63. JIHYE SEO: A SPACE BETWEEN SWEET AND LIFE.
‘It's difficult for me to separate childhood and adulthood… I still love to eat ice cream and enjoy watching ants moving something to their house… when I was a child, I often more think about life after death and loneliness of existing in the universe...’ J.S.
Jihye Seo - ‘Tree Trunk, Winter’, Sugar, spices and food color ink in frame 80x 100 cm, 2024.
The first time I saw your work, was in a crit - a tiny painting of a boat - floating on the surface of a sea - and there was a joy within your translation that captured me immediately - I could feel that sunshine and then to see these works in sugar - there is still that lightness - but also a certain heaviness - maybe that's just me - but I am very much drawn to this contradiction... what is your feeling on your work as a whole, made within this year?
I didn’t intend to create contradict work, but looking back myself, it’s part of reflection of my personality and taste. I’m often fascinated by conflicting concepts such as old and new, birth and death. (I was a fan of musical Jekyll and Hyde as well.) I enjoy the certain energy generated from the boundary when two different concepts put together.
When I was much younger, I was more intrigued by Hieronymus Bosch or grotesque shapes. On the other hand, now days I am big fan of David Hockney, bright colors and nature. Those changes might naturally be shown on my work.
Long time ago, I used to worry about myself not having firm identity or taste, which I thought it’s important quality of the artist, but these days I am happy to allow myself to have some space to be changed and let it be.
Jihye Seo - ‘Tree Trunk, Winter’, Sugar, spices and food color ink in frame 80x 100 cm, 2024.
Conceptually - the temptation to read into these works is fascinating - when held to the light - there is a sense of opacity that feels like glass - have you considered working with glass? And what is your visceral reading of the materiality of the sugar works?
I also imagined of making with glass, since it might be much more permanent and easier to keep it not worrying about temperature or humidity. However, it might become different project while losing sense of smell and some texture, which is one of the important parts of my works in terms of engaging with all senses. But I honestly don’t have any knowledge about the process working with glass, so I want to try in the future.
I think the materiality of the sugar work is the moment of the sugar powder being caramelized syrup in the certain degree. Once the sugar transforms its shape, it allows itself to react and embrace with the environment such as light.
I was shown an illustrated book that you contributed to recently and so am aware of you as storyteller - the connection to childhood - and yet these works seem to step between different stages of life - can you reflect on the sense of time within the works made of sugar?
It's difficult for me to separate childhood and adulthood even though I made children’s picture books. For example, one of the books is about ants delivering ice cream to their ice cream car, and I still love to eat ice cream and enjoy watching ants moving something to their house. Also, when I was a child, I often more think about life after death and loneliness of existing in the universe. On the other hand, as grownup, I more seriously think what kind of bread to eat next morning before sleeping.
I think all works are results of my thoughts and experience of life in different shape. There are some qualities I lost while growing up, but I still feel like I am quite living like a child.
What inspires me greatly on viewing these pieces are there multi-sensory nature - you inhale them, their touch is sticky in part and they are fragile while being heavy - contradictory and yet light and somehow imagined - how did you feel in creating them, and why did you make them?
Looking at my results, I found out it’s quite similar with my experience of the trees which was my inspiration in the first stage. While living here, my favorite routine was walking around a park in the morning and night looking and touching trees. The texture of tree trunk is very rough but warm like a hand at the same time. On top of that, I sometimes notice the fallen trees, which made me think that it’s dead, but at some point, it suddenly blooms leaves and flowers.
Those observations naturally lead me to think life is beautiful as it is. The beauty of a tree is that it grows embracing all days including storm and sunshine. The human being also can fulfill growth when we accept every experience from life. This is how we become distinctive being from each other without the need of comparison. When I make caramelized sugar, I found out it can be bitter or sweet by temperature, and even texture can be different. Nonetheless, it is still sugar, sweet life.
The first inspiration rooted from the pattern and texture of tree trunks, but it more represents our life comprising our own world, which is beautiful as a big image despite the painful days.
I found this painting, propped against a wall and was told that they were being given away - which again I found really fascinating - this act of giving feels somehow conceptual to the nature of the works - like giving away sweets to friends - and knowing you a little - I feel that this spirit, this gesture is very connected to who you are - can you expand upon the life span of these works from idea to creation and beyond...
Since I am going back to Korea soon, and I don’t have space to save my works in London, I was very happy when they are taken by classmates and tutors. It’s meaningful when my works go to someone who can enjoy. Also, through this process, I was quite surprised how paintings can find its proper owner. For example, when I heard that you took my one of the pieces, I thought you were the right person to take it. The painting was made with much more calmer colors compared to my other works, and I thought it more matches with your image in my mind, which is night sea in a warm day.
In the very first stage, the crit you mentioned above, which is about the paintings of sea, helped me to decide where to start. At that time, as I understood, you advised me to engage with the sea directly and it might allow me to make more alive works. However, even though I agreed with your point, I couldn’t be that enthusiastic. I thought about the reason, and I found out I don’t have huge passion for the sea now. I like to visit sea, but I more love to engage with trees using all my senses all around year.
Then I decided to make a tree using sugar since I had seen peers experimenting with sugar and initially I was intuitively, playfully attracted to this material. Nevertheless, as discovering the character of sugar, it led me to keep trying to work on it. Then, I finally succeed to make a sculpture using sugar after repeating several failures. Until this point, I was not sure what I exactly want to tell through my works except the blur idea of engaging with trees. Then, one of my classmates told me my work looks like pine resin, which made me to come up the idea of scar and growth of trees. This allowed me to move my focus from making images about the nature to self-reflection through the nature. I started to make patchy shape using a variety of colors inside of a frame to represent my idea.
While working sugar painting, I could develop them getting lots of help, advice and support from the community. Therefore, I decided to make last bigger piece for everyone, hoping all of us have sweet days more often through the life. That might be slightly not coherent meaning compared to other pieces, but I thought that’s the joy of having journey of making paintings. Nothing was planned or clear at the first stage. It literally grew up from small seed and whole journey was the process understanding the character of sugar, myself and my community. I am not sure what would be next, but I am very happy to have experience of working with lovely people.
Jihye Seo - ‘Tree Trunk, Winter’, Sugar, spices and food color ink in frame 80x 100 cm, 2024.
62. RICHARD SERRA: A SPACE BETWEEN ABSORPTION AND DISSIPATION.
Six Large Drawings, David Zwirner - LONDON.
Richard Serra, Periodic Table, 1991, Paintstick on two (2) sheets of paper 83 x 149 inches 210.8cm x 378.5 cm RS-0324 SERR104559A - Photograph by Zhonghua for M-A (A SPACE BETWEEN) April 2024.
‘Black is a property, not a quality. In terms of weight, black is heavier, creates a larger volume, holds itself in a more compressed field. It is comparable to forging. Since black is the densest color material, it absorbs and dissipates light to a maximum and thereby changes the artificial as well as the natural light in a given room. A black shape can hold its space and place in relation to a larger volume and alter the mass of that volume readily.’ R.S.
Richard Serra, Kerouac, 2009, Paintstick on handmade paper 78 1/2 x 78 3/4 inches 199.4 x 200 cm RS-2266 SERR10506. Photograph by Zhonghua for M-A (A SPACE BETWEEN) April 2024.
Six remains - a burnt land in memory -
drenched dry as wax powdered cracked to demarcation -
to drain to disparate - as tar fractures to crisp.
To fill these planes of nothing
to flood these fields to edges tawn.
A blade tip - to split - as a board leaves a wall - a leaf peels a book - white sun reflected on a hanging sword -
- a shard under door - to watch a passing car - glide to silence
- to strip back to remember - a beginning - the papered beginnings
- to wrench out the entries - as endpapers remain and hardbacks nailed open.
A moon - viewed from afar - fallen still from the heat of attention.
- impressed, embedded with hushed suggestion - graveled to dust.
Blocks to black slammed to one - pressed between paintings as sculpture - faces hewn as raw.
As a space between scraping a sky - as a powercut blanks or quarried slabs wedge to blink between pagan beams - eclipse obelisks reach.
A scarred ridge - seamed without stitch - calm to observe - numb to jolt.
A verticle as velvet - sodden - brushed with a besom of wire - once controlled to caress - now disrupted from scrubbing. Not erasure - more exposure - and yet this mass of marks forms a mono - a once horizontal sheath - as a map, whose delineation long abraided - reveal to revert - return to the start.
Fiberious as filings held in state - A darkened grain advance of rust - to be studied - as a land mass bare.
Richard Serra, Triple Rift #2, 2018, Paintstick on four (4) sheets of handmade Japanese paper 9 feet 9 inches x 22 feet 3 x 6.7m RS-3952 SERR10507. Photograph by Zhonghua for M-A (A SPACE BETWEEN) April 2024.
Richard Serra - Six Large Drawings - David Zwirner - Until 18 May 2024.
Special thanks: Sara Chan and Niamh Brogan at David Zwirner.
61. TIANAN DING: A SPACE BETWEEN PROPS AND PROPER.
ALA ‘New story Intro 02: Office chair customised with ALA new material’. February 2024. Image courtesy of ALA.
‘I don’t have a grand yet to pull up a fashion show, the only thing I am chasing right now is being 100% honest with myself and my work. Every material I used and the techniques I chose are for a reason.’ T.D.
Your specificity with materials really fascinates me, you see things that others don't, and you see the opportunity and the language within the invisible and the overlooked - the resulting works are raw and yet refined at the same time and ultimately very modern as they reflect so much of today...
ALA TIANAN is a streetwear concept - it is a playful, critical experiment on clothes’ fabrication, cost, and function – inspired by the controversial issues of value and affordability in fashion.
In this new story "Tiny Room" (presented February 2024 - London), I tried to bring the pleather’s “value” back, especially the cracking, peeling, and unwanted pleather.
“Tiny Room” depicts a generation of transient kids leaving their hometown, finding self-acceptance and friendship. This is the story that happens in my community. I also dig into the story of people while exploring the property of pleather as a fabrication.
Pleather is a cheap “street” material that kind of stands for fast fashion, It gets criticized a lot because it is almost non-recyclable and it peels easily after long use. You can also see it on the motorbike, moped seats, or on the dumped sofa. My take on that is fixing the peeling, cracking bits, and transferring them to engraved patterns.
In the suburb area of my hometown, you can spot a lot of small town teenagers wearing pleather jackets, and they are so proud of owning them. I can relate to it a lot - not everyone can afford brand-new leather clothes, I think a good piece of clothing doesn’t value by how expensive its fabric is.
As an artist you are incredibly fluent with your visual communication - I really feel that your contribution to culture will be felt in the future when we look back at this time - how would you define your creative process in terms of objectives?
Thank you so much Joe for this comment!
To be honest, my last 3 collections, are all based on stories I have been through, I don’t have a grand yet to pull up a fashion show, the only thing I am chasing right now is being 100% honest with myself and my work. Every material I used and the techniques I chose are for a reason.
That’s also why I don’t think I am a fashion brand yet - I still create for myself and my friends, it is our story told in the language of clothes & fashion.
