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Studio visit and interview
In conversation with Helena Cardow, TAG Fine Arts
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An interview and visit from Helena Cardow, one of TAG Fine Arts’ curators, and regular exhibitor at the London Art Fair, the London Original Print Fair and Ink Miami, amongst many other annual events.
View London Original Print Fair ⟶
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November 2018
HC How and when did you first start working with TAG Fine arts, how did the relationship develop?
CE I’m a relative newcomer to the TAG stable. I guess we’ve been working on projects together for about three or four years now. I’d seen Hobby around the fairs over recent years and was keen to forge a relationship with him, he’s a contemporary dealer who shows work both nationally and internationally, which is great. I also felt that TAG have a strong roster of quite graphic artists, many of whom work with print, and as such felt we might be a good fit…
HC Tell us about your background?
CE I started as an art student in 1984 I think, studying illustration at Bath Technical College, and went from there to a Foundation year, followed by a BA (Hons) degree, so seven years at college in all. My BA was at the old Hornsey School of Art, now amalgamated into Middlesex University. Personally, I would’ve been in favour of the UK retaining its independent network of art schools, I don’t think they are or should be departments in larger universities. Historically British art schools have often been absolute powerhouses of contemporary artistic and political thinking, and are more than capable of standing alone in my opinion! That said, I was delighted to graduate in ’92 with a First class Hons degree, and from there I moved straight into Soho’s art and design scene. I cut my teeth at Ace studio, which later became CRS, a kind of graphics production facility, for a couple of years before launching Dais studios on Great Marlborough Street, then Flux studio on Greek Street, and most recently the Transistor project, which started life as an artist’s collective, and vehicle for both curating and representing new work, mostly by established artists from the South West.
HC What have you got coming up?
CE I’m looking forward to exhibiting new work with TAG at the London Art Fair again this Spring. TAG are also showing my latest pigment prints at Ink Miami. And there’ll be some Diasec mounted Lambda photographic prints at the Singapore AAF this autumn too. In addition to working with TAG, I’ll also be exhibiting a new body of work with the Catto Gallery in Hampstead, where I show biannually, and so am looking forward to bringing my latest studies to London in the spring of 2020, or perhaps later in the autumn, depending on how it all comes together.
HC Did you ever decide to be an artist? What inspired you to create?
CE I guess I must have! It’s not a moment I particularly recall. I knew I wanted to go to art school from my mid-teens, I guess to follow in the footsteps of all the many and varied radical thinkers that have come up through that system. It seemed, and still seems, ridiculously glamorous, and profoundly romantic. The idea that it could be possible to spend one’s days making, thinking, reading and studying, in a life long arc of activity that begins at art school, and leads to a journey studying, experimenting and of course making, new visual work, still strikes me as a good way to spend an hour, a day, a week or a decade, if at all possible.
The tech college I started at organised a demonstration of the Quantel Paintbox in maybe ’84 or ’85. Quantel was/is a British computing company that had created a digital paint system, the Paintbox, running on dedicated hardware, that at the time was rumoured to cost around £2m to install, and came with a large screen in a dedicated studio space, with a second room full of spinning Winchester drives and the CPUs, all of which combined to allow you to paint straight onto the screen. It was pure revolution. For those of us who had been struggling with gouache, oils, Rotring pens and airbrushes, the idea that you could paint with a full spectrum of colour, add tonality, and comp in photographic material if so desired, whilst retaining the option to re-edit everything ad infinitum, was a total revelation.
Around the same time I was inspired by the huge American names being exhibited in London, and LA, at that time, Chuck Close, Richard Serra, Mark Rothko, Frank Stella, and so on. This was well before the YBA’s turned London into the global centre for contemporary art that it is today. This largely American idea that you could make non-figurative work at scale, for gallery exhibition, seemed totally contemporary to me, and of real interest. In fact, of course, it transpires that the Northern European mindset we have is simply not the same as the American one that created that moment in time. We continue to be informed and constrained by our own sense of history, and perhaps have a less emboldened way of working with material. As James Turrell says, whilst Europeans continue to be interested in representing the effects of light with paint, as an American, he decided to get back to the source, and work with light itself. Likewise with Pollock and Serra. There seems to be an almost intercontinental difference in the mindset here, as to how things may be made and represented. A critical difference between illusionistic representation and material reality.
HC Can you define what art means to you, in 150 characters or less?
CE Art is, without any doubt, the total arc of a life spent studying and practising the form.
HC Describe what your studio space is like.
CE A little over ten years ago I moved down to Bristol from London. Bristol provides a kind of anarchic satellite to London’s muscular capital, still spinning well within London’s orbit, but not playing by all of the same rules.
