in the mountains which I’d like to read. ‘Their horizons are so acute, their surfaces so perfect, that they light up in the most dramatic fashion as if they’re their own brilliant source. One can sing through the dark of dusk and suddenly every blade of grass would be illuminated by a great triangle light’. And you go on to say ‘what makes them truly perfect is that they are insurmountable.' (too great to be overcome) Their sides are so smooth and the edges so sharp that it is impossible to get a foothold. A pickaxe would have bound off them.’ And that came to mind because of what you’re saying about the fact that perfection perhaps leaves us with nothing to connect with. /// this was quite mind-blowing as well. another contrast within the mix.
- LG: Well it kind of is a feeling of exhaustion, there’s a thing Paul Valéry said about a poem being never finished its abandoned and I think it’s one of those rather slickish, it should go on a t-shirt on the island actually, because when you’re young and discover it you think you understand, and then you think about the word abandoned and the word finished for thirty years and begin to get an idea of what it might mean and all I know is that I feel a lot of things coming into balance and that’s my point to step back. /// this makes me think I have a whole life journey of thinking about what those words mean.
Untitled (Dilettantes Eel hunting in the Memory of Consciousness), 2014
Pencil, ink, acrylic on paper, 110 × 155 cm
Untitled (The Ninth Resort), 2010
raw notes/transcript:
-she saw his small works in a show full of loud works, realised they were some kind of map, think of her own fascination from childhood with invented worlds and maps, imagine going there.
-his earliest fascination of maps was a huge wall map that his mum had painted at the wall of his house, very local not even the entire area, full of little figures like sea monsters and headless horsemen, the possibilities, all about possibility of adventure which is what drawing is for him.
-he believed those headless horsemen in a very real sense, was terrified especially when dark at night
-started drawing this island when he left his island (he started the islanders project when he was around thirty)
-LG: do you remember the first impulse you had towards doing that?
CA: Yeah, I do. I was in a council flat in London, and I just remember saying to my wife, Dorothea, this is what I’m gonna do, I’m gonna spend the rest of my life, I’m gonna describe this island because I just needed somewhere to sort of, isolate myself, not in a negative way, just take a bit of control, protect myself from the forces of the art world at large, take the territory of art making that thinking and exploring rather than just making pieces. As an artist you go from art college, my art college career was very unsuccessful, but in theory it’s a critical environment where everything is wrong and you’re just experimenting with stuff. Very quickly, certainly in my case, I went to having a show and career and I wasn’t ready it was far too early I was twenty-four when I had my first big show but it was the opposite everything was presented as exactly correct, best possible version of itself..
-LG: thinking about these other places, you said about it as a way of protection, I thought of mine as a form of escape (both) . My place is a place where it’s possible to be when being here can seem pretty impossible.
-CA: yes, I long to be on Mull (the island he grew up in), not all the time but, I long for the sea, that longing is inspiration, it’s not being on Mull, it’s just, ‘brilliant, we’re here.’ the utterly physical contact (fishermen, farmers etc) is inspirational for him but it ‘certainly doesn’t happen while I’m there, it happens when I’m back in London’.
-LG: ’so the work is done before and after being there, and being there is just about, being there.’ He fills his lungs metaphorically. Also so many distractions, don’t wanna be drawing when he could be messing about finding stones or being on a boat.
-LG: ’if I had never seen your drawings or read your descriptions, how would you describe it to me?’ CA: ‘The island has no scale, it has dubious borders, you know, wave-lapped, to the north it’s infinite, to the south pole it’s infinite, but materially speaking, visually speaking, what people take from it it’s got a little bit of my life’s experience in terms of the characters and places, it’s a little bit of the western isles, a little bit of Rome, where my wife and I lived for a while, it’s a lot of hackney, it’s not a fantasy land, it’s just another place. It has it’s own idiosyncrasies developed from its creole culture, but nevertheless it has its own uncanny familiarity as well. It has trade with that which is outside of it, it’s not mechanised, couldn’t be bothered drawing cars (laughs) but there’s lots of modern things in there.’
-LG:’that’s why it spoke to me as poetry as such, because of its precision in articulating states of uncertainty. So I look at one of your drawings, say, The Marketplace, the people are in different states, dress/undress, action/in action, the buildings are in different states of smartness and degradation, and the main town is called Onomatopoeia, sounds like it means, and you’ve got this wonderful slogan on bags and t-shirts, ‘it means, it means’ and I just love all the ways I’m being made to think but I’m not allowed to settle in a thought.