I will be moving forward and growing up - but I will be forever proud of these stories I created so far.
ALA ‘Black version kitchen towel jacket partly burnt & dissolved - knit section by Elaine Lip.’ July 2020. Image courtesy of ALA.
ALA ‘Engraved pleather body, lambskin arms.’ April 2024. Image courtesy of ALA.
The silhouette of the pieces you create are also very specific, in terms of form and the way garments fall off the body, again there is this reluctance within the shape that feels heightened because of the materials you develop and use, can you discuss what you feel you want to say with silhouette within your work as a whole?
I was trained as a menswear designer back when I was 19. To skill the menswear design and pattern cutting quickly, I have been working hard on military clothes, sportswear, and tech wear knowledge.
This time I am trying to find my “flow” in all these hardcore, streetwear types of garments, I do most of the pattern cutting and draping myself, and I am trying to gradually peel off my thought pattern of “uniform, armed, protected menswear”. I used some dress fabric, particularly Chinese silk, to see what a fabrication’s context could bring to a stereotypical streetwear and menswear image.
I remember visiting you at your desk as a student, it was mountainous with material tests and little iterative discoveries of magic - always so inspiring and clever, and funny! Always with that specific combination of a certain nostalgia without being retrospective, the Frank Ocean-ness and also something ferrel and yet so sophisticated. What do you remember from that time?
I love the word “Frank Ocean-ness”! I would describe my last few months in school as “ Frank-Oceany” too.
It was a bit sad at that moment as we know later we were all forced to leave because of the pandemic, but I am surprised that I finished the idea of using toilet paper to do leather-like garments. It presented during such an insecure & confusing moment in such a positive way, it also kind of perfectly matches the pandemic situation - people been panic-buying toilet rolls. The disposable has never been so precious.
I still appreciate that experience as it turns me into the designer I am right now.
M-A (A SPACE BETWEEN), Issue 1: Art Direction: Tianan Ding, Photographer: Lijuan Liu, Model: Xiaoyi Liu. September 2020.
Thank you again and again for those pictures that you made with Lijuan Liu and Xiaoyi Liu for the first issue of the magazine - as soon as the pictures came in, I knew that the eye had to be the cover!
It was a very special co-working experience - as everything was executed during the first lockdown 2020. We were only able to communicate through phone and video Zoom calls for the prep and art direction. We couldn’t get access to make big props or get a proper shooting studio, so we just made use of what we had.
We did the shooting in my flat at the end and I uber-ed the photographer Lijuan and model Xiaoyi to my place - during the shooting, Lijuan and I were using a thin glossy film, which is my graduation collection scraps - to layer the textures and shadows on Xiaoyi’s face. We soon found out the whole image was way cleaner than we thought - so we randomly splashed some spray paint over the film. We also did the test reprinting on kitchen paper, which is also part of my graduation collection techniques.
ALA ‘How much I love about the reflective’. February 2024. Image courtesy of ALA.
60. TINA MODOTTI: A SPACE BETWEEN REACH AND FALL.
L'œil de la révolution, Jeu de Paume - PARIS.
Lys - Vers 1924
As a cathedral reaches - as an opening ceiling - unzipping -
as a tender notion - as a darkness shocks to move in silence
as seams ridge and a casual nature is.
A functioning quiet - an ongoing nurturing and symbolism sustained - a scent imagined - an inhaled prayer.
A gloss of form and stillness of poise - to open and fall - eventually to decay - but for now eternal.
Nu - 1923 - by Edward Weston
A body bare - beneath the sun - as the skin turns - and points darken - as the eye glosses and hair heightens -
The shadow beneath the arc of the spine - beneath the slip of skin
- under arm - under knee - under face
- the shadow between an outline - which pools of rest - quiet and underseen as the focus holds the skin.
The eyelash fur - full - the eyebrow brushed - still
- the gloss of touch - the imagined touch -
In this heat - the beating heat -
pretending to be alone - when in fact - a subject is studied
As the rib cage forms - and the skin pulled over
- to form a landscape - a mountainous scape - to undulate and fall - to pool in the valleys and to rise - over nipple - under ear - over hip
The mirroring of anatomy and the casual asymmetry of the rest - of the calm - of an ease.
As a hand span rests in the cool of the unseen - to leave a momentary trace - an imagined imprint - on hot bricks baked underfoot.
Tina Modotti - L'œil de la révolution - Jeu de Paume - Until 12 May.
59. EKUA McMORRIS: A SPACE BETWEEN IDENTITY AND BELONGING.
‘My work speaks of the family and its extension, the everydayness of life and moments, but also the grappling struggle we all have when it comes to identity and belonging. In my case, I am always trying to get to the point of understanding what it means to be African Caribbean in Britain’. E.McM
Ekua McMorris, ‘We Played Spaceships 2’, image courtesy of the artist.
Ekua McMorris, We Played Spaceships 1, image courtesy of the artist.
Your relationship with the medium of photography and documentation is very particular, can you think back to the key moments of forming your visual language?
I grew up in a family of storytellers. I used to love resting my head on my mother’s lap, listening to her and her friends discuss, and reason the history and experiences of Black folks, politics, family, and the police. These stories took place in rooms that were filled with a variety of images, paintings, and illustrations. Regardless of the subject matter, there was a sense of warmth that enveloped the rhythmic flow of discussions that I was permitted to silently be part of. Always at the heart of these discussions, there was a feeling or a need of having to record and document these moments and faces that represented the diversity of Black life in Britain.
As I lay with my head on my mother’s lap, these stories would become pictures in my mind, that helped me understand the world and my place in it. The camera helped me capture the works and emotions I grappled with, working as a tool that allowed me to speak without opening my mouth.
Ekua McMorris, untitled, image courtesy of the artist.
Ekua McMorris, Me as a child 1983 Wilesden, image courtesy of the artist.
Carrie Mae Weems, in a lecture given at The Barbican last year, said how important it is to pay attention to your own work, as an artist, 'as your work will tell you what you are up to', can you reflect upon this statement in response to your own practice?
It requires sitting and listening to oneself and one’s work. There is a conversation, or a narrative that can take place, that at times goes beyond the purpose of creating the work. We have ideas of what the work will be about, but I think that changes once it has been created or given life.
My work is not just about the images that I make, they are also about the stories that they speak out to the world. My work speaks of the family and its extension, the everydayness of life and moments, but also the grappling struggle we all have when it comes to identity and belonging. In my case, I am always trying to get to the point of understanding what it means to be African Caribbean in Britain.
Ekua McMorris, How I will always remember you, image courtesy of the artist.
The subject of memory plays a key context within your work, please can you discuss this?
Yes, it does, this is because I know how precious it is. There is something so intangible about it, while at the same time, memories are so embodied.
I do not come from a financially rich family, but I do come from a culturally rich one. My mother ensured that we all had access to our heritage and culture, and a strong part of that was to expose us to the fullness of the past, of which my mother had many ways. But the storytelling made me pay attention to the importance of observing, recording, and telling our story of belonging, not just to the past but also to the now.
I suppose I am trying to do several things in my work, and one of them is to create images that one day will also be a part of the Black African, African Caribbean, and British experience.
Teaching is sometimes described as a calling, not a choice... You inspire your students deeply to commit to their practice and without instruction - I think great teachers possess that quality - as Louise Bourgeois said 'artists are born not made - There's nothing you can do for them'... how do you feel about this?
That is an interesting thought. I think, if one considered the ‘born-ing’ of an artist that can happen at any stage in life, then I agree. Some people are fortunate to be gifted from birth, to have an ability to create and see the world differently, for others I think it is about connections and moments that collide that can create an artist.
I think teaching is about showing students the value of listening to the self and their work and responding to knowledge through feeling and making.
I remember you advising someone once to sit with discomfort in order to learn and break a system of fear, which I thought was very interesting. When you work through ideas, I realise you often physically stand to process your thoughts. Physicality seems very important to your methods of thinking, can you expand upon this?
It requires a lot of energy and focus to stand or sit in front of a group of students, moving around enables the channelling of that energy.
I think there is an expectation that knowledge, learning, and change will come about instantly, when really it takes time, and sometimes that can be uncomfortable and challenging. I also find that it requires a shifting or position.
Movement also allows me the opportunity to process my thinking, to feel it and work with it physically. I suppose what I would like to demonstrate is that ideas are things that move, grow, change, and form.
Ekua McMorris, Dread, image courtesy of the artist.
A wall of your sitting room, in your childhood home was covered in images that your Mother placed together, can you tell me more about this?
My mother used images as an educational tool to familiarise us with our culture and history.
For my mother, positive images of African, and African Caribbean culture were placed as a counter-narrative to the negative stereotypes that were commonly placed throughout our childhood.
My mother wanted us to see ourselves reflected in those images so we could imagine a different reality.
For example, photographs of us as children were placed next to Black people from across the diaspora of great standing. The photo of the little girl on the mantelpiece is me, and above there is a photograph of Queen Mother Moore, an African American activist who suggested to the African Caribbean community here in London, that it was essential to archive their experience here in Britain, of which the Black Cultural Archives was born. You also see her wall, images of Marcus Garvey, Haile Selassie Emperor of Ethiopia, Malcolm X and many others who fought for the liberation of all Black people.
Ekua McMorris, Mum and Makeda 1984 Kilburn, image courtesy of the artist.
Within your work, you have focused on archives, a physical space for order but also within a psychological state of time - why do you return to this?
I think that this goes back to your first question. The archive as site of storage and retrieval is an exciting one, particularly if we think of it outside of its traditional use. What if we think of it as a space that requires creative interaction to give it life, or new ways of engaging with it. When we delve into the archives, we allow documents or object from the past to time travel, which I think is a wonderful prospect. This also allows one to think about what an archive can be or contain, and what it can allow us to do, as Diana Taylor suggests, it can expand what we understand of the world.
For me, knowledge and it’s making is a form of storytelling, that is performative. I am most inspired when I am faced with a story of a thing, or how a moment came to be.
When working with a camera, taking a photograph, there is always that moment/s before the shutter is released. I love those moments; they can add so much more to an image than I think the image can do alone, but that also requires a different type of documentation.
Someone once said that I was an intuitive artist, and for a long while I thought of this comment negatively, but as I have got older, I can now hear what they were saying.
58. ENZO MARI: A SPACE BETWEEN PRODUCING AND LIFE.
Enzo Mari, Design Museum - LONDON.
'I want to create models for a different society - for a way of producing and living differently.' E.M.
16 Animali (‘16 Animals’) interlocking game, 1959. Image for M-A (A SPACE BETWEEN) April 2024.
'I suggest looking outside the window: if you like what you see, there's no reason for new projects. If, on the other hand, there are things that fill you with horror... then there are good reasons for your project.' E.M.
Lo zoo di Enzo by Nanda Vigo. Enzo Mari Curated by Hans Ulrich Obrist with Francesca Giacomelli. Image for M-A (A SPACE BETWEEN) April 2024.
Enzo Mari - Design Museum - Until 8 September.
Special thanks: Grace Morgan at Design Museum. Thank you Ania Martchenko for the recommendation.