It’s interesting to note that Britain’s two most notorious artists, Banksy and Hirst, both emanate from here. Bristol has a beautiful, vibrant community of artists, musicians and writers, that makes for a really fabulous scene, where affordable (ish) studio spaces are still achievable within the city limits. I’m no longer sure that London can claim to be able to provide affordable spaces for artists anymore? Not sure…
The space I have today comprises three rooms within a larger house. A quiet basement room for drawing, mostly although not entirely on my digital system. This room also houses my fairly haphazard ‘library’ of books that I’ve collected over the past 30 years or so, along with a tonne of printed ephemera mostly stored in boxes, that combines into a kind of visual catalogue and resource for many of the shows I’ve seen, as well as providing a kind of visual reference, often tangential, for the ideas I’m trying to resolve into new studies.
I also have a separate larger room for printmaking and framing, with racking for completed work, my printmaking equipment, my dad’s old plan chest and a central work table that probably needs to be bigger, my prints are often hanging half on and half off the surface, but it seems to work.
Finally, there’s a beautiful, battered, old Victorian conservatory, heavily bomb damaged in the war, that now serves as a makeshift woodworking and painting space as required. There’s a romance embedded here, which speaks directly to the idea of the artist working in a slightly ruinous old building, a trope which still appeals to me, although less so in the winter!
HC Do you have any routine you follow when you’re creating?
CE Not really. I think the physicality of the space you inhabit probably creates, or can tend to dictate, a particular routine or way of working and making. But if you concentrate hard enough, it should be possible to overcome most of those physical constraints. Opportunities to exhibit, in conjunction with the way the market for art functions, are probably more significant factors in decisions that get made about what should be produced in a particular moment, especially with regard to scale. The market’s desire to use the art fair as an interface between contemporary studio practice and the collector can determine what is shown, and therefore what is made, and as such I’m becoming ever more aware that this is a limiting force that needs to be resisted!
My partner would tell you that if I have the chance to take a day off, I’ll often choose to use it to work instead. There’s some truth in that. As I get older I’m not sure that it’s particularly desirable to try to compartmentalise one’s activity into ‘work’ and ‘leisure’. That perhaps is a notion that relates more to an industrial age that is passing. I think it’s possible to reimagine the home/studio as a place for meditation and activity, to be viewed more as a singular whole, than as individual processes that stop and start. If art offers anything at all, it surely must be the opportunity to focus in on whatever activity seems right in the moment, be that making, studying, reading or travel. It seems to me that there is an opportunity for near total freedom to work and create, as long as you stay busy. There remains an economic cost to being alive that does require servicing, so I haven’t yet encountered the freedom to stand still, but currently, I have no desire to do so. Maybe that will come further on in the process.
I love to get on quietly in the studio, thinking about and making new work, most days, if at all possible. Life gets in the way of course, and as I now also have a patch of ground to tend, I’ve inevitably become a keen gardener, an activity which I think can directly inform artistic practice, and interestingly has done so historically for many artists, I’m thinking of Monet in particular of course who chose specific plants to cultivate prior to painting them and the light on them, in situ, in the garden. Art and nature entwined into a singular vision. In a sense, a whole personal universe reduced to a domestic scale. There are many others too, of course, Conrad Shawcross, Fred Tomaselli and Peter Randall Page all spring to mind as contemporary artists exploring nature and the cosmos through their work.
The idea of creating an ephemeral space full of light and colour in which the seasons, and nature, take a hand in growing and creating what you experience there on any given day, strike me as being entirely analogous with artistic endeavour in the studio too. The two activities seem to mesh into a single, very particular way of thinking and being. It’s about seeing the totality of the whole over time rather than each individual component.
A garden provides both immediate work in the form of tending whatever’s up and in growth today, alongside a longer term view of how to manage and manipulate the essence of the space over the coming years. Planning, curating and developing the space to accommodate that growth as it occurs. I think that this way of thinking is almost entirely in tune with the idea of creating a series of works that build upon and reference each other over a period of time, in which the ultimate endpoint cannot in any way be known at the outset, nor even along the path as you travel. The pleasure and excitement, therefore, lies in the serendipitous events that occur along the way, these events are of course the individual works, as they occur.
One of the many things I love about print, as with plant material, is its relative ephemerality, and to some extent disposability. As the historically poor relation to painting, print has allowed artists to be more experimental in their work. Instead of demanding decades of life in a gilded frame, print has always been more democratic, more avant-garde, more experimental. That isn’t to say that it can’t be collected and treasured of course, merely that as a medium it seems to be quicker to react, fleeter of foot, and more in tune with the now. Think of Banksy’s shredded print in a recent auction, or Shepard Fairey’s work.