-changes all the time, people say to him, everyone looks so sad, always balancing, thinking with happy.
-LG: and in order to achieve an outside and inside, we have to have somebody move from the outside to the inside, and in your book, The Islanders: an Introduction, you have this beautiful essay which made me think about Robinson Crusoe (leading many readers to believe he was a real person and the book a travelogue of true incidents), very much in the style of the traditional, male, discovery, the whole idea of ‘discovery’ is a problem, isn’t it, as if somethings waiting there for us to go and name it, and otherwise it can’t exist.’ CA:’Yes, and that’s relevant to what its like when you’re a young artist and you enter the world of ideas, and people say you should look at such and such and you realise rapidly that there’s already so much that’s gone on and every single part of the territory of ideas, owned, re-owned, and actually the only way to engage in that, and you making your own pathway through that, I created the character the Hunter, kind of an everyman, kind of coming to the island thinking of himself as the discoverer thinking of his greatness and meets his opposite number who disabuses him quite quickly, also discovering that she lives in the outskirts of town and that he’s actually been preceded by generations and generations.
-LG:’it reminded me of when William Morris went to Iceland in the nineteen seventies and he went to the geysers, and he was so crushed that many many English tourists have already been there and when he said where do we camp and they said over there that’s where all Englishmen camp. Morris was appalled by that and it was covered in bits of paper, people had written their great thoughts responses and even poems. This idea that, why is it so important for us to feel that we are the first, that we are doing something that no one’s done before?
-CA:’I guess it’s like, what’s the point, I suppose, but actually you can’t help, every generation has an original voice/perspective, like children, we can’t tell them not to make those mistakes, they’re just gonna make those mistakes maybe in their own unique way, amnesia between generations, gives some wriggle room.
-LG:’it’s creating the conditions and what I do need, is a set of tensions, and they’re rather like yours in that, living and working in two places, city and sea, being at home and away, here and there, alone and in company/family.. CA: and the physical, societal limitations of our lives as well. We all have to negotiate those don’t we.
-CA: achieved the most in terms of progress in the last fifteen years because I had children, what that structure provides, can’t imagine when I don’t have that.. LG: pregnant at twenty-four, and after she was born, spent maternity check, on poetry workshop so clearly having her had some fruitful unsettling of my head. Always thought having a child was a very big shift in my work. Not to underplay the demands of bringing up a child making a living/ art. Feels like a set of demanding but fruitful tensions.
-CA: my oldest daughter is 1 and a half and on the shore it was quite windy and I just heard something and I said to did you just say the tangerine heron and she could hardly talk and she was like a verbal child but still fifteen months old And I thought I really like that image but sort of deliberately oriental so I wanted to obscure it. turned into an egg-eating engri instead and that became the name of a bar on the island which have these speciality drinks with eggnog or something and the hunter impress mis-mis and there's all sorts of waves of text on the island,, so all of this came from a strange mumbling so there’s a capital in children.. LG: my daughter gave me the name of the village in my first novel, she was on a train in a playground and I said where are you going and she said alnorthover and I needed a place in the north that people went past. They’re worth it
-LG: I’m interested in why you chose drawing in this investigation, because it is very much a method of investigation perhaps more so than other mediums? CA: I’m glad you asked that, I definitely didn’t choose it, I just always did it, as most people do, as children do, just didn’t stop doing it. My mum was an artist as well, and she drew a lot and she encouraged it. My dad too, is an architect, drawing was definitely a thing. Sometimes what perplexes me is that, it gets described as a traditional medium, which is completely absurd to me, it’s like describing words as a traditional medium. It’s just there and it’s the most immediate form of inspiration for most people. But I’m aware, very much aware of its diagrammatic properties. So when I think of drawing, I’m not thinking of pencil, paper, and all those things, I’m thinking about the diagrammatic, so it’s not trying to be the thing in itself. It’s referring to something that is elsewhere. And as such, what I try and do is only describe what I need to describe, so if I draw a picture of somebody sitting in a chair, I don’t need to draw the chair, because as soon as you draw the chair you get bogged down in concerns of what kind of chair to draw, is it a breuer chair or is it an Ikea chair, all those things come in meaning. But just to describe the act of sitting you just don’t need to draw the chair, that’s what I mean about diagrammatic. With the island its about creating a sort of structure, a way in for the viewer to make their own voyage, their own trajectory, through a territory that is elsewhere. The artwork is simply that sort of vessel which is this structure for this ghost to adhere in. LG: That sounds exactly to me like a description of a poem, it is a vessel, it is a place in which you hope the reader will have something activated for them rather than enacted for them that they will enact them themselves and be their version of whatever it is, so there is that feeling of a place already being there and you’re there to wander. CA: exactly. LG: Wandering is quite an important word because it’s not systematic or preplanned and there’s a sense of responsiveness or unknowing CA: yes, which I feel like as a writer, will be a more natural tendency, it’s more naturally structured to be able to take advantage of all the material that life brings you, would you say? LG: I think there’s quite an important first step of not knowing where something has come from that I’m beginning to work with. Feeling my way at first, later on being very precise about things but, drawing it up as from under the earth or underwater. And that problem of description, it seems to me to be something you’re looking at again and again on this island because you walk this incredible knife edge between the familiar and the unknown. And one of the things that I try to address again and again or find myself addressing over and over again is describing the unknown because we can only describe the unknown in terms of the familiar.