57. CONNOR DILLMAN: A SPACE BETWEEN THRESHOLDS.
Connor Dillman,‘You are here’, 2024, 31.5x23.5 inches, oil on canvas.
‘Los Angeles…the city’s underbelly can be intoxicating. I would try to articulate it, but Bret Easton Ellis’s Less Than Zero does it best. I remember getting chills the first time I read one scene in particular in that story where Clay, the narrator, sits in drugged malaise at a Hollywood restaurant, watching as his ex-girlfriend’s car “glides out of the parking lot and becomes lost in the haze of traffic on Sunset.” My adolescence was spent reveling in that mundane, sun-baked magic. It fuels some people and swallows others.’ C.D.
Your work really fascinates me because I see a certain stillness within it, and yet there is also a feeling of movement, which feels sort of televised - as if the screen is frozen and these fragments are part of a larger frame... something entertaining and yet there is always a feeling of serenity which sort of breaks the context…
I appreciate that observation. I think the mood you’re describing is a result of the way my brain solidifies the visual information I absorb. Similar to how a writer might revise a first draft many times to sharpen its original form, there’s a kind of spontaneous honing process that happens once I’ve identified the skeleton of an image I need to paint.
Say for example that it comes from an in-situ sketch or a memory—there are blurry fragments of context attached to those kinds of source material. Working with that liminal recall can be exciting, but right now I’m more interested in what happens during the making of a painting when context is allowed to fall away in favor of a refined image with a certain cryptic conviction. Or hieroglyphic sensibility. And because these pictures often contain human bodies paused in poses, they can definitely nod to filmic compositions.
I remember walking through the studios in white city and seeing you working - engrossed within your internal space - can you reflect upon the space that you enter when you work?
Recently I’ve been thinking about my time in the studio as a series of thresholds. On the best days, where there is nothing to do but paint, it’s like slowly sinking through the zones of the ocean. Warming up physically is one threshold, trying to clear my mind is another. Then sustaining unbroken focus for a bit can lead to a nice flow. But a level beyond that is when I’ve been working steadily for a couple hours and the needle suddenly drops into a groove of blissful play bordered by deep concentration. That’s a sacred space for me. It’s where time doesn’t matter and my intellectual curiosities meet my childhood propensities. The ultimate mirror.
Connor Dillman, Los Angeles, 2022.
I remember you talking about being from Los Angeles and saying how the flashy side that maybe we know from Hollywood doesn't resonate with you as much as the nature side - do you still feel this way?
It’s true that my favorite spot facing the Pacific near Tower 21 on the Santa Monica sand will forever be where my soul meditates. It’s also true that I felt pretty out of sync with LA’s culture when I worked across a few different areas of its entertainment industry after college. In retrospect, though, I realize the tension I was carrying then had as much to do with my own lack of creative fulfillment as it did with that world’s frantic pace and overwhelming pressure.
And even the city’s underbelly can be intoxicating. I would try to articulate it, but Bret Easton Ellis’s Less Than Zero does it best. I remember getting chills the first time I read one scene in particular in that story where Clay, the narrator, sits in drugged malaise at a Hollywood restaurant, watching as his ex-girlfriend’s car “glides out of the parking lot and becomes lost in the haze of traffic on Sunset.” My adolescence was spent reveling in that mundane, sun-baked magic. It fuels some people and swallows others.
Connor Dillman, ‘E 16th St’, 2021, 24x30 inches, acrylic on canvas.
Your paintings seem to often be self-portraits, can you express why this is and what it is you have learned about yourself through the act of depicting yourself through your work?
Paintings can’t lie about the mental state of their creators when you stand in front of them. I’ve had many conversations with artist friends about that phenomenon of someone looking at a painting you’ve made and then naming a feeling they get from it that touches on something specific that you were contemplating privately while making the work. There’s a 1655 Rembrandt self-portrait hanging in the National Gallery in Edinburgh that paralyzed me when I saw it last year; the dire circumstances surrounding its creation came as no surprise when I learned about them later.
The primary function of self-portraiture for me is related to this transmission. It’s certainly cathartic to ruminate on life in real time when I paint myself, but more valuable to me is the experience of coming back to a self-portrait after a significant amount of time has passed since completing it. Its emotional truth then becomes strikingly clear and gives me a potent zap of the energy I was emitting at the time I made it. For me, there’s really no other mode of self-examination that compares.
You have lived in London for a few years now, why did you want to be here? And what has London taught you so far?
My conception of home is complicated by the fact I’ve always felt more of the world than from a specific part of it. I was lucky to grow up in a family that consistently traveled outside of America, and I think that’s a main reason why I felt tugged towards a place where I would be surrounded by people whose cultural backgrounds differ from my own. There are days walking in the busier parts of London when I’ll hear ten different languages being spoken in the span of five minutes—it’s a constant reminder of the scale of the human procession we’re a part
of, which is invaluable for coloring my life and practice with a sense of urgent purpose on a daily basis.
And on a less existential yet equally important note, my community here reflects this international diversity, which has completely changed the way I approach my relationships. It’s a privilege and so edifying to be regularly exposed to unfamiliar angles on language, friendship, politics, food, love, music…the list refreshes itself with each new day here.
Connor Dillman, Big Bear Lake, 2019.
56. JACQUES CAVALLIER-BELLETRUD: A SPACE BETWEEN SYNESTHESIA AND EVOCATION.
A Perfume Atlas - Louis Vuitton - GRASSE.
A Perfume Atlas
‘Perfume is a journey, intimate and motionless at first, an illusion that takes you by the hand to lead you somewhere else, to another emotion, another dimension, a completely different space-time.’ J.C-B.
‘I must have been fourteen when I stuck a blue Dymo label reading ‘osmanthus’ on a flacon, it symbolized for me the other side of the world, unknown lands that I would never visit.’ J.C-B
Pamphlet papers slip through fingers as notes of fragrance glide through the air and vanish into memory - cool to touch and warm to inhale.
Evocative images seemingly slipped between pages - collected as moments of realisation - of breathing in with closed eyes - to be transported in the crushing of a bergamot leaf in the hand to sense the Calabrian landscape - to be surrounded by the dark forests of El Salvadore and taste the scent of peeled bark burning to exude precious resin.
'A fragrance starts off as flowers, seeds, roots or rhizomes generously offered to us by nature, and we try to extract their scents as faithfully as possible. These scented plants flourish in distinctive soils, in various climates, giving them their specific olfactory characteristics' - I have learnt about geography through raw materials.' J.C-B
A Perfume Atlas
Then to the sheets of toothed cartridge signifying a change in terrain and tone, as brushes of illustrated waves of colour break into emotively pigmented studies of abstract expressions - to evoke the gloaming and dawns of distant lands where a harvest of ingredients are painstakingly picked and pressed at precise times of day and season.
Specimen sketches, ombred and floating - as if pressed between diary entries - evoke the plucked state of the article remembered and analysed. Ylang-ylang from Madagascar, Ambrette seeds from Ecuador, Indonesian Clove, Oud Assam from Bangladesh, Sicilian mandarin, Spanish rock rose.
To close the eyes and voyage back to a momentary place, where a stillness of emotion envelopes and evokes a consciousness of peace.
Eyes open and to return to the calm of Monsieur Cavallier-Belletrud's laboratory of memory - a space between the consciousness and the dappled Cézanne impressionistic green of a garden beyond. Collected vials of an assembly of rose petal shades, line deco shelves - casting tiny hues as stained glass in a chapel of science.
A Perfume Atlas
And so the perfume atlas charts an immersive tracery - touched by artisans whose fluency in the art of translating emotion is fathomless. It is in the mystery of the imagination that enables internal doors, closed in the compartmentalization of adulthood - to be reopened onto Rousseau rooms - to tread, barefoot into floors of earth and realise that ceilings are canopies of chorus.
'..in a more democratic and egalitarian light, where everything has its place and a role to play, where the wealthiest continents are not necessarily the ones that produce the rarest scents. This vision upholds the reality that most of these plants no longer grow in the lands where they originated. They have transplanted and acclimatized to foreign settings, where they have achieved their maximum expression.' J.C-B
Louis Vuitton: A Perfume Atlas
Special Thanks: Clara MREJEN and Ines Roger at Louis Vuitton.
Thank you Callum Helcke.
55. BENJAMIN JONES - A SPACE BETWEEN TOUCH AND TIME.
Benjamin Jones, Binder #39, Binder #40, both 2023. Courtesy the Artist and Loom Gallery, Milan.
The first piece of work I ever saw of yours was a large print of a map made on carbon paper, where each place name had been crossed out - leaving a document of erasure -
It feels a long time ago now, but certainly still has echos in the current work. At the time I was thinking about how meticulous the process of mapping landscape is, compartmentalising and revealing through language and visual data. I was looking particularly at the UK National Parks which have this aura of being more natural / untouched / wild spaces, though of course are heavily human-altered landscapes. It is also a process that compresses history into a single plane of information.
I took maps of the Parks and crossed out every place name. Erasure provided a way to work against a sense of knowing a place via this overlay of information. To have this data is a comfort, promising predictability when navigating; the land has been charted, there are no unknowns. So this erasure is asking how our sense of place is shaped by information, how we project it onto reality, how this sense of knowing a place through it perhaps allows us to ‘confuse the map with the territory’, to believe that the totality of a place can be known in abstraction.
There’s also a reference to the past and future of these landscapes; in that they suggest a time before language had compartmentalised space into places, but also a future point where this language is somehow unreadable to whoever may be viewing it. This aspect of being able to simultaneously read multiple time scales or points of reference in a piece is something that I’ve remained interested in, and that carries through much of my work since these maps.
Benjamin Jones, Untitled (National Parks), 2016. Courtesy the Artist. Image: John Taylor.
There is a reoccurring sense of physical space within your works, of land masses and of tangible surfaces that seem either to be very close or very far away - do you feel this and if so why is this?
There are varying scales of time present across the works, most often signified through natural subjects or the traces of darkroom processes. A work such a View Towards the Pacific 2019-22 deals with the geological timescale of erosion; the poppies published in issue #3 M-A (A SPACE BETWEEN) in contrast are far more ephemeral. As viewers, the span of our own lives are in a kind of dialogue with these various rhythms and cycles in the natural world.
Benjamin Jones, Morning, Afternoon #2, 2023. Courtesy the Artist and Loom Gallery, Milan.
The work Morning, Afternoon, a photograph of the sky with two suns published in issue #3, provides another example. A group of these works, printed on dibond panels, were installed throughout the village of Pieve Tesino, in Trentino, Italy, during summer 2023. They were made in response to the story of the village's shepherds who in the 1600’s left shepherding behind to become print sellers for a local print-works. They travelled the mountains on foot, going as far as Moscow and South America, away for great stretches of time. Their wives and children remained at home in the village; the two suns became a way to relate to that experience of separation via the measuring of the passage of days, tracked by the suns progress across the sky. Of course at this time, communication across such distances was nigh-on impossible for the average person. So these works use landscape to relate historical experience to the present. They were installed floating slightly off rough stone walls in passages, stairways and alleys, to generate chance encounters when navigating the village.
