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Holly Hendry

"the cross section gives the inside an edge. It is a cut and slice to learn and reveal."

Could you tell us a bit about yourself? How long have you been a practicing artist and where did you study?

I studied my BA at the Slade School of Art in London, then lived in Newcastle after graduating. More recently I completed my MA in Sculpture at the Royal College of Art in London. I’ve been making things for as long as I can remember but considering the possibility of being a practicing artist came while studying, so I would say that I’ve been a practicing artist since then.

Your sculptures give the appearance of the body/flesh being constricted or cut/sliced through, could you tell us about these works and the inspiration for them?

The thinking and making for these works revolves around edges - architectural edges, body edges, the meeting of edges, the puncture of edges. Edges also relate to the inside and outside of things, skins, messiness and tidiness and when and people’s edges can be interchangeable or porous. In this way, the idea of the edge, to me, defines or outlines where something is – so they’re really about absences and presences through borders. I’m interested in our own edges and this literal or imagined membrane that surrounds us, and other things when these contours shift and morph, or turn inside of themselves.

In my sculptures, such as the Gut Feelings works, the cross section gives the inside an edge. It is a cut and slice to learn and reveal. A lot of the time I use architectural drawings or plans to technically work out the larger sculptures, and I have used motifs from these drawings, and the architectural drawings of my Dad, in some past works. I have also recently been looking at a lot of my partner’s medical books where diagrams show our internal workings or methods of fixing to keep us alive longer. Both the architectural drawings and anatomical cross sections are examples of a segment of a thing. They are turning a 3d object into a 2d image, in the same way ancient remains in a museum may be sliced in half and displayed for us to learn from, and to prove its authenticity.

For my recent work Wrot (shown at BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art) the slice was significant within the entire installation. The work on the whole acknowledges this idea of surfaces and peripheries but I used the cut in a literal sense to slice through the architecture. The cross-sectional layers also referenced archaeology and burial, so all of the objects contained within the layers existed on the flat plane of the cross section - as if they were held within the flatness of the surface. The making is very tied to this, as the works are formed by pouring materials into moulds, so this invisible surface is a trace of this process too, a previous supporting skin that has been removed.

*Wrot,2017 at BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art (c) Mark Pinder*

*Nasothek, 2017 (c) Alastair Philip Wiper*

*Nasothek (detail), 2017 (c) Alastair Philip Wiper*

Tell us a bit about how you spend your day/studio routine? What is your studio like?

My routine is completely dependent on what I am working on at the time, and what that entails. Due to the larger scale of most my works, things are usually made in parts, so I would work on one specific section at a time. A day in the studio can be small tests and drawings, reading and research or it can be hectic pouring or sanding or chopping or pasting. I seem to always work in ways that teeter on the edge of my capability in terms of scale or quantity which is a physical challenge but also a thrill. These sorts of out-of-control processes are at odds with the more reflective studio intervals, where small objects and details are made, and where I draw up spaces on computer programs to attempt to grasp the quality and scale of it. There is a real yo-yoing of macro and micro happening quite physically and mentally.

The studio itself is a hectic collection of moulds and frameworks, chunks of materials and tests, as well as finished works and their corresponding smaller details. Currently I have a wall of jesmonite noses protruding at different heights as company. They were modelled on family members and inspired by the Nasothek collection of plaster noses in the Glyptoteket museum in Copenhagen, which stood opposite the museum where I exhibited the works.

What artwork have you seen recently that has resonated with you?

Philip Guston’s paintings have always felt very significant to me, but recently seeing some of his drawings from the 1970’s had a real gut impact. I think to make simple lines so chunky and weighty while being both hysterical and sinister in their current relevance is incredible.

Where has your work been headed more recently?

Recently I have been thinking about agglomerates and aggregates, barriers, cartoon violence, metal cracks, potholes, big foot, mud, digging and swallowed objects. The work titled ‘Flatbone’ that was part of Wrot at the Baltic feels in line with some my current thoughts, considering positive and negative forms and stacks that are bolted and cut. For this work I had been thinking about materials and flatness - things weathering or being ground down into different shapes by things like the sea, air or humans. The work originated from seeing some medieval ice skates made from cow bones that were found in the London Crossrail dig. This idea of human ingenuity and the impressions we leave.

How do you go about naming your work?

