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Artist in Focus
Jamie Aherne, Blackwater Gallery
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In conversation with Jamie Aherne, Blackwater Gallery
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July 2020
Combining technology and art, Chuck Elliott has a passion for creating beautifully manipulated digital artworks. Utilising a computer’s ability to meticulously alter light, colour, and form. Elliott’s work has a core in abstract fine art but has evolved alongside advancements in the digital design field, to produce something that transcends expectations of what can be produced by traditional methods.
We catch up with Chuck and discuss his latest creative developments as well as take a look into the life of one of the UK’s most recognisable digital artists.
JA Becoming a full time artist in 1992, art has been your professional focus for many years. But outside of a career based context, what are the earliest memories you have of art in your life?
CE I have a very strong memory of visiting the Tutankhamun exhibition when it arrived at the British Museum in 1972. I queued for hours with my dad to see the show, and it was of course completely mind blowing. I’m not sure that the original artefacts on show would ever be moved like that again nowadays.
JA Your work is incredibly abstracted, we would love to know what inspires you to make these beautifully altered forms?
CE Nature. Life. And no plan B. Ever since I decided to go to art school back in the late Eighties, I’ve single mindedly pursued the idea of making art, and working in a studio, as a daily practice. I’ve been lucky enough to have a succession of good studio spaces to work in since I graduated in the early Nineties, first in London, and now in Bristol.
A studio should present an opportunity to work, to read, to study, and to reflect. I tend to think of art as study nowadays, a kind of research project, a visual distillery for thoughts, ideas, and explorations. I love to think about new sculptural forms, ideas that I’m currently visualising, or planning to draw, and have a constant list of pieces I’d like to make, largely based on thoughts about natural forms and plant life, on architecture, and product design, on the sheer thrill of colour and line, the way these elements interact with light, the way it moves through them.
In essence, I’m working with the most basic of things, line, light, colour, and form, to create works that abstract ideas about the world that surrounds us. For me, despite the fact we’re all taught to work with words and language at school, the real world lives in my mind through colour and form, life is primarily a visual experience, not a linguistic one.
I hope the end results evoke some beauty and some kind of poetry. It’s not my intention to overpack the work with overt references and meanings. I like the idea that art exists in the space between the work and the viewer. That’s where the energy is. There has to be some room for interpretation, for people to bring their own thoughts and feeling into the space, and layer it up with reference to their own experiences.
Ultimately art is open to interpretation, and misinterpretation, and shouldn’t constrain the viewer into a narrow world view.
It’s additionally worth noting that I’m a keen believer in the idea of working with contemporary tools, in my case that means digital tools. I love the idea of being able to paint and draw on system, but also to be able to edit, cut, paste and remix. I see this as analogous to the way in which film and music are being created nowadays. I’m interested in the liminal space between the analogue and the digital, the virtual and the material, and how the visual can exist both in the eye and on the screen, and what that means for the visual artist.
To my mind, everything is material, including the digital, and so the digital space strikes me as being a very real, and exciting, place in which to work, especially as that work can now move between the virtual and material worlds, by laser output and pigment printing, 2d and 3d scanning, CNC sculpting, laser cutting, and many other hi-tech processes that allow ideas to move on and off systems, often repeatedly, as projects progress both on and off system.
JA With clients across the globe, your work is renowned for featuring in photos of gorgeous homes. Who was your most memorable client from all that have collected your work?
CE Miuccia Prada. When I was still working in my Soho studio, often on projects that were more commercial than the work I do now, Prada’s design team asked me to create a virtual sports stadium for them to promote a new collection of urban sportswear. As a result, I was commissioned to work day in and day out for weeks, building a model, and rendering images, to my own designs, with no external interference at all. It’s incredibly rare for a commissioner to trust the process entirely, and use the results broadly unedited. It’s a testament to the way Prada works, and the total belief she has in the people she chooses to commission, a rare treat.
More recently I’ve visited her amazing art complex in Milan, which is one of the world’s great private galleries, filled with her own collection of fabulous contemporary art, particularly memorable to me was Thomas Demand’s model grotto and photography. Well worth a visit, once we’re free to travel again.
JA Which current ‘Art World’ trends are you following right now?