Installation view of To Live Inside a Second, Pieve Tesino, 2023. Produced for Una Boccata d'Arte 2023: a project by Fondazione Elpis in collaboration with Galleria Continua and the participation of Threes.
When I think of your works published in issue 1 and 3 of M-A (A SPACE BETWEEN), I think of first impressions and then as the eye settles into the image, the picture seems to change, emerging into something else, is there a process you tend to follow in the production of your works?
I’ve always been interested in how process and materiality develop meaning. Whether this is Giuseppe Penone cutting back the layers of a trees growth or Liz Deschenes photograms that integrate a viewers reflection and position into the work. It’s for this reason that I primarily use analogue processes; materials that are sensitive to light, touch, time, chemistry, exposure. Photography enables the image to be effected by and in dialogue with these aspects. Experimentation with process, exploring that particular language, is a constant in my practice. One that has resulted in various abstract groups of work made in cycles.
I also make ‘straight’ photographs, that are sometimes printed immediately, sometimes wait in the archive for a few years, and often are re-printed with different exposures, scale and paper type at different times; so a long term relationship with these relatively few selected images. What is significant for me is their poetic capacity for meaning, for engaging with the viewers interpretations, emotions and speculations, eschewing reliance on fact and narrative in favour of emotive weight. It’s due to that constant sense of more to be discovered that I return to poets such as Philip Larkin, Wallace Stevens and Leontia Flynn for example.
Thinking back to the works published in issue #1, a number were from a group titled Binder. These are collages I've been making since around 2019, with a new cycle of 7 completed last year. They are created by projecting multiple negatives onto sheets of light sensitive paper in the darkroom, masking different areas during each exposure to print each image into different areas, sometimes overlapping (and going black), sometimes remaining blank. They fragment the botanical source images and weave them together, pushing back at recognisability, setting these organic forms within a geometric framework. There is a lot of chance involved, the process layered enough that I can't exactly prefigure the outcome. This is one process of many, and a large part of what I do is experimentation with the materials to develop such approaches that define a group of works. Another example would be the group Fog, made with light, chemistry and light sensitive paper. Whilst Binder fragments and collages photographs, Fog appears somewhere between appearance and disappearance, with no discernible ‘image’. The title refers to the 'fogging' of paper; an accidental exposure to light. Defining the parameters before introducing chance is centrally important; the opposite is true in printing the straight photographs however, which require a lot of precision.
Across all these groups, I’m interested in what the experience of that final photographic object is. There are therefore commonalities, with most works made using a specific heavy weight, matte silver gelatin paper, displayed without being mounted to a substrate and so retaining a more sculptural form. Their frames are specifically designed to emphasise this object-hood, the sense of the print as a unique object that through material and scale has it's own history and presence. Bound to it's referent but independent, not a ‘window’. With emphasis on how it establishes distance from it and generates potential for new meaning, that as you recognised, has the capacity to change with time but also with the viewer.
Benjamin Jones, Poppy, Provence (4.1), 2023. Courtesy the Artist and Loom Gallery, Milan. M-A (A SPACE BETWEEN) issue 3, 2024.
Your meadow series have such a sense of calm, they are fragile and strong, fleeting and yet have a permanence - and needed to sit as a set to conclude the new issue of M-A. Please can you expand as to the process of how this series came into being and what they mean to you?
That fragility you picked up on is really at the core of it. When photographing something so small so close up, the physics of the lens dictate an incredibly shallow focus, itself something slight, delicate. These pictures are a kind of balancing act, a fragile slither of clarity prescribed by the proximity of camera to subject. I’ve never been so interested in making photographs that propose a neutrality or objectivity. The subjectivity of photography, its apparatus and materials, and the way it re-presents the world to distill or suggest something other, is what I’m interested to explore. So making these pictures became about this act of looking closer, taking a perspective less defined by our own bodies; so being on the ground, focused at this close distance, and making monochromatic images of these multicoloured scenes.
The whole series was made within a ø10m circle in an olive grove in Provence, where I was on a residency last year as part of the Galerie Heimet/NG Art Creative Prize. Traditionally the ground between trees is cleared to minimise competition for nutrients. In this case it hadn’t been, with great botanical biodiversity the result; that also provided a habitat and food source for numerous insects. I became interested in this overlapping, tangled world hidden nearest the ground, like looking at the weave that comprises the wider landscape. A less ordered space, more chaotic and opposed to agriculturally organised space. They are structured photographs, heavily composed and pictorial, something that emphasises their constructed nature as a trace of their subject. Their relationship between ephemerality and permanence then, is centred on the fact of these plants brief existence and the way their appearance punctuates the seasonal cycle; participating in processes of pollination etc, that are part of a slower, deeper natural rhythm.
You have a particular relationship with Italy which seems to be evolving, can you expand upon this connection and what you have learned since being based there?
Since 2020 I’ve been working with Loom Gallery in Milan, and so have produced a number of projects with them including a solo show in the gallery last year; previously a collaboration with Antonini Milano and group presentation in Ljubljana. The conversations around the work have been brilliant, and so of course you meet people, the work is seen, new collaborations are instigated; there’s a fantastic energy there. The most significant of these was an invitation last year to participate in Una Boccata d’Arte, a nationwide project initiated by Fondazione Elpis and Galleria Continua, that included a residency and public commission in the village of Pieve Tesino, Trentino. It bore the Morning, Afternoon works I mentioned earlier, and a large piece (To Live Inside a Second) that will become a permanent installation. The whole project was developed in response to local histories and installed throughout the village during summer 2023. So indeed the relationship is evolving, with opportunities to expand the scope of my practice through these sorts of collaborations.
What has been learned specifically is somehow difficult to pin down; of course it’s bound up in personal and working relationships, exposure to different histories and places. It's really a sedimentation of all the conversations, interpretations and opportunities to develop the work. It is also however the increased awareness of Italian art, design, landscape and architectural history; experienced in a way that research from afar does not permit, understanding the shape this history gives to the present, and how it underscores a sensibility.
Since the pandemic years life has changed near unrecognisably, and so it's hard to separate everything out. The experience has regardless been formative, and I now travel there multiple times a year. It’s become a hugely important place, now populated with great friends and collaborators. The opportunity to work intensively in any country other than your own I think gives a stronger sense of the changing world, of commonalities and localised challenges, and a new perspective on what defines the culture you originate from.
All works courtesy the Artist and Loom Gallery, Milan.
All images copyright Benjamin Jones.
Benjamin Jones is a contributing artist to issue 1 and issue 3 of M-A (A SPACE BETWEEN).
54. RUTH ASAWA - A SPACE BETWEEN THE INDELABLE AND EPHERMERAL.
When Forms Come Alive - Hayward Gallery - LONDON.
Ruth Asawa, Untitled, (S.065, Hanging Seven-Lobed, Multi-Layered Continuous Form within a Form with Spheres in the Second, Third, Fourth, and Sixrg Lobes), c. 1960-63. Oxidised copper wire. Private Collection. Image: M-A (A SPACE BETWEEN) 2024.
shadows drip -
awaiting surrender to pool
- a presence suspended
cages as cases of a fruit long decayed
to leave an outline - a combe - a line
as a scribbling of biro
- to blur into umbra - to form a state between the dissolving
as these drops nestle their Siamese
as a feather grows within a womb -
a scientists diagram
to rest within the dormancy of an atmosphere
rusted to inspire a russet dust
to halo these swollen orbs
elongated - by far away bulbs - to pulse a lunar tide
extruded - by fingers out of reach
undulating a waist - tender and gravid
Ruth Asawa, Untitled, (S.142, Hanging Five-Lobed, Multi-Layered Continuous Form within a Form), 1990. Oxidised copper wire. Private Collection. Image: M-A (A SPACE BETWEEN) 2024.
a pregnancy of volume
a bubble birthed within these rings
to further drip down to be caught up within -
- within these wire jars, these baskets of the collected
- as eggs that will remain unhatched
embryonic and empty
discarded shadow skins - hang suspended
dripping to pools of puddled penumbrae across an illuminated floor
- pulled up across the walls - an extrusion from within a memory
an evidence of an ephemeral rhythm to remain indelible.
Ruth Asawa, Untitled, (S.142, Hanging Five-Lobed, Multi-Layered Continuous Form within a Form), 1990. Oxidised copper wire. Private Collection. Image: M-A (A SPACE BETWEEN) 2024.
When Forms Come Alive - Hayward Gallery - Until 7 May, 2024.
53. FRANCESCA BATTAGLIA: A SPACE BETWEEN STILLNESS AND MOVEMENT.
Francesca Battaglia, London 2019.
I remember meeting you in tutorials, in those beautiful big rooms in Lime Grove, and filling my eyes with your pictures. There was always this sense of movement and the perfumed warmth of an Italy remembered - as if from a film - where characters were dressed immaculately and high drama was ushered into frame. Your image within the new issue of M-A - I feel is a very concentrated image of you, can you discuss this work and where you were within yourself when it was made?
At the time I was working on my final major project. The core of the project was the fear of forgetting, of losing memory. I wanted to focus on my roots, on my family, to be able to put together an experience and a body of work that could reassemble a story that would become timeless. I was getting a bit stuck in the process, trying to chase something deep and real that could tell a sincere personal story. I was obsessed with taking pictures of places and things. I guess my aim was to explore how to tell a story of people by taking pictures of still objects and places. That’s when this image was made. I was taking some test shots in my flat in West London in the spring. I was focusing on the still life working with objects that I could find around in the flat. My room faced a small courtyard down a basement, there was this beautiful flowery plant that had dropped and scattered all the flowers around creating a flowery carpet just right outside my glassdoor. I had found a blue plastic bag that had fallen down from the street so I took it and filled it up with all the flowers almost all already dried.
I think I realized it maybe a bit later, after leaving London, growing up, that during that period of my life I was going through a hard time with my mental health and that those images of dried flowers and pomegranates pictured also where I was within myself in that period.
The painterly palettes you return to, why are you drawn to that particular range?
I guess what I like is softness, something that is gentle and tender. I guess it’s also the palette of the places I know. Where I grew up, in the north east of Italy, near lakes and mountains where everything is slow paced and silent, the light grey of the stone of houses, the brown of the wooden roofs, the green of hills and fields. Another place I feel at home is Ibiza, the incredible colors of the island’s nature overwhelm me every summer since I was born: the red of the sun, soil and rocks, matched with the colors of pinewoods and the deep blue of the sea.
The memory of these places blended together creates my palette. And now that my work concentrates also more on portraits and sometimes capturing someone really close, I find that in the nuances of people’s skin, eyes and hair.
There is a particular melancholy that feels like a dapple of memories within your work - which I am drawn to. There is a tension there and a sense of the unresolved, which feels very poised, can you reflect upon why you depict this state and what are the questions which thread through the work?
I love how you worded it, I relate a lot to this description.
Whenever I think about a project I want it to be real, to be reasoned and sincere. I want to capture the truthfulness of the subject: an honest look, a natural slouch posture, a gesture, a crease on the fabric of what they’re wearing. I’m not into perfection and constructions.