Titles are very important. When discussing my work, I tend to talk about the material processes and back-to-front techniques that happen in order to create the sculptures, but the final results are usually cleaner cut than their backsides or hidden hollows. Considering this and the somewhat sugary appearance of the work, I would hope that the titles add a bit of a muckier side to the work, usually referencing really specific terms, actions or things that tie directly to my research.

Is there anything new and exciting in the pipeline you would like to tell us about?

I will be making a work for ‘The Box’ at Pippy Houldsworth gallery in London, and a larger body of work that will be shown in Berlin later in the year, as well as a public commission in London next year.

www.hollyhendry.com

All images courtesy of the artist
Interview published 01/06/17

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Peter Ashton Jones

"I’m in the studio almost every day, and usually begin the day with two to three hours of thinking, almost as if I’m finding or retracing my way back into a painting.."

You were recently in a group show called "Part II: The Turning World" Curated by Zavier Ellis at CHARLIE SMITH LONDON. Could you tell us about that show?

The show was a three-person show about contemporary landscape painting and included Barry Thompson, Sam Douglas and myself obviously. Zavier Ellis, the Director of Charlie Smith Gallery, came to my studio a while back, just for a nose I think, and I have a vague idea that, although landscape is just one genre I use, (constitutes about a quarter of what I make), the show may have evolved as a result of a conversation we had about a group of landscapes that I had made or that were on the go, something about a tension between a fiction and a realism dichotomy - finding ‘a realism’ through ‘a fiction’. I think Zavier expanded and layered this idea and curated the whole thing, and presented three painters that occupy three very different and distinct positions with regard to landscape painting, and for me, the show did aim to constitute something of a tension between fiction and realism.

Could you tell us a bit about yourself? How long have you been a practising artist and where did you study?

I studied at Kingston University in the mid eighties and have been painting since then. I’ve also worked as a curator, mainly for independent project spaces, and I have written about painting. I founded Turps Banana with Marcus Harvey in 2005 (although I left three years ago), and I also founded the painting gallery The Lion and Lamb (which closed three years ago).

*"Part II: The Turning World", CHARLIE SMITH LONDON 2017*

Tell us a bit about how you spend your day/studio routine? What is your studio like?

I’m in the studio almost every day, and usually begin the day with two to three hours of thinking, almost as if I’m finding or retracing my way back into a painting or paintings. I usually make a body of work of between twelve to twenty paintings simultaneously. Some paintings might be finished or close to being finished and they will influence or define ideas about other paintings that are in progress, which in turn will suggest new paintings. Some days I’ll paint for seven to eleven hours straight without a break, other days I’ll make drawings or just sit and think for hours – it really depends on the developing consciousness of the work.

My studio is at Standpoint Studios in Hoxton, London and I’ve been there for seventeen years. Standpoint, in my opinion, is quite a unique set-up in the sense that it is well run, everyone just gets on with their work, but there is also a lot of humour and friendship. The top sections of my studio walls are covered with drawings that serve the development of ideas for paintings. I have a ‘main’ wall on which I hang the paintings that ‘I’m painting’ and the rest of the paintings that are on the go are hung on other walls as if they are waiting their turn for attention. The scale of paintings varies from twelve inches to six-foot stretchers - in my opinion scale is dictated by content. There are a lot of books in the studio, some on work surfaces, others on the studio floor along with loads of notebooks, sketchbooks of drawings, more drawings and block prints.

*'in that large book that overhangs the earth' 2016*

What artwork have you seen recently that has resonated with you?

For me, resonance is really about what contributes to and extends your thinking at a given time, and in that sense, I look at a lot of painting from many different periods. More specifically though, in terms of what or who I constantly go back to and think about I’d have to say medieval illuminated manuscript paintings, the northern and southern renaissance painters (particularly Breugel and Titian), Degas, Monet, early Cubism (particularly Braque), the late Andre Derain paintings and some of Guston’s paintings. I did see a Neo Rauch show a while back which I thought was disappointing, and the recent Paul Nash retrospective, which I thought was one of the best shows I’ve seen for a while. With regards to particular works that resonate with me, I have to single out Hunters in the Snow by Breugel, The Death of Acteon by Titian and The Painter’s Family by Andre Derain.

Where has your work been headed more recently?