-CA: yes, definitely. But I noticed that you walk a similar line in the book City of Love’s Sleep, which I’ve just been reading, you studiously avoid naming London and tying yourself and even though it seems like London’s got all the characteristics of London, and I think that’s incredibly successful because it allows you to sort of float over and not get pulled down because London is such a cumbersome concept. LG: This book started with the images on the first page and a phrase I wrote years before I even started the book, I wrote, ‘imagine a woman running’, because I just had this image of a woman at night running at some sort of institution, running away from what appears to be someone else but actually something in herself has been activated by seeing someone and recognising something in them that she doesn’t know what to do with what she’s recognised. And in that sense, with the nature of the book, with the unnamed city thats obviously London, but conveyed and described as rather an essential way of you know, being up on a hill, the river, the towers, all of this is a resistance to creating too much specificity, the kind of specificity that occludes rather than animates. And allowing a simple story that is, in a sense, timeless and placeless, to assert itself. CA: so successful is to create these points like the church tower the museum which you float freely in the space, it can be anyone’s tower it can be anyone’s park, it can be anyone’s museum. You don’t tie that into the baggage of a particular place, if you start talking about notting hill or Islington you start invoking, you start thinking about that, you’re not thinking about what you should be thinking about, which is the drama that is unfolding, relationships, and it is dramatic, I mean for me that book is a page turner, the last thing I was expecting, riveting tale like treasure island or something. The two characters iris and raif, who is a forty year-old widower, chance encounter through a set of doors, flirtation begins.. LG: I’m not even sure if I would describe it as a novel but I was trying to capture two people encountering and re-encountering each other and trying to move each other at a point in life when any gesture, one made towards the other activated all the times that gesture was made before, and both had the drag of middle-life, of family, illness and parents and breakdowns and all kinds of things. And I needed to find a form that in a strange way was loose enough to allow the essential nature of characters or place to remain open so that’s exactly what you’re saying readers or viewers can project onto it because after all when we look at any work of art we are looking for what we can learn about ourselves, not looking to learn about the artist or the author. We might be curious about them, but it’s the work that matters its what we discover of ourselves within it. But I enjoyed making decisions like, I knew I wanted to write about these museum objects which I first encountered when I did a residency more than twenty years ago at the science museum. And I kept trying to find convincing ways to bring them in that would be in quotes ‘natural’ and then I thought no, they’re kind of emblematic, and so they will have their own pages, so they stud the narrative separately. That’s one of the great joys is realising that just as the work announces its laws as it begins to take shape, as we go on as artists, we can realise the ways in which those laws can be extended. And it feels to me there’s something in that what you’re doing CA: I really feel like I’ve gone on a similar journey, I particularly identified with the model, I wouldn’t describe as a novel but cluster of entities which is how I imagined the islanders project to come and might be doable for me cause making it doable is a big important thing for me when I’m in crisis how do I actually do this
-LG: when I enter the island of either drawings or descriptions I come back empty handed but you brought back things in the form of objects and sculpture. The first thing you describe on the island is the stone mouse. And in the book, we read about the stone mouse and its qualities and we turn the page and there’ a full page picture of the stone mouse and what the text says is that if the stone mouse is removed from the island it just becomes a stone. CA: yes, exactly and that’s just what it’s like being an artist. You bring this thing from this place the studio, and then you present it to somebody and they’re not ready, not in the zone, like my wife might be cooking supper for the kids, just not interested LG: and yet we pick up stones all the time because of their shapes and what their shapes suggest CA: yes, exactly. And the stone mouse has both the qualities of being a stone and being a mouse on the island and then the subjective world it can do that. When you present it to the world as a stone mouse, it’s simply a stone that looks like a mouse, at best. A couple of friends and I, we actually went up in Mull, a stone mouse expedition, I wrote a set of criteria for the stone in order for it to be a mouse and we went scavenging for stones that fulfil these criteria. The penultimate one is you have to be able to throw it over your shoulder and achieve a certain distance just so we could keep a scale on it. It was actually quite rewarding, it was a fishing trip, we were there for several hours, and we found about five or six specimens, one of which appeared in the book the islanders. LG: when you took them back to your studio did they just become stone CA: just became stones, yeah. They’re in the Bojimans museum now in Rotterdam. LG: if the label says it’s a stone mouse then it’s a stone mouse (laughs).