As I mentioned in a previous answer, I’m scared of losing memory, and this definitely reflected on my urge to take pictures and make videos, which luckily growing up became my job. There is definitely melancholy, especially in my past work and I acknowledge it today in my current projects. This unfolds also when thinking about moving image. The sense of the unresolved you talk about could definitely be the thread in my film language. I’m fascinated by movement but also by stillness, on how dynamic and powerful a still frame can be. That’s why I’m probably so drawn to film, I feel so absorbed by the freedom of it and the variety of ways I can choose to tell a story. It’s not easy to describe it in words, I’m just really really passionate and I’m sure it’s the medium I’m actually more naturally prone to to express myself.
Francesca Battaglia, Piedmont, March 2021.
Your Italian-ness is again, specific to you and I greatly appreciate that in your work. There is often a tension between fashion and art, do you feel this and if so why?
Italy has of course a huge historic cultural and artistic heritage and in every part of it you can find unique breathtaking places filled with history. Sometimes it feels like the time has stopped in some places. The fact that you can feel, smell and touch something so fascinating that’s been there for centuries, it’s inspiring. This belonging is for sure very present in my work. Fashion is a big part of Italian culture as well as art. It fascinates me, I am passionate about it. I think that my way to communicate, my way to tell stories and take pictures is more focused on the subject in front of the camera, that fashion becomes almost impalpabile in my work. It isn’t explicit nor literal, it’s not the main focus, it’s part of the subject, it needs to be merged with it and tell something about it. I feel like a need to find a story in every picture I take, and clothes definitely tell stories.
You studied in London at a fascinating moment of national change, and I remember the characters within your community - together this seemed to simultaneously provoke and support your artistic development. There is often a criticism that the space between education and life after education is widening, do you feel this and if so what do you feel should change?
Yes, it definitely influenced my artistic development. I often think though that my experience was strongly affected by the rush to start so soon. There was this urgency to start university right after high school, like you shouldn’t waste a second between each step of education otherwise you could lose interest in studying, lose the moment. At least that is very common in Italian conception on education timings.
When I was 19 I remember having this feeling that I couldn’t miss the moment. I had to know exactly what my future would be, and choose right away my path. Moving to a new country in a big city, to a world so different from the small province town where I grew up, it was definitely a big step. I think it’s really important to take the chance if you have the opportunity, while you’re still fresh and eager to learn and discover, when you’re finally free to choose your way. But I also think it should happen when you really feel ready for it and when you’re more self-conscious. I think this brought in a lot of insecurities in my experience and made it more difficult to go through. While in education you can feel like you have to perform and do well and this can compromise your mental health.
This can happen also after graduating university. That space between education and landing into life and starting a career, it can be scary. When you’re a student you feel kind of in a safe zone. After education, that fades away and you’re on your own. It’s not easy to find a way to earn money doing what you love or what you studied for especially if you have to support yourself in an expensive city.
What I’ve learned after finishing my studies and growing up is that if you have passion, it’s never too late to change direction and explore something new. So there shouldn’t be pressure in choosing a path when you’re approaching education and there shouldn’t be pressure while experiencing it. Every imperfect experience builds you up as a person, but you should feel more relaxed and free regarding what you want to choose for yourself and for your future.
The personification of space is very present within your work - I remember from the early works I saw that you made, to the recent images, why do you feel you are drawn to these spaces?
I think I am drawn to spaces where I get curious, where I can imagine a narrative. I’m also really fascinated by architecture, how a space is designed and its history. I try to imagine what stories a place holds. Sometimes I wish I could see what happened there in the past, through the years, imagining stories of people. It really fascinates me. And I’m always attracted to details that sometimes aren’t noticed.
I attribute a special meaning to some places, and I want to keep them impressed in my memory, sometimes there are places I just pass by and I know I won’t visit again, sometimes they are very familiar in my present but I know someday I won’t see anymore.
For this reason, I use photography in a kind of obsessive way, always taking pictures on my phone when a detail captures my gaze.
Francesca Battaglia, Lombardy, Summer 2018.
Francesca Battaglia is a contributing artist to issue 3 of M-A (A SPACE BETWEEN).
52. JOHN SINGER SARGENT: A SPACE BETWEEN ART AND FASHION.
Sargent and Fashion - Tate Britain - LONDON.
John Singer Sargent, Polly Barnard, 1885, sketch for ‘Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose’, 1885-6. Tate.
The bobbing of paper lanterns and the witnessing of a swarm of tiny unfurlings - illuminating the glosses of lilies - popped open, the micro parasols - weighted in pollen, sticky with scent. And the roses, abundant and scattering of their harvest of petals - delicate and a chatter with brushstrokes gleaned from many gloamings.
An upstep of heel treading the violet dust of an imagined earth.
To capture cloth as if to listen to its very fibre - of impressions more akin to murmurings than definitions - lapping, pearlescence of a purring, bubbling calm.
His romance is to engulf, to suspend and to flush -
A corset laced so tightly - a bosom of blossoms - a fluttering of clementine ribbons - and yet the swathes of blacks, charcoals and ebonies envelope with descending cloaks of the impending.
John Singer Sargent, Sir Philip Sassoon, 1923, Oil on canvas, Tate.
Fashion - the audaciously tardy teenager - lost within their love of the fleeting, the door-slamming demands for attention and the special treatments negotiated for the rewards of such mysterious beauty and eternal youth - where the alignment of silhouette, fabrication, and atmospheric timing play a poker match of tactility.
John Singer Sargent, Portrait of Mrs Leopold Hirsch 1902, Oil on canvas, lent from a private collection.
And to art - somehow nobler, wiser and calmer? And so, more reliable and respected? And because of this, somehow more bankable even controllable? John Singer Sargent dares to occupy both trade traits with the fascinating directness of not just the artist but the art director - who employs, even tames the perfected technique to present and seduce without conceptual weight. As then and now, Sargent's target audience is consumer lead and in so doing he protects a legacy as a creator and also as a service industry - a bridge between two industries - where every subject surely leaves a happy customer. However, as with trends of technique rooted in time, the shelf life can form an obstacle when viewed in retrospect.
It is this, the often overt impression of fashionable success that Sargent perpetuates through his work - that somehow falls foul of the art world’s cardinal oath of a confessional truth confided by the noble artisan who suffers alone, and for all the implied champagne cork pops of Sargent’s atmospheric belle époques - it is sometimes hard to follow the script. His subjects do not appear to depict the dour, devoted disciples of faith as the jeweled-toned clouds of Titian's subjects suggest or the patron saints of the noble as favored by Velasquez - Sargent dares to centre his illuminating brushes not on celebrating faith but instead on fashioning celebrity, utilising the techniques of the brotherhood of artisans who proceed him, and this is his conceptual provocation.
Viewing these works today - Sargent’s ability to seemingly weigh hearts against feathers - feels faux - deep down, as he entertains with a classism that is loaded for the loaded, exclusive, and excluding, as all great fashion is - unforgiving and tailor-made to flatter the benefactor alone, however admired. Conceptually provocative when considering the means for which some such Victorian fortunes were amassed, who patronised Sargent’s ability to render his subjects as meaningful even iconic. This bookable Midas touch, entertains - but does not, fully convince - to modern eyes perplexed and weary of news-stories whose heroines do not have the choice to wear their hearts on such haute couture sleeves.
And yet, just as the great fashion makers know, it is in the juxtaposition that the tension, the catalysts for change lives. Sargent is surely a signaling influencer to each of the societal tastemakers who follow his legacy, in the camp of Cecil Beaton's charm, in the noble stature of Richard Avendon's knowing reduction and in the impossible drama of Annie Leibovitz's filmic knowledge of the jarring - a lynchpin in a style, which defines modern portraiture.
Jean Philippe Worth for House of Worth, Woman's Evening Dress, around 1895. Silk damask. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Gift of Mrs. J. D. Cameron Bradley.
Sargent and Fashion - Tate Britain Until 7th July 2024.
51. NATHAN VON CHO: A SPACE BETWEEN THE BOW AND THE STRINGS.
‘I really wanted to be a vessel: M-A speaking through my violin and I.’ N.V.C
Nathan Von Cho photographed by Eva Vermandel, 11th January 2024, London.
Before I ever heard you play I saw you play, when we walked into the David Zwirner gallery for the first time, you closed your eyes and performed without a physical violin. I found that to be fascinating - watching you play I was amazed at how both physical and metaphysical the process of creating and performing music is... can you expand upon your creative process?
David Zwirner has such a unique presence about it and I also noticed that my speaking voice carried like we were in a church. I guess as soon as I found out the position I was going to play in, without much thought going into it, I naturally closed my eyes and imagined how the violin would complement the acoustics of the Gallery. This way I know what I can get away with and how I bring the space and violin to life.
Nathan Von Cho, David Zwirner Gallery, London, December 2023.
Your relationship with your violin is very particular, I remember you saying that there was a period of time when you wanted to reject what you knew, and yet you chose to perform with it - can you tell me about Nathan and the violin?
My violin has been my partner in crime for more than 20 years and I actually cannot imagine a world without it. Of course - having gone through childhood & my teenage years (maybe even up to my early twenties) I had my battles where everything else in life seemed so much more appealing. Be it rugby, friends or just anything that was not the violin. They even wanted to take away my music scholarship back in secondary school because I was that distant from it but my violin teacher at the time Mr Burov, stopped the music department from stripping me of my scholarship saying: "just wait, Nathan will come back to the violin" and I think this quote sums up my relationship with my instrument very accurately. Looking back, I was extremely lucky with all my violin teachers. They really filled the father role for me growing up which I in retrospect, desperately needed. It was more than just violin lessons, now they are beautiful memories for me so, as I also teach music, I try to carry the message as I was shown, ‘from the heart to the heart’.
I knew that I really wanted you to be involved with the opening ceremony of the new issue of M-A because you have an energy that is rare and urgent. A contagious energy that I first encountered last year. I asked each of the artists presenting to choose an image from issue 3 to reinterpret in their own way - your choice was fast and fascinating - can you recall the process of developing work for Thursday 11th January?
I do remember that moment and process. Yes - it was indeed quite fast and I was torn between two images for a brief period but I really like the style of the main character, (Boy with Pink Aerosol, Stroud Green, 2006, Eva Vermandel) the cap, the jawline even. Something about that image was screaming inside me that I could relate to, the style and the colours. One quite amusing fact about this process is that only after I chose the picture (three days before the event to be exact) I realised the boy actually looks like he is playing the violin! It could also be a phone but obviously, the first idea appeals to me more. There is that sense of brushing someone away, multitasking or even impatience and you mentioned that my energy is urgent (which is a word I haven't heard before to describe me) and the boy in the picture - looking at it now has - definitely an urgency.
There is evidently a lot of discipline which is invested in the pursuit of mastering the violin, so many rules and yet you seem to break down these rules when you play. That particular feeling of suspended charge that comes with the risk-taking of adventuring off-piste, which your audience was transfixed in witnessing - can you expand on the relationship with boundaries when you create and perform?