I finished a group of fifty-three paintings about eighteen months ago that took me five or six years to complete. Although most of them have been in shows over the years it has been important to me to see the group as an entirety, almost as if that group defines my range and intellectual and emotional structure. My objectification of what that group of paintings is about propelled me into a new group of paintings that feeds off the collapse of a long-term relationship and the death of my dog Milo last year, and they in turn refer, on an abstract level, to thoughts about the content and pictorial significance of Breugel’s Hunters in the Snow.

How do you go about naming your work?

Naming paintings is very important to me. I constantly remind myself of a quote from Shakespeare, “and gives to airy nothingness a local habitation and a name”. Objectification is always in play. All the titles of the paintings that were in The Turning World show refer to what is depicted, to ‘ the language of the painting’ and to words that might be used to describe a painting, such as The Passage, The Edge, The Field or The Hand Glider. The Passage emphasizes the light and space in the picture. The ‘painting’ in The Hand Glider implies ‘a gliding’ across the surface of the painting and the picture plane, almost as if the picture is suspended ‘within the surface’.

Is there anything new and exciting in the pipeline you would like to tell us about?

Yes, a solo show in October at Emma Hill’s gallery, and The Eagle Gallery in Clerkenwell, London.

charliesmithlondon.com

All images courtesy of the artist and CHARLIE SMITH LONDON
Interview published 01/06/17

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Thom Trojanowski Hobson

"My work is very auto-biographical. I’m a loud, exuberant, emotional and probably exhausting character, and my work will always reflect this."

Could you tell us a bit about yourself. How long have you been a practising artist and where did you study?

I left high school and quite quickly the band I was playing with took off, allowing us to play music together for quite a few years. As all of that came to an end I was left with a bit of a hole in my life. Painting and being creative has always been an intrinsic part of growing up in my family household so applying to study painting at a higher level seemed like a good route to go down. I studied Fine Art Painting, BA at Wimbledon College of Art, graduating in 2015. It was a great school, filled with some brilliant tutors and funny people. The fact that I started when I was twenty-four worked in my benefit, I had already spent some time away from home and had already had my social awakening, meaning I was in the studio most of the time. I was also very aware of how great it was to have a studio and resources readily available, and didn’t want to waste any of that time (or money).

After completing my degree Stevie (my wife) and I moved to Antwerp for greener and cheaper pastures, painting there for a year after which we then came to be in Suffolk. I’m now soon to be thirty and would say that I’ve been thinking about art as a focus for fifteen years now!

You were recently in a group show called "Dumb" Curated by Kristian Day. Could you tell us about that show?

It was a great show, filled with heavy hitters. Some painters which I have been looking at and up to for a while so it was an honour to be hanging in there. It happened at Mercer Chance which is a brilliant non-profit in Hoxton, run by artists for artists.

The show was called “Dumb” which is a word that one of the the other exhibitors, Paul Housley has been playing with in different connotations in relation to painting. In certain examples the word “dumb” is used to describe base materials such as paint and canvas which need to be activated by the intelligence of the artist. I can get on with this. He’s a good painter who I can identify with in terms of his obvious love of Picasso and Guston.

Shit, that Robert Rush painting in the show was a knock-out too! Probably quite an obvious choice for me though.

Your paintings often feature strange/comical figures, could you tell us about these and where your inspiration comes from?

My work is very auto-biographical. I’m a loud, exuberant, emotional and probably exhausting character, and my work will always reflect this. Painting has always been a form of self-help for me, or a way to work out any problem solving that life throws up. Funny and sad - sad and funny.

After finishing my studies at Wimbledon I watched the movie “Mid-night Cowboy” a bunch of times, Loving everything about it. I started to see parallels between Joe Buck’s (the lead) path and my own - country boy moving to a bright new city (Antwerp), thinking he’s going to crack it, living on a crazy busy street filled with busy, crazy people - soon realising that what was once gold is now dust. I’m a theatrical guy, and really like to throw myself into a role. So once I had made these connections I started to try and live my life as “Joe Buck” as possible. It was all really fun.

I’ve put that one to bed after having a solo show which bought together all my ideas and am happy to move on. Right now I’m working on a body of work which is a response and inspired by Drones Club’s new EP. They are old friends of mine so I’m able to talk with them in depth about the ideals that they have in regards to the music they make and what kind of message they want to get across. They are ideas that I’m very much on board with and I’ve found it very rewarding exploring those together with them. We are working on a collaborative show together for the start of June.