-LG: I was struck looking at the images again, the fact that within a drawing some of them might be unfinished some of them will be intensely detailed, so there’s a drawing called ‘dilettantes eel hunting in the memory of consciousness’ and it immediately makes me think of how a group, whether they’re friends, family, or whatever, move down a beach and how they’re both together and apart and how each person is in a different mood so someone looks frightened someone looks bored someone looks intrigued and there’s this kind of fragile surface of shifting sands, and there is this eel, really beautifully precisely and finely delineated so it’s utterly present, and you give us also things like these very watery reflections of the bright yellow boots, and I’m just wondering that, decisions you make about where to invoke focus are conscious, or felt? CA: I think they’re felt, yeah. I think as an artist, one of the main tools is contrast. So for me, to delineate that eel in this vivid and visceral way, while trying to keep the energy and life in there, and thats always a great struggle how do you keep the energy but have that control as well, keep the vitality under control. But then the moving sands and reflection that’s bashed out in a couple of minutes, very little control and I wet the paper and I mask a couple of bits off, the pool where the ink can do its thing, and the ink can just move and you’ve got no control of it and I love that kind of contrast between control and non-control. And also I masked these areas, I know full well and I use this tape which is completely inadequate for this purpose, that the ink will leak underneath it and you get these crazed patterns, and it’s just that thing seeping over the edge as things going wrong that’s really important to keep as a sense of imperfection, era and medium in the work because if everything was perfect the outline and the background the foreground stood perfectly everything is right and correct the drawing would be dead and its about keeping things alive so this sense of the provisional which I feel is something that you have very much as well, keeps this thing vital and moving and shifting all the time. LG: I love that idea of leakage and letting the ink do its thing because it’s easy when you’re moving words on a page to stay in that room of the page and it’s like you’ve got a room crowded with furniture and you just keep moving the chairs about and it still doesn’t work. Whereas what you really need to do is step outside that room and loosen it up and knock down the walls, and leak. CA: how do you- that’s really interesting - do you talk about those words on the page or do you achieve that leakage? LG: I’ll take what’s got stuck and move it on to a piece of paper and just start writing incredibly freely not thinking at all, to kind of trust that the impulse that brought those words which got stuck, is still live and that I just need to revisit it and find a different way forward from it, if that makes sense. There’s a description in your introduction in the mountains which I’d like to read. ‘Their horizons are so acute, their surfaces so perfect, that they light up in the most dramatic fashion as if they’re their own brilliant source. One can sing through the dark of dusk and suddenly every blade of grass would be illuminated by a great triangle light’. And you go on to say ‘what makes them truly perfect is that they are insurmountable. (too great to be overcome) Their sides are so smooth and the edges so sharp that it is impossible to get a foothold. A pickaxe would have bound off them.’ And that came to mind because of what you’re saying about the fact that perfection perhaps leaves us with nothing to connect with. CA: yes, leaving the drawings unfinished is a way back in for me, to say well this is not perfect, leaving the old lines in there as a way to say, could have been all these other different ways, it just happened to be this way, I stopped doing it, avoiding that idea of the cult of the masterpiece, once you’ve come to terms with that then you’re able to move on. I’m just constantly curious, how do you actually commit to print? (Laughs) LG: when I reach a state of exhaustion. Well it kind of is a feeling of exhaustion, there’s a thing Paul Valéry said about a poem being never finished its abandoned and I think it’s one of those rather slickish, it should go on a t shirt on the island actually, because when you’re young and discover it you think you understand, and then you think about the word abandoned and the word finished for thirty years and begin to get an idea of what it might mean and all I know is that I feel a lot of things coming into balance and that’s my point to step back.