If I had to use one phrase to describe the event or even my life, it is "rule-breaking" not always in the most artistic of manners as I almost got kicked out of school for not adhering to the rules. You specifically asked me to wear what I wanted and be myself (when I performed`) which for a classical musician is not something you hear every day. I feel like classical music at the current stage is like a 5-course meal and sometimes you just want a snack. I would like to be the bridge to make classical music more accessible and for people to approach it lightly without having to mentally prepare or take out 90 minutes of their lives. Going back to rule breaking, I only really composed the first 4 lines of the melody and for the rest, I just let something else channel through me so if you ask me to repeat what I did on the night: I probably couldn't. That is the beauty of it where it is something that won't be recreated exactly. This event definitely was an eye-opener for me to really just go for ideas I have in my head because that space, the present moment sharing with my fellow performers & the audience. I really wanted to be a vessel: M-A speaking through my violin and I. One last point to make would be engaging with the audience. Not in a talking to them verbally kind of way but feeling out how full the space is, how much of the sound they absorb and how much I can push, and what I would like to do, which at the time, is just in my head until the bow meets the strings.
Culturally you are diverse in your lived experiences, South Korea, Berlin, and London - how have you been influenced by your journeying through these spaces and how have you explored this knowledge within your practice as an artist working today?
I am super grateful to have had the opportunity to live in different countries, mix with different cultures, and be a part of religious cultures from where I do not originate - but on top of that - one common denominator, they all have is music - in my experience, the violin. Having a Russian Guru who was only in Berlin due to half of Berlin being split due to historical & political circumstances, playing for Jewish weddings growing up, speaking Hebrew and even playing for the Royal family's Christmas reception. These are experiences and influences one cannot take for granted and have affected my music-making massively.
Nathan Von Cho preforming with Zaineb Lassoued, Callum Helcke, Max Shoroye, Xiangyin Cho and Nandi at the launch event of M-A (A SPACE BETWEEN) issue 3, David Zwirner Gallery, London, 11th January 2024. Photographed by Sunny Sun.
Special thanks: Eva Vermandel and Sunny Sun. Sara Chan and Aoife Kelly-McCann - David Zwirner.
50. YOKO ONO: A SPACE BETWEEN MAXIMUM SILENCE.
YOKO ONO: Music of the Mind - Tate Modern - LONDON.
Yoko Ono, Sky TV, 1966. Photo Cathy Carver. Courtesy of Hirshhorn Museum.
A typewriter - embossing without a ribbon.
A call for response where no reply is needed.
'Hello this is Yoko'
A harmonious gloom of shadows cast from a caste of chairs requires no impression.
Paintings of unfinished shadows, of water droplets - of whispered - imagined instructions and collected skies.
'A frame of mind, an attitude, determination, and imagination that springs naturally out of the necessity of the situation.’ Y.O.
John Cage and Yoko Ono performing ‘Music Walk’, Tokyo 1962. Image courtesy of Sogetsu Foundation.
Cut pieces away - while I watch you - while you watch me and while we never make eye contact. To hold these scissors and to practice an invited assault while an instinct is over-ridden - while my heart beats faster. Take whatever you want to take not what I want to give.
To slice through a life with a katana precision, as to reek the domestic - ridiculous, unliveable - when viewed in surprised retrospection - with an understanding of maximum silence.
To soak hands in this stillness and stare out - through the fourth wall, looking for the collaborator, the other half of a puzzle never to be solved or completed. These pieces await and yet it is the space between which is more present, more painful than these creamy-coated souvenir souvenirs - these severed props which began as a comedy and conclude as a tragedy.
An invisible city built in perspex, audacious in adolescence - now chipped with the wounds of removal and the evidence of provenance.
This distilled metropolis, whose light-less structures cast an impression, not a shadow.
Atop this rooftop penthouse - rests an apple totem - perpetual in life - symbolic in renewal.
The iconography of the implausible, of egoless empire - of tart temptation - a readygrown - readymade, whose skin will never wrinkle and whose flesh will never feed.
Installation view of Apple 1966 from Yoko Ono One Woman Show, 1960-1971, MoMA, NYC, 2015. Photo © Thomas Griesel.
From these imagined constructs - a view can be felt, a horizonless landscape sustained, as a scudding of daydreams fill forever blue, where 'you can eat all the clouds in the sky' and where the sunsets last for days - and yet an internal starless darkness persists - as molecules of ink - circulate as a pointillist's insistence, in a tapping which collectively leaves a tattooing trace and a jarring humm in this silence - to freckle a skin of touches.
'Molecules are always at the verge of half disappearing and half emerging...to wear different hats as our heartbeat is always one.' Y.O.
YOKO ONO: MUSIC OF THE MIND - Tate Modern - Until 1st September 2024.
Special Thanks Anna Overment and Kyung Hwa Shon.
49. SUNNY SUN - A SPACE BETWEEN AWARENESS AND RESTRICTION.
‘Do I need to be objective about something I don’t feel is quite right?’
S.S.
Image courtesy of the Sunny Sun.
We were talking recently about the notion of not needing to be convinced - when something feels right, can you expand upon this idea and how it relates to you?
I realised when I speak to others, who like different things, they always try to convince you with their point of view, the reason, a different understanding and insight. No matter what they say - they can’t really convince me - everyone seems to try to be neutral in different circumstances, but is that really possible? I start asking myself ‘Do I need to be objective about something I don’t feel is quite right?’
The attractiveness or reluctance of anything comes from the thing itself, not from how anyone tried to explain/justify it. So I believe no one can be convinced, or anything can convince anyone, if anyone has an opinion I guess it cannot be explained. But at the same time when things are good enough, your instinct will feel it.
Image by Sunny Sun for M-A (A SPACE BETWEEN) 2021, as seen within issue one of M-A (A SPACE BEWTEEN) 2021. Still life image: Harry Nathan.
You know I love your photographs, your contribution to issue one of M-A was so distilled, even private and yet your pictures have a specific generous quality which seem to welcome interpretation.
The series from Hong Kong feels so strong, the sleeping father, the granular city in the scorching heat of August... when you look at your work what do you see now?
Umm, Joe you know I never take photography seriously just like a ‘photographer‘. Always out of focus, films out of date, or even with a random camera. I started picking up shooting images (won’t say photography as I don’t think it’s proper) when the mood comes, My mother playing mahjong, capturing the sound that I got so annoyed as a kid that eventually I felt at home hearing it. Or my father sleeping on the couch (just like a mugshot, no shame but scared at the same time). When I first started to take images, I felt the struggle between trying to be brave, and the reluctance of pressing the shutter. Once I pressed the button, everything stopped within that image, no idea if it is overexposed, or even if anything comes out. I guess that’s the tedious journey of being with film without doing it properly, the instinct of that split moment, no idea, not feeling secure. But that nervousness captured how I felt at that time, its abstract and intimate that only myself will feel.
Now I look back by the perfectly edited down images, I felt thouse nerves, the struggle to make my mind up. It’s just like looking back to the first word of a public speech. Maybe I meant something maybe it didn't, but looking back what’s real and what’s not? I guess going back to being convinced or not I am glad the audience felt differently from the images, they probably find more values in those images that I did while I took them. I find that quite fascinating.
I had a first look at the first series of M-A, and I said that this is the only tactile media I’ve read in my life that makes me want to flip back and think what exactly is this? I recalled looking at my images - I almost forgot what I’ve taken. I guess I wasn’t convinced, the images convinced myself or others of something else, memory stayed intimate to myself. You see, no one knew it was my father...
Image courtesy of the Sunny Sun for M-A (A SPACE BETWEEN) 2021.
Image courtesy of the Sunny Sun for M-A (A SPACE BETWEEN) 2021.
You are a designer also, and you favour a very discreet aesthetic that resonates with a respect for materials which you seem to see almost like ingredients... There is a certain shrugged on invisible - gentle quality within your own identity and your images reflect that - can you trace back to the key moments in your life which have helped form the way you see?
I was never shown as a masculine person, I like feeling humanity, being free flow. Feeling material and craft but also knowing the fact that there are some sort of invisible rules. Images are the same, I recalled myself saying, my images have to be film, but in a P&S camera with no settings, I like to set myself rules but nothing looks stable. Of course from time to time I stopped using film and I just have that awareness of restriction inside me and again, every images comes out as random as it looks. The formal sense is hidden to myself, same from taking pictures, to the clothing I like, or the things I want to design really.
Image courtesy of the Sunny Sun.
Your loyalty to your own instinct is probably the thing I respect most about you, and I know that people in your circle feel the same way, you are the go-to person to ask about sourcing. In fact I think the first time we met you were striding through a studio triumphantly holding a double-faced tweed coat from Jil Sander in one hand which you had freshly acquired and had already secured a buyer - your ease in acquiring amazing things is certainly a talent, do you remember the first objects you started to collect?
Aha, the Jil Sander, was a steal back in the day and reselling since I knew I won’t be wearing it!
I guess I like to understand products and items from the second-hand market, and how it was worn. I always believed that clothing is like a tech, its existed to be used, and to be felt and to solve problems.
Not only what I buy and wear, as an accessories designer, we love to collect materials, hardware or tools. We appreciate them and think how it can be enhanced, or even solve problems in a design/product perspective. I love factories and rustic sourcing markets, they are people that fulfil our fantasies, solve the problem that we wanted to be solved. Designers are there to solve problems, not only practicality but also aestheticly, I guess that’s my core and that’s why I love participating in sourcing too.
I remembered the first ever thing I really started to crave and buy multiples of were Tricker’s shoes. I really liked the shapes, and everything. But eventually I stopped wearing them, and looking back - how on earth I wore them - so rigid and heavy, and travelled everywhere? Except being so hard to wear in at first, Tricker’s shoes are a wonderful piece of tech.
Image courtesy of the Sunny Sun for M-A (A SPACE BETWEEN) 2021.
Your returning to London always interests me - even when you are not there your mind seems to be in some way there, what is it about the city that resonates within you?
London means home to me, I’ve been here for 10 years. It’s great to feel, revisit and explore the city, it’s always cinematic, passionate in some ways and quite special despite the fact that more and more people rant about London.
I’ve been living in many cities and I miss and fantasise about london a lot. This time I’ve moved back - I am not a student. I feel that London makes the majority of us special - We are all enjoying, expressing and struggling...
For me London gives you things that cannot be bought with money.
Image courtesy of the Sunny Sun for M-A (A SPACE BETWEEN) 2024.
48. DAIDO MORIYAMA - A SPACE BETWEEN DESIRE AND TERMOIL.
Daido Moriyama: A Retrospective - The Photographers Gallery - LONDON.
Daido Moriyama.