CE Black Lives Matter right now, and the Climate Crisis over recent years. I guess the art world does have trends, although it makes me slightly uneasy to consider that reality! I’d like to believe that I work autonomously in my own furrow, without too much consideration of trends and fashions. Clearly, that is a fantasy as there are highly discernible trends in art, as in everything, running across the decades, but perhaps a little time needs to pass before they can be clearly discerned, with some perspective. I think the current movement towards removing racial bias from our systems is both hugely overdue, and hugely welcome. I wonder if there needs to be some form of reparation too. I’m considering working up a new piece referencing the issues myself, although I’m not sure that I have the requisite authority to add my voice to the dialogue. Not sure, it’s something I’m still thinking about.
JA Have you found that lockdown has affected your ability to create? or your ability to gather inspiration as you would normally?
CE In a myriad of ways. To some extent artists are often used to working in isolation, day by day, so to some extent, the lockdown here hasn’t changed my time hugely. That said my house and studio are more bustly, as my family are around all day at the moment. Normally they would be out and I would be here on my own! So that’s been lovely in many ways.
With the spring and summer, I’ve been changing my working hours, and am trying to get out into nature more each day, by limiting my studio time to 8 hours or so. It’s been good to compress my studio time into a more focused day, and then enjoy time away from the systems too. It allows for more time to think, and questions the need for relentless production, which is something I think about a lot. Perhaps we would benefit from having fewer, more amazing, things. There’s an interesting tension between the economy and production on one hand, and a need to reduce our material footprint on the other. It's a fine balance, and one I’m thinking about more each year.
For the future, I wonder if we’re going to see more focus toward online presentation of new work, and less on physical gallery shows. I think the gallery remains the best way to experience real work, in the flesh, but there have been some interesting digressions into the digital to bridge that gap in the meantime, with VR gallery visits, and online collections and fairs, becoming more usual, and better thought out.
JA Do you feel that the internet, and particularly social media, has had an impact on the art world while in lockdown? As a predominantly digital artist, has the current situation encouraged you to use digital technology in new ways?
CE I’m pretty sure we’ve all been spending more time on our screens. For myself, I’ve started work on a new website, v5, which will be more editable, and more up to date. In the past, I have seen my website as a space rather like a book, a collection of static pages that catalogue existing works and projects.
For the future I’m keen to pivot this approach towards keeping a more up to date, editable, lively space, that can enable people to see the latest works in progress, alongside images of works recently installed, and news about new projects. I suspect that if we are going to be spending more time in our homes, a more up to date online presence will be of real interest, I hope so anyway!
JA Can you give us a sneak peek into what projects you are currently working on?
CE In the last few weeks I’ve been pretty busy. I wonder if the extra time people have been spending at home has caused them to consider buying new works for their homes? Perhaps also because there are fewer ways to enjoy your income at the moment, be that trips to the cinema or restaurants, or time away from the home.
Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve been working on two new editions for my Experimental Print Club. I use Patreon to host an online club, where people can subscribe to receive 3 or 4 more ephemeral new editions in the post each year, as well as more detailed notes about the studio, and works in progress. It allows me to create experimental pieces, try out new ideas and materials, and post out works that I hope people will enjoy collecting. We’re about four years in, and I’m up to edition #14. It’s a lively side project, and one I enjoy greatly.
I’ve also just completed installing three large works at a local collector’s home here in Bristol, including a 5m high piece specifically built to fit in a narrow double height hallway. It’s a real pleasure to undertake bespoke commissions for people, as it often opens up opportunities and dialogues that can lead to really interesting new pieces.
For the summer I’m working on a shortlist of six or eight drawings. Titles include Coaster, Monolith, and a new piece made up from laser cut rings that nest within each other on the wall. Imagine thin hoops offset within each other in an asymmetric arrangement. I’m ever more interested in cutting the work up, and exploring the gap between flat art and low relief sculpture for the wall. I’m also tempted to break out into the gallery space with freestanding work. My latest Print Club piece, Paean, marks an initial exploration into the idea of making freestanding work, that doesn’t need framing. I’m already in discussions with a New York client who may be interested in a larger wall mounted version of Paean, that would come away from the wall in panels set at contrasting angles to each other. Of course, there’s never enough time to do everything, so to some extent, it’s always a question of where to focus energy next and actually complete things before moving on!
Art = Energy, ultimately.