Tell us a bit about how you spend your day/studio routine? What is your studio like?

Stevie and I share a studio at Asylum Studios. It’s set on an old American air base which was abandoned after the Cold War. The old buildings, radio station, bunkers etc. have been filled with a mixture of different and weird businesses. Asylum Studios is where a lot of the police work and intelligence operations happened. In fact, between Stevie’s and mines studio is a partition wall with a one-way mirror window set in. It’s where the Americans would hold their interrogations. In the late eighties there was quite a significant U.F.O sighting - it was our studio where the American air men who saw the U.F.O were bought for questioning. It’s a very atmospheric place, old jet fighter planes are strewn across dis-used runways, radio domes and watch towers spike the horizon. Its very close to our house that we live in on the South East coast.

Asylum Studios itself is a co-op run by some brilliant, active and entertaining artists that we now call our friends. Its great to be part of a certain community that makes decisions together and pull each other forward.

Having a partner in the same line of work as yourself is such a bonus - Stevie and I both drive each other. There is a constant support net there if ideas are wavering and you don’t have to twist an arm too hard for a crit!

What artwork have you seen recently that has resonated with you?

If you can call The Louisiana in Copenhagen an artwork in itself then that! Just as a building it was beautiful. The lines, the alluring corridors leading to perfectly framed views of the Scandinavian shoreline and the architecture of the gardens. It was incredible. As a museum - just as great. Whilst we were there we caught an ever poignant Louise Bourgeois show - next door, Asger Jorn! But for current resonant work, the John Kröner show at Gallery Bo Bjerggaard that we caught whilst in the city. It was such an excellent example of incorporating the space into the exhibition, right from the windows of the gallery being left open to let the white chiffon curtains billow in the cold, Danish air to raising the floor through the show so it finally meets the ceiling to create the feeling of a wave of doom! The paintings were fresh and a perfect mixture of comic noir, using techniques which I hadn’t thought about before. He is also a painter who I wasn’t previously aware of so it was all the more exciting.

Where has your work been headed more recently?

I have always had light-play with sculpture, but I think about it more and more. It’s a crazy beast which needs looking at with a whole different eye, which is probably why everything 3-D I’ve made are very much literal reliefs from my paintings. It’s something that I would like to learn more about and be able to use as a vessel for my painting or vice versa.

How do you go about naming your work?

A lot of the Midnight Cowboy paintings were named after one-liner quotes from the film, sometimes translated into Flemish as I was living in Belgium at the time. There’s a lot of lines in that movie which made me chuckle. This most recent body of work I’m making I have named after the song titles from Drones Club’s EP. My work, is figurative, honest and brutal - the titles should reflect that.

Is there anything new and exciting in the pipeline you would like to tell us about?

I’m working with an artist I really love, Jonathan DeDecker, towards a solo show of mine which will be curated by him in an brand new space in China Town, New York. The show will be large scale works on paper which is something I’ve never done before but I’m up for the challenge and feel comfortable in Jonathan’s hands. I’ve worked with him before and trust him. For me the idea alone of China Town excites me enough. It’s totally romantic.

www.thomtrojanowski.com

www.kristianday.co.uk

All images courtesy of the artist
Interview published 01/06/17

Frame 61 6/1/17 Frame 61 6/1/17

Carol Robertson

"Geometry allows me the freedom to channel a myriad of different material. It removes the potential chaos of having too many subject options, yet remains open to sensory or poetic influence."

Could you tell us a bit about yourself. How long have you been a practising artist and where did you study?

I live and work in London and have been a practising artist since 1981 when I completed my MA in Painting at Chelsea School of Art. Prior to that I’d been a BA student at Cardiff College of Art from 1974 to 1978. I knew I wanted to be an artist from an early age… I never had any doubts about going to art school and was quickly drawn towards painting and non-figurative art.

Could you tell us about these repeating geometric forms you create, would you say you are quite obsessed with certain shapes?

Geometry allows me the freedom to channel a myriad of different material. It removes the potential chaos of having too many subject options, yet remains open to sensory or poetic influence. I work with a variety of different geometric formations but it’s true to say I find the circle to be the purest, the most universal of all geometric shapes. I never tire of its associations with art and architecture, with ritual and religion and with the cosmos. I’ve been making circle paintings since the late 1980s and feel sure I will continue to do so for the rest of my life.

Tell us a bit about how you spend your day/studio routine? What is your studio like?