It’s a good discipline to work within. As with gardening, whatever your best intentions or desire for longevity, art by its nature is temporal, current, and of the moment. These are its best values in many ways. I love the idea, as with music and literature, that visual art can provide a focus to see where we are now, and where we may be going, to some extent. The great artists seem to be able to almost foretell the future at times, perhaps because at its best, art provides a very pure distillation of individual, singular thought, untrammelled by any brief or marketing strategy.
HC What is your favourite work of art? Why does it inspire you?
CE Yoko Ono’s ‘cut piece’ takes some beating. As an expression of trust, confidence, humility, and just pure humanity, I’ve rarely seen a piece that is stronger or more extraordinary than that. In paint, it would be a tough choice between the colour and clarity of someone like Botticelli, or the printmaking genius of Hokusai.
To be honest it’s a ludicrous question really. How can you possibly choose between an illuminated medieval manuscript and a stellar Ab Ex canvas? A Rothko painting or a Renaissance masterpiece? Art is too wide a category to be able to successfully focus down to a single object, which perhaps brings me back to the Yoko Ono piece, which is comprised of pure thought, of course, there is no object to own, simply an idea about how you may choose to exist in the world, which corresponds beautifully with contemporary thinking about what art is. A system for living, not a set of objects to own. She also seems, specifically with the cut piece, to have pre-empted the #metoo movement by some fifty years?
HC If you could have dinner with any artist, past or present, who would it be and why?
CE Just one? Jean Michel Basquiat would have to be a contender. It kind of depends on whether you’re thinking of this meeting as an informal opportunity to chat, or a chance to attend a lecture! If the latter then to sit and hear Leonardo’s thoughts for an hour would be amazing. If the former then I’d be fascinated to meet any number of contemporary artists working today who have real integrity. Mark Wallinger, Fred Tomaselli, Renzo Piano, Richard Deacon, Santiago Calatrava, the list is endless really…
HC How important are current affairs to your works?
CE I’m endlessly fascinated by politics and current affairs. That said, my interest and study tend towards researching more timeless, fundamental things. I’m really interested in studying how things work, visually and structurally, at a base level. How light, line, colour and form work, and interplay, to create structure, be that natural or manmade. I’m much less interested in narrative art that intends to tell a story, and I have very little time for glib one liners, described pictorially. There needs to be some space left for the viewer to experience and consider their own thoughts and experience in relation to the work.
It has been said that the space between the viewer and the artwork is where the art really exists.
It’s an interesting moment. It seems almost possible that the printed image and the printed word may be subsumed by electronic and screen based representations of imagery and ideas, as the move away from the printed page and printmaking continues. But in contention with this thought, of course, is the human desire to create haptic objects and experiences, which keep us rooted in the physical world.
Much of my current study concerns the interface between the digital and the physical, especially in regard to the production and manifestation of contemporary artwork, paper vs screen, static vs animated, illuminated vs reflective, digital vs analogue, and so on.
It seems increasingly the case that this apparent division is in fact melting away, and that C20th ideas of the real world and the virtual world will in fact hybridise into a more integrated whole, as technology becomes wearable, or even embedded, and ever more closely integrated into our daily experiences.
HC Do you think social media has impacted your career? How so?
CE Massively. Inevitably. Social media provides an incredible platform to disseminate and explore networks of visual content that the old fashioned high street library couldn’t begin to match. An internet enabled screen allows you to lose yourself in the collection of a major museum, or explore a single artist, musician or writer as you see fit. Whole discographies are available at the touch of a button. Google images make available the total visual output of almost every artist, current and historic, and that wealth of data looks set to get richer, more immersive, more detailed and more refined over coming years. It’s an incredible resource. Additionally, social media has allowed makers to promote, display and catalogue their own work, in a way that allows the contemporary artist to become internationally well known in ways that only very few artists in previous centuries could achieve.
HC Do you create your best work independently or when within a community?
CE I think you would have to concede that we are all members of a wide and diverse community, although there are always going to be nationalistic desires to draw artificial boundaries around particular groupings of people, which to my mind are to be broadly ignored. I like the idea that the working artist is a member of a larger group of like minded people, making work, and living within a fundamentally liberal society that values creativity, in a non party political sense. Art school, certainly as I experienced it, seemed in part to be an incubator for the idea of the liberal, free-thinking radicalism that has driven the contemporary art world forward over the past century, albeit with some significant headwinds.
That said, the studio where I work is designed to be quite solitary. I like the idea of quietly getting on, within the larger more industrious setting. So no desire to retreat to the country, but no desire to have too many interruptions either. A calm room within a bustling urban setting seems ideal to me.
HC What advice would you give to upcoming artists?
CE Keep going! Start anywhere. Exhibit widely. Trust your own voice. Make what seems right to you. Don’t worry about critical opprobrium, although do listen to critical advice. Keep practising, that’s the main thing really.
HC Do you love what you do? Why?