A blur of an unknown street, exhausted tulips surrender, teeth lick, 'I am constantly observing the city', 3am naked, electric light and black shaddows. Araknid paused - ready to scuttle, the exposed metal intestines of a motorbike,
Daido Moriyama.
footprints in the slush, mesh, fish-scales, tiles undulate,'People's desires are endless'. Rubber tires tessellate, stockinged legs, gated fences, observed encounters, tarpaulins sweat, the mannequin severed, all become equal. The
Daido Moriyama.
signature granular of the ingrained, the arousal of the saturated violence of colour, occasional, the darkness of death.'The human world is erotic' Behind glass - laid out as if awaiting a chalk outline - relentlessly passive probe
Daido Moriyama.
printed pages overhead and overheard Moriyama murmurings.'I am always in a state of emotional turmoil' The plethora of an unshelved library - damp as if the first things saved from a fire - neatly, calmly awaiting the next viewer, the next
Daido Moriyama.
voyeur the next body. Forensic and cold to touch, burnt into paper - exotic in weight, erotic in tender - like cigarette paper or cicada wings - cut - cut sharp - detached. 'I don't feel at ease when I am shooting' To inhale these
Daido Moriyama.
sticky sheets is to see the secrets, to feel these ferals, which glisten and undulate with a painful ferocity - tiny breathing dialogues, caught in a
Daido Moriyama.
viewfinders' trap, hooked on an inky intimacy, still wet - so close - the eyelash brush of his window cannot be unseen.
Daido Moriyama.
Daido Moriyama - A Retrospective - The Photographers Gallery - 16-18 Ramillies Street, London W1F 7LW. Until 11 February 2024.
Special thanks: Martin Steininger.
47. GERHARD RICHTER - A SPACE BETWEEN DISARRAY AND ALMOST NOTHING.
Gerhard Richter - David Zwirner - LONDON.
Gerhard Richer 12.8.2023 (4), 2023 - Coloured ink, and pencil on paper 21.5 x 26 cm. David Zwirner, photographed by Zhonghua for M-A (A SPACE BETWEEN) February 2024.
Spluttering, undulating clouds squashed between glass - as in a microscope - a slide - analysing life - the beginning - made towards the end.
a micro-line ticks forth as on a graph - connecting dots - a constellation - charting a course.
A map viewed from above - where colours indicate symbolism, shading regions and masses darken depth.
Landlines cut into a terrane - exposed in the full flow of controlled volatility, the diagrammatic splicing of a leaden cloud.
The marking, amorphous of meetings - of melding, of bleeding and healing of reaction and action to erasure.
Of minerals under scrutiny of an eagle's eye, sawing above - the telescopic range of NASA - the cosmos overwhelms yet ignites - a steady hand at mission control. A world beyond - a world within - all is made of such matter. To The unblinking of these emerald pools -
Gerhard Richer 3.8.2023 (2), 2023 Coloured ink and pencil on paper 21.5 x 26 cm. David Zwirner, photographed by Zhonghua for M-A (A SPACE BETWEEN) February 2024.
- a dilation - where inks bleed and freckle a genus.
These micro graphite configurations - a psychiatrist's analysis - the tracery of the barely, an outline to define an impossible - an almost nothing.
A flushed roomscape emerges from a swathe of washes - as a tide draws back - exposed the headlights of passing in the night - a still from a progression - a sequence of future memories - as such clouds engulf these sunsets - the phosphorescence - these shimmering auroras. The ruin of a drop to further dive into the green - the validifying context of chance - the chance of a master of control - now swimming in the night - why now to revel in such encounters?
To scour the surface at right angles to counter and encounter this organic. To appraise these meetings of ink and paper of then and now.
Such subtle tenderness - catching colours - unexpectant of the violence in plain sight - volatile, momentary and permanently scared. - Scratched insertions disrupt the near-solidified solutions in their final moments of lucidity - to drag back a surface to expose an emergent - chalken line of the vulnerable - not ready to be set in stone.
Gerhard Richer 11.8.2023 (2), 2023 Coloured ink, ink, and pencil on paper 21.5 x 26 cm. David Zwirner, photographed by Zhonghua for M-A (A SPACE BETWEEN) February 2024.
A crackling through the shellac glosses of the sealed in the semi-permanence of a reign storm - to reach a relief from the impending.
The occasional bubbles escape the depths to reach the surface - to flush with blushes of remembrance.
Presented from behind the engineered - graphite frames of the creator's vision - looking out - looking within. Crisply defined as the sheets of identical paper, a ground of snow where horizons meet the sky - to trace the silhouetted clouds from a child's eye.
“What characterizes drawing even more obviously than painting is the sense of disarray, the absence of a way out.… Drawing is … an erasure, an almost nothing, right at the extreme edge where everything would fall into pieces. Just before then you stop.”
— Gerhard Richter, 1997
Gerhard Richer - Strip, 2013/2016 Digital print on paper between Alu Dibond and Perspex (Diasec) Four (4) panels, each: 200 x 250 cm overall 200 x 1000 cm. David Zwirner, photographed by Zhonghua for M-A (A SPACE BETWEEN) February 2024.
Gerhard Richter - Until 28 March 2024, David Zwirner - 24 Grafton Street, London
Special thanks Sara Chan and Kyung Hwa Shon.
46. MASAOMI YASUNAGA - A SPACE BETWEEN HOLE AND WHOLE.
‘Clouds in the Distance’ - Lisson Gallery - LONDON.
'Beauty can be discovered in the most unconventional situations.’ M.Y.
Masaomi Yasunaga photographed by Sunny Sun, January 2024.
A psychological archeological haul, presented in the blinking daylight of a time in delay - like the memory of touching the clouds, as a child.
A time machine's contents where such relics are scoured for answers, seemingly created in the depths of a darkness - their inward eyes baked shut, their heartbeat too slow to hear, but to touch these tremulous barnacled bodies is to sense that their kiln birth - forever warm. A grandmother’s ashes form a porcelain memory - crystalised and hot with tears to dissolve into the porous.
To hatch the insects and protruding bones of a ruin. A construction of rubble, where foundations are absent and the ceilings cave.
'When I create, I always envision a distant view, an act of seeing afar'. M.Y.
Masaomi Yasunaga, Vessel Fused with Stone 2023, Glaze, Coloured glaze, Glass, Coloured slip, Kiln wash, Granite, Kaolin 82 x 70 x 70 cm. Photographed by Sunny Sun, January 2024.
These unearthed - amniotic fluid glazed jars hold their holes to cast internal beams in a dormancy of rest - vacant, abandoned yet meniscus full - all these nothings have meant more to me than so many somethings - The escaped or rolled back stones expose the gaping of the dropped granites of the monsters bite - such teeth marks afirm that the space is greater than the sum of such parts.
'Beauty can be discovered in the most unconventional situations.’ M.Y.
Masaomi Yasunaga,‘Empty Creature 2023 - Glaze, Coloured glaze, Titanium oxide 17 x 22 x 10.5 cm. Photographed by Sunny Sun, January 2024.
Poisons bubble, spurt and splinter to hue a mosaic of excavated evidence - formed under the pressure of violence, of ego and the melted prestige of fallen kingdoms - relics still stunned in stillness - once lucid and undulating - now brittle and dry, exposed on a beach awaiting the tide to conceal, to return.
'The ultimate goal of my art is not self expression but what's left of self, after being filtered through fire'. M.Y.
Masaomi Yasunaga, Melting Vessel 2023, Glaze, Kiln wash, Kaolin 31 x 22 x 21.5 cm. Photographed by Sunny Sun, January 2024.
Masaomi Yasunaga ‘Clouds in the Distance’ - until 10 February 2024 - Lisson Gallery - 67 Lisson Street, London.
Photography Sunny Sun for M-A (A SPACE BETWEEN)
Special thanks: The Lisson Gallery.
45. EVA VERMANDEL - A SPACE BETWEEN CALLING AND CAPTURE.
The artist discusses her creative process.
‘I do wonder sometimes whether I’m just a vessel that captures things that get sent to me and need to be caught.’ E.V.
Eva Vermandel, Boy with Pink Aerosol, Stroud Green, 2006. Image courtesy of the artist.
The first time I saw your works, I was immediately amazed at how you communicate emotion - images that are so luminous they can be seen when the eyes are closed - at what point did you know that photography was your way forward?
Thank you so much, emotion is what I try to communicate so it’s incredibly gratifying to hear that that is what you take away from my work, and so intensely.
I was about four-five years old when I first picked up a camera. My father was an amateur photographer and we’d often go for walks together with his camera in tow. He’d occasionally let me take a picture with it. Back then, in the late 70ies/early 80ies, photography was precious and expensive, so this was done sparingly, we were not a rich family. By the time I was a teenager, my dad let me use his Contax to shoot the odd film, and the curious thing is that the pictures I took back then have the same intensity and atmosphere they still have now. So I think it came embedded in me.
Eva Vermandel, Bart, 1988. Image courtesy of the artist.
That said, I’ve often battled with the actual medium of photography, with its directness. The art I get drawn to most is painting. There’s such a freedom to bring the emotion of an experience to the fore in painting, rather than the de facto ‘this is what occurred’ element that often gets represented in photography. The result is that my practice revolves around breaking through the directness that is inherent to photography.
For years I found this directness a restraint, and up until a couple of years ago I did toy with the idea of switching to painting, until I realised that my battle with the directness of the medium is what makes my work so singular. I revel in pushing the camera to its limits, and this often happens not through special effects but simply through intense observation. This can go so deep that I feel that it is me who is being swallowed up through the lens, rather than the other way around.
Over the years I have become aware that I don’t ‘create’ my work, but that I ‘catch’ it. The sharpening of my craft lies in training my instincts to feel these moments brew and trust that whatever it is that needs to be captured will get thrown in my direction. Even on the few occasions that I have worked in a constructed manner, there will still be elements within that constructed setup that guide me rather than me guiding them.
'Boy with Pink Aerosol' seems to be such a pivotal image, how did that portrait come into being?
I personally wouldn’t call it a portrait, rather a state of being. At the core of the image lie the gestures of the arms, which are both engaged with elements you can’t see, and the tilt of the head and neck. There are also details that are so slight that the viewer needs to fill them in. It’s a puzzling work and it requires active looking. I love what Francis Bacon said about art: “the job of the artist is to deepen the mystery”. I fully empathise with that.
It happened upon me in the summer of 2006, when I had gone for a walk with my Mamiya 7 near where I used to live. I came across a group of teenagers spraying graffiti on a section of Parkland Walk, north London. This is a disused railway track that is now a nature reserve and favourite haunt for locals. Several of the leftover structures of the railway get graffiti-ed on a regular basis and that afternoon these boys were having a go at it.
I asked if I could photograph them. I remember that the boy in the photograph is called Phil. He had an elegance about him that drew me to him more than the other two boys. I think he must’ve been around 16 at the time, so he’ll be well in his thirties now. I deliberately underexposed the negative to get the background to drop away and to enable his skin, which was luminous, to become even more radiant.
The post-production of this work was as important as the creation of the work itself. To achieve the depth of the luminosity of the skin, the underexposure of the negative was pretty extreme, about three stops; afterwards I had to rebuild the parts that had nearly disappeared. All in all it took me about five years to get it to a point where it felt right. It’s not the only work that took me years to finish.
I love the fact that it can take me years to get a photograph ready for print. It reinforces the long-time-frame undercurrent of the work. A lot of artists I admire have elements of this in their workflow too: Edvard Munch often reworked his paintings or revisited the same theme/setup he’d painted before. He once said “I don’t paint what I see; I paint what I saw” which resonates with me immensely. He’d spend hours just sitting opposite a person, not touching his canvas to then paint them after they’d gone. The galloping horse he painted in 1910 was done from memory. He must have deeply absorbed what he saw in those split seconds that it was happening to be able to paint it in such a dynamic way afterwards.