I always walk to my studio, which takes about half an hour. The walking part is important …it clears my head and leaves me fresh for working. I’m lucky that my route takes me mostly off-road, through London Fields and then along the Regents Canal. My studio is in a beautiful 1930s building, owned and managed by ACME, an artist’s studio and housing association, and I’ve worked there for over 20 years. It has a cohort of about 30 artists and my partner Trevor Sutton works there too. He and I have a close dialogue; we visit one another’s studio every day.

I keep the studio tidy and organised… too much disorder interferes with my thought process. I normally work in series, on several paintings at any one time. I start intuitively, by pouring layer upon layer of unstructured liquefied oil paint over the canvas. Adding the meticulous over-painted geometric detail comes later. These combined processes satisfy my need for both chance and order. I try to achieve an atmospheric spatial quality in the grounds so as to create the equivalent of an environmental space in which the geometry can exist. Once the grounds are done, next comes the drawing and then finally the careful over-painting. The colour changes a lot. It’s never achieved in one go, so there’s a discreet physicality in the history of the surface.

*Pointstar, installation shot, Flowers Gallery*

What artwork have you seen recently that has resonated with you?

I’ve just seen Richard Long’s beautiful new installation Earth Sky at Houghton Hall in Norfolk. It’s an impressive experience, seeing his works in the context of formal gardens and parkland and the grand elegance of a Palladian house. His works take simple powerful forms; circles, lines, crosses, made in the most natural way from stone, slate and flint. And here they are made on a huge scale. There is a spectacular red Norfolk carrstone line, 84 metres long and also a giant circle made from fallen estate tree stumps. There are ghostly white pigment cascades poured from the tops of arched loggias on either side of the house and in the central Stone Hall of the house, itself a masterpiece, sits a Richard Long circle, another masterpiece in slate and flint.

How do you go about naming your work?

The provenance of my titles varies: some works are titled descriptively in numbered sequences, such as the recent Star, Ancestral Lines and Quadrille series. Others may record the place where they were made or an important event in my life, or simply offer poetic names that seem to fit their character. Every work is unique… it deserves a name. It’s important to use titles for identification purposes so I never leave finished works untitled.

Where has your work been headed more recently?

I’ve been making circle paintings exclusively for several years so I wanted to diversify by introducing very different geometry. By way of contrast I started exploring sharp pointed geometric formations, which, for no particular reason I have rarely used in the past. Firstly I worked with triangular motifs that quickly progressed into zig-zag chevron formations with a strong heraldic feel. Most recently, as variant of both circle and triangle I’ve started painting stars. Like the sun and moon, stars for me evoke the mysteries of the universe and the heavens: they come laden with inspiration drawn from the beauty and infinity of the cosmos.

From an early age until I was sixteen I studied classical ballet. I was never going to be a great ballet dancer but I enjoyed doing it. It did however provide me with a developed sense of physical spatial awareness that I use to this day. I’m acutely aware of my physical movements in relationship to painting; how my body is set during the act of painting and how the scale of a work affects this. Composition-wise I’ve always had a sense of spatial order and discipline when it comes to proportion and placement. Chevron paintings like Dance acknowledge this and the Quadrille series is named after the square dance famous for its precise steps and figures.

Is there anything new and exciting in the pipeline you would like to tell us about?

I have a solo exhibition Pointstar, presently showing in London at Flowers Gallery, until 3 June. It’s the culmination of two years working on star and chevron paintings. Very large oil paintings on canvas are installed side by side with a series of tiny paintings on board.

I show more star paintings in Life Lines 27 May- 14 July with Galerie Gisèle Linder in Basel. This is a three-person exhibition with works on paper by Trevor Sutton and burnt line wood pieces by the late Roger Ackling, who was one of our closest friends. The show is dedicated to him.

Trevor and I are also working for the first time on a collaborative painting for a show at Cinnabar in San Antonio, Texas in September 2017. Four artist-couples are exhibiting individual works alongside their collaborations. We’ve just started our joint work and it will be interesting to see how well we can combine our imagery and methodologies to make a strong and unified painting.

Carol Robertson: Pointstar is on view at Flowers Gallery, London W1 until 3 June.

www.flowersgallery.com

www.carolrobertson.net

All images courtesy of Carol Robertson, Flowers Gallery London and New York
Interview published 01/06/17