CE I don’t think about it in those terms. I actually think making art is quite a hard way to live. There’s no safety net, no salary, and the terrain comes with significant self doubt about the intrinsic value of the work you’re producing, in an intellectual as opposed to a monetary sense. It’s clearly difficult to stay the course. Ultimately the best way to continue working as an artist is by having no Plan B I suspect. If you can’t successfully answer the question ‘what else would I do’ then the logical conclusion is to keep practising until you can answer that question. To date, I haven’t thought of anything that I’d rather be doing. Market gardening maybe!
HC How would you describe your style?
CE I like the idea that the work uses the latest digital tools to explore, and push at the boundaries of the C20th colour space, geometric, op and modernist ways of thinking, by a myriad of artists from the Bauhaus, the Black Mountain College, through the St Ives school, Ab Ex painters, minimalism, the sixties Op and Pop movements, and the sublime work of people like Ben Nicholson, Bridget Riley. Kandinsky and so on.
There seems to be an opportunity to explore denser, ever more sophisticated digital tools for drawing, sculpting and representing colour and form, which haven’t previously been available to us, largely through the ability of computers to process complex multi-layered drawings, both in 2d and 3d, alongside pixel based photographic and paint based imagery. It’s a heady mix.
HC What themes do you reflect on in your work?
CE A lot of the thinking comes from nature, both macro and at scale, from architecture, from physics and engineering, from maths and quantum mechanics, from cosmology, and so forth. The ability of computers to marry the rigour of mathematical and geometric processing, with a painting and drawing capability that allows for pure lyrical abstraction, provides the framework for a lifetime of study.
HC Do you collect art yourself?
CE Of course! Generally by the time-honoured method of swapping works with other artists, especially my brothers who both make art, alongside occasional purchases. Artworks in the home are perhaps the only objects that you are likely to keep and study for your whole life, and as such provide a kind of rudder, just under the waterline, that steers your direction of travel, perhaps fairly subconsciously. I have pictures here that I’ve been living with since my late teens, that continue to engage me almost daily.
HC What inspires you to create?
CE I think we’ve maybe covered this, but in essence, it must simply be the opportunity to explore new ideas, and research them, freely, and to follow that thinking, in an almost synaptic way, to wherever it may lead. The beauty of the position is that you have no idea where you’re going to be next month, next year, the work and the journey unfolds as you travel, in quite unexpected and haphazard ways.
HC What artwork of yours would you like to be remembered for?
CE I’m not at all concerned at the thought of ‘being remembered’. When you’re gone you’re gone I think. Clearly, I’d be delighted if my drawings loiter on in people’s lives for as long as possible of course!
HC What is your quote to live by?
CE Quite a long time ago I stumbled across The Incomplete Manifesto by Bruce Mau, a fantastic designer, thinker and artist. He describes his incomplete manifesto as a system for living, and I think it certainly contains some great thoughts. Of all of them, my favourite might be ‘Stay up late, interesting things happen when you stay up late’. It’s a particularly good thought on a warm summer evening, of course...
HC What are you working on at the moment?
CE Lots of things. I’ve been hugely distracted by making a new website recently, which I’ll launch shortly. It’s an update that will add maybe 1000 images, and a lot more writing, to the previous offering. As we seem to be spending more time online, it seems important to have a good web presence, although it remains a poor substitute for standing in a physical space in front of a real artwork of course. The thrill I got from rounding a corner to be confronted by Chuck Close’s epic self portrait at MOCA in LA can’t be matched by an onscreen representation. Not even close.
I’m also working on several new series of drawings. Unit based, or modular, pieces that can be user configured are something I’m interested in. Allowing the user/owner to configure a number of components to suit their space. I’m also exploring the idea of making more sculptural pieces using multiple monitors to inhabit a space, in such a way that they each become components in a larger study, that animates across multiple screens. To date, it seems to me that the monitor has been broadly seen solely as the frame for a single image or animation, not as a sculptural component in itself. As we move towards more dissemination of imagery on screen, it seems interesting to explore the potential of the hardware to become incorporated into the artwork. To some extent you could compare this idea to the way in which Hodgkin started to overpaint his frames, ultimately making the totality of the canvas and frame into a single indivisible artwork. It seems interesting to see if it’s possible to enmesh the digital drawings and the hardware into a new, singular sculptural form. We’ll see.
And of course, I’m continuing to work on my Experimental Print Club pieces. The club is a vehicle I use to explore smaller, more ephemeral works on paper, that are distributed via a subscription model to club members every three months or so. I like the idea of subverting the traditional idea of the collector buying a piece after viewing it. In the case of the print club, people sign up for the journey and then receive unexpected, unseen artworks, delivered by post quite sporadically. I hope that the pieces in some way align with the day to way work carrying on here in the studio. It’s a very analogue, often quite haptic way of representing the digital workflow in the studio at particular moments in time.