Edvard Munch, Galloping Horse, 1910-1912, Oil on canvas, 148 x 120 cm, The Munch Museum, Oslo.
Pierre Bonnard is another example of prolonged-time artists: he’d show up at the opening of his own exhibitions, brush and paints in hand, to add more touches to the works installed on the wall. Or he’d repaint a whole section of a painting years after its initial completion. He’d ask sitters to walk around as he was painting them, which enabled him to shift the focus on the rhythm and colour of the work rather than the ‘likeness’ of it. One of his sitters, Dina Vierny, said that he asked her to walk all the time; to ‘live’ in front of him, trying to forget he was there.
You need time to process what is happening AND life is in constant flux. These two factors combined mean - for me at least - that art needs space to breathe and will never be, neither should be, ‘finished’.
The title of your book, 'Splinter', is fascinating, the idea that elements of a whole can fracture and get underneath your skin - I really feel that within your works. What are the key images that you return to within your collection and what do they tell you?
Thank you, yes, the name Splinter was suitable for the work. It has many ways of interpreting it, which I like. Aside from the splinter as something that gets underneath your skin there’s also the fact that a splinter comes from a tree, a beautiful thing (trees are such a joy!). Then there’s also the feeling of being splintered. And there’s the famous Adorno quote: “The splinter in your eye is the best magnifying glass available”. It’s such a versatile word that can be used in so many different contexts and interpretations.
In terms of what the key images in my work could be: these often change. Over time works that were key get overtaken by other works and then things change all over again. The work is never static, it keeps evolving, within the existing work and in the process of the creation of the work.
This is also why Giorgio Del Buono of Systems Studio, who designed my website - and did so most beautifully and insightfully - created the randomisation of the Selected sections on the site. I love the way that every time the page gets reloaded different images will be thrown together: through this process new elements you - or I for that matter - hadn’t spotted before come out through these randomised juxtapositions.
As to ‘Splinter’ as a book, I now see it more as a collection of early works rather than a ‘project’ or ‘body of work’. I’ve completely stepped away from the ‘project’ approach that is so prevalent in photography. When I put work on display I like to mix up pieces created throughout my whole practice, old and new. New work can add a whole different dimension to older work and vice-versa; there’s always a dialogue: within the work, between the work. I find the idea of a ‘project’ far too constrained and it doesn’t fit with my thinking.
To get back to the point of key works: even though they often change, there are some works that were turning points in my approach to the creative process. One such work is Tree, Stroud Green, 2014, Which came into being because it had to: I could feel it calling me as I was walking down the street I used to live on. I got my point-and-shoot Contax T3 camera ready (which I started using for my artistic practice around that time and always carry with me) and when I turned the corner it was there. I even remember thinking “ha! It was you that was calling out to me!”. I took a couple of shots and walked on. The piece that came out is one I’m very fond of.
Eva Vermandel, Tree, Stroud Green, 2014. Image courtesy of the artist.
At that time I needed to break away from the aesthetically pleasing painterly style I’d mainly been working in up till that point. I needed something harder, something that would be both appealing and repelling. I do not like complacency in art, not as a viewer nor as a creator of art. This need to push boundaries does not come from the perspective of “aaah today I’m going to do something different, something subversive”; it comes because at some point the work calls out that this needs to happen. This image came into being because it had to. It ‘presenced’ itself and I caught it.
I recently made a film in collaboration with the composer Galya Bisengalieva, shot on my iPhone, an old SE. Once again, it was a case of something brewing, an invisible thread that I needed to follow. This came about through Galya’s invitation to create a film for a track on her album Polygon, which, after a couple of weeks of letting the music sink in, led to a first spontaneous piece shot from a double decker bus for the track Degelen. This set things up for further technical explorations on the device I was using and - finally - another ride on the same bus, the 197 between Sydenham and Peckham. It all built towards the film I landed on in the end, shot during that second bus ride, which is uncanny in its timing, composition, eeriness and perfect syncing to the music. It baffled both Galya and me afterwards, how deep the synchronicity is between the film and the music, and I can still barely believe it all came together the way it did.
Galya Bisengalieva - Degelen (Official Music Video)
I do wonder sometimes whether I’m just a vessel that captures things that get sent to me and need to be caught. It’s a funny thing to build a whole practice on chance; on sharpening the intuition to grab things rather than actively setting out to create work from scratch. It requires a leap of faith which I relish.
Your images evoke so many senses and yet you are known for creating photography, have you expressed your instinct through other media?
Oh yes, see above. I sometimes paint, mostly in watercolours. I recently did an audio-piece for an exhibition I had in Amsterdam in April 2023, and am working on another one for a future exhibition, and I’ve done three films up till now. As with everything, these things came about because they presented themselves to me in some way or other.
The three films I’ve done were shot using completely different tools: 35mm film, a Nikon D800 and my iPhone SE.
The first one, The Sea Is Always Fluid, with Aidan Gillen, was shot on 35mm. It had cinematographer Rachel Clark on camera and was one of Rachel's first films as a cinematographer back in 2011 (she now shoots feature films, among which I Am Ruth with Kate Winslet and her daughter Mia Threapleton last year). It came about because Panavision had offered Rachel a whole 35mm kit rent-free and she was looking for an opportunity to use it. I’d known Aidan for a long time (we used to see each other) and felt I’d never been able to capture him as I’d wanted to in a still. I especially wanted to capture his connection with the sea. I’d just had a good year financially so could afford the costs involved in a production like this (despite the camera kit being free, there was the insurance, transport, accommodation, processing etc to pay for still).
I had plans for what I was going to film, because when working in a setting like this, with all the cost involved and a whole team (Aidan, Rachel and the two camera assistants Tim Allen and Alejandra Fernandez) giving their time for free, you can’t go “ooh I think I’ll just see what happens and improvise on the spot!”. It was - of course - the spontaneous, everything-falling-into-place footage that we shot right at the end of the day that became the piece. The sun was setting, the sea had pulled back and formed a mirror on the shore. Aidan lay down onto that mirror, and as we were using the very the final piece of film, the flash of light you get when the celluloid is cut off, became part of the piece.
The second film I made is Blood Orange, shot on a Sunday afternoon in January 2018, in the living room of my former house. It came about through a prism of restlessness combined with boredom and an underlying emotional current, an avalanche that was heading my way which I wasn’t aware of yet at that point. It sat on my hard drive until earlier this year, post-avalanche, when the aforementioned exhibition I had in Amsterdam, with its theme of Transition/Transformation, created the perfect platform for its first outing.
The most recent film I made is Degelen in collaboration with Galya Bisengalieva, shot on my phone, which I spoke about earlier.
The audio piece I did for Amsterdam consists of readings of very brief excerpts of short stories by DH Lawrence, whose writing has had a major impact on me. This work was partly created to make visitors to the exhibition aware of the view onto the bay from the windows where this piece was installed. You can see bits of that view and hear these audio pieces on my Instagram account.
So to cap it all off, the space in which I exhibit becomes a work in itself too, with the same principles of fluke that apply to all my other works.
I realised while putting the new issue of M-A (A SPACE BETWEEN) together that I was also searching for myself within the works collected, which was an extraordinary realisation, can you share any thoughts about searching for answers within your practice?
That gives me enormous pleasure to hear. The last thing I want to do is force my thoughts and feelings onto the viewer, instead I love it when the work functions as a mirror that people can project their own thoughts and feelings onto.
I search all the time, but it isn’t answers that I’m looking for. I want to figure out what it is that I am searching for, which aspects of life I’m trying to explore and why. I don’t think there are any answers in life or art. Life is about openness and exploration - the more you open up to the world and the people around you, the more it enriches you.
With the current wave of self-obsession that came in the wake of social media and a higher level of affluence, people seem to have lost the ability to look outside of their own heads. It doesn’t do anyone any good - the more you navel-gaze the more you end up in a spiral that can lead to mental ill-health. The consumer society we live in thrives on this: the more unhappy we are the more we consume; happy people don’t tend to have this urge to consume. So the big corporations have all to gain from keeping us self-obsessed and miserable, and that counts even more for the tech giants, who need our eyeballs for their data scraping, than the classic, pre-internet corporations.
I’ve gotten to a point now where just looking at, interacting with and being in the world, brings me deep happiness and creates an urge to relay this which is irrepressible. I live in a perpetual state of wonder.
Eva Vermandel, ‘The Sky over the Southbank’, London, 2021. Image courtesy of the artist.
A selection of images by Eva Vermandel are published within issue 3 of M-A (A SPACE BETWEEN).
44. PRADA - A SPACE BETWEEN DESTRUCTION AND CREATION.
A series of artisan artifacts in LONDON.
Hand-stitched fringe dress with metal and crystal embroideries. Spring Summer 2024 Womenswear collection - Prada.
Borrowed utility jackets arrive - worn down, sprouting their internal waddings - modern trophy heirlooms - a life previously lived, the marred surface of belonging. Artisanally aged to costume a chosen reality, a series of identities offer a heroine’s wardrobe of perverse contradictions and intellectual complications.
A series of unlikely pairings flirt, never to be photographed by Lindbergh's lens, alas a delicious melancholia seeps - like Absinthe on flaming cubes of sugar - to be swallowed whole - a sweet liquor rush distilled to delicacy for a grown-up palette.
Canvases shrugged on over hand-stitched flapper fringe - hang by a thread, sway on bleached oak hangers - matte-ly porous and albino against a deeply pigmented patchwork of leathers.
Meticulous micro-metal and crystal-stamped embroideries disrupt a delicacy of textiles - abrupt close-up yet protected with perfected diamond shimmer from afar.
Hand-stitched nylon and leather bag - Spring Summer 2024 Womenswear collection - Prada.
A re-imagined replica of an archival Mario Prada bag tether an assortment of transcience, quietly signaling back to the heartbeat of a brand recognised for its DNA of the luxurious, the rare, and the symbolic.
Originally in ruched and pleated black moire, now offered in feather-light, paper-thin nappa or signature nylon - snapping-shut with an ivory lock carved in the form of a satyr head - a direct resin replica of its original mimic the possible Japanese *netsuke origin.
An artifact, more talisman than mere decorative adornment, its protruding tongue and intense grimace remind and reflect back to an ancient - future punk - to destroy is to create.
The Satyr head - a possible netsuke object, originally in the possession of Mario Prada - replicated for a series of bag fastenings within the Spring Summer 2024 Womenswear collection - Prada.
Archival original - image courtesy of Prada X.
*Netsuke, formed by the characters 'ne', meaning root and 'tsuke' meaning attached - are highly prized, hand-carved micro objects originally created as toggle-like fastenings for securing the cord belts worn by gentlemen in 17th century Japan.
The Start Museum 111 Ruining Road, Xuhui District, Shanghai - until January 21, 2024.
Prada Spring Summer 2024 collection is available from January 2024.
Special thanks Rebecca Fletcher-Campbell, Edlira Panxha and Sui Zhonghua - Prada.