Frame 61September 02, 2020

Henry/Bragg

Frame 61September 02, 2020

“we like to feel it's more like holding up a mirror, a reflection of society.”

Interview with artist duo Julie Henry and Debbie Bragg
by Sonja Teszler

Could you tell us a bit about your backgrounds? Where did you both study art?

Sure. Julie is from Cambridge, worked in electronics and then later in life studied Critical Fine Art Practice at Central St Martins as a mature student. She once appeared on television as a giant mole. Debbie is from the London suburb of Bromley and studied Photography and Electronic Imaging at the University of Westminster. This was a very technical degree and covered the early days of digital photography. She was a raver and spent most of her 20s documenting youth and black music culture. We met while we were still at university studying. Julie was filming a lot at the time and often needed another photographer for stills and the partnership developed from there. We have been working together for more than 20 years.

Your practice deals with various rituals of the slowly diminishing working class – what drew you to your subject, do you have a personal relationship to it?

Yes, we both have a personal attachment to working class culture as its part of our history. We both hail from strong mothers who were single parents so have an understanding of difficult circumstances. The commodification of working-class culture is subject matter we have addressed in the past and one we’re pretty sure we’ll return to. This has featured in many of our previous works but Dyed in the Wool and B.I.N.G.O are probably good examples of big corporations commodifying working class culture. With Dyed in the Wool we invited football fans to design a cardigan representing their team. This was a nod to the cost of being a football fan in this era, with the annual increases in season tickets and overpriced merchandise. The designs were later made into a knitting pattern book enabling fans to knit their own. We felt that we were giving a bit of ownership back to the fans. As part of the B.I.N.G.O project we held bingo sessions in art spaces and invited the local community to attend. Our prizes were bits of modified memorabilia from various bingo halls which had been closed down. One of the bingo sessions was held at the London Art Fair - we had a few complaints because we created a bit of a din. The bingo players were a mixture of the local community from Islington and serious art collectors. It was great fun.

You work mostly with film and photography, which are perhaps the most direct mediums of storytelling and evoking empathy – what’s your goal with bringing video projects like these into art spaces?

We do primarily work in film and photography as we both like the immediacy, however we have ventured into other areas in the past and would definitely consider other media if we felt the subject matter suited it. In past projects we have included knitting for Dyed in the Wool, performance for B.I.N.G.O. and Absence of Evidence, electronics in our Rosie Rosie bingo lingo machine and software programming for the projection Edge of Chaos lottery number predictor. So although photography and film are areas we are very familiar with, it’s always exciting to explore other ways to realise the work. Our goals have always been pretty much the same, wherever the work has been placed. Be it in a gallery space or on a TV on top of a pile of rubbish at the side of the Regent’s Canal, as was the case for our film The Surrey Hills, we want people to engage with the work. Is it a comment on society? Probably yes, but we like to feel it's more like holding up a mirror, a reflection of society.

We love film and video as an art form. It’s a really accessible tool to be able to capture a narrative immediately. Our film Going Down is about the elation or misery every football fan experiences each game, encapsulated into one and half minutes. The same with X, where a video game player conquers the world in 7 minutes; you don’t necessarily need a great long narrative to explain the passion. We also like to explore different techniques. The Surrey Hills is a film about a landfill site, composed of thousands of still images, so it looks like stop motion with dinky toys. And the films don’t need to be shown in a traditional way - showing The Surrey Hills on a fly-tipped TV was a novel way to get the message across about our waste problem.

With some of your projects like “One Night in Benidorm” or “Three Minute Heroes” where you’re participating in the subculture and activities of your subjects, is your experience more akin to a Louis Theroux- style neutral voyeur or do you feel like you’re entirely a part of their world? Have you ever hit any challenges or barriers with connecting to these environments?

We’re laughing at remembering One Night in Benidorm as we were definitely part of the party, as the blurry photos at the end of the night will testify. We had previously been to Benidorm for a holiday to celebrate a friend's (big) birthday and we loved it. So we decided to go back to take some images. One of the main revelations was its democratic approach to fun. In all of the venues there was no age barrier, you could be 18 or 80 years old, everyone mingled together, and there was zero dress code, you could be decked head to foot in sequins or come dressed as a banana, it really didn’t matter. The only requirement was to have a good time. We were so taken with this inclusive approach, we wanted to capture it. People loved being photographed, and got us to dance and put gnome hats on us, and we must have given over our cameras quite a bit as there are LOADS of pictures of us with various revellers. Top top night.

In the case of Three Minute Heroes, we’d been to many pub gigs over the years, so we were familiar with being part of the audience. Julie’s partner is in a punk band so we had been unpaid roadies countless times. We decided to focus on punk bands that originated in the 70’s. Punk was always seen as subversive, and historically, challenged the system. With the recent political upheaval brought about by a divided Brexit vote, it seemed to have echoes of this social unrest. We were curious to find out what still motivates people to continue performing decades later, especially if they’d had little critical or commercial success. We wanted to know if they still held the same ideals and passions and still had radical things to say. The answer was an overwhelming yes. We discovered that despite age people still needed to find a way to express themselves and, in this case, although it might not always have the same amount of audience, the passion definitely doesn’t diminish. For filming, we used a very discrete 360 camera and we didn’t interfere with the action. The main problem was trying to keep the camera still whilst everyone was pogo’ing around us.

In the age of globalization and the virtual, your practice explores various ways to rediscover a nostalgic connection to the local and the interpersonal (such in "Pigeon Service"). Could you explain the ideas behind this?

Nostalgia has been mentioned before and there is an essence in our work of capturing something before it completely disappears. Not that we think that there’s anything wrong with progress, even though it is a bit of a double-edged sword. Technology has touched every area of our lives with incredible advances in medicine, infrastructure and communication. But it also has huge drawbacks. We are drowning in images and data and many of our relationships are now conducted virtually.

We were invited to take part in a group show called Interface that focussed on technology. As we both have a bit of a science background, we were tempted to build some sort of wizardry gadget but decided on looking at the past instead. We started researching how we shared information pre-telecom days. This led us to spending some time with the curator at Bletchley Park and we discovered some amazing facts about carrier pigeons. They were integral to the war effort, delivering important tactical information. We looked at the stats of how many pigeons we would need per person to deliver the current flow of messages should there be some sort of catastrophic internet failure. We pondered over if they might contain messages such as, I’m running a bit late, hashtag sad face! Which is why we decided to create our own pigeon messaging service for the Interface show. We invited gallery goers to write down the last message that they received on their phones and then had an on-line poll (oh the irony) to decide the winner. They then had their message sent by a pigeon. Most of the messages were very banal and uninteresting and not worthy of a pigeon carrier, which was basically the point. Although some were very touching and poignant and made us question our assumption that all our constant messaging was worthless, when actually it was quite nice we were sending positive affirming messages to each other. The winning message was “I’m just finishing this pint. I’m with Colin and Karen”. A worthy winner.

*Three Minute Heroes, Fuck You, 2019 (Film Stilll)*

In “Why I’m Not Talking to White People About Race”, British author Reni Eddo-Lodge dedicates a chapter to Race and Class. She describes why it can be potentially harmful to put the term “white” in front of “British working class” and how that remains common a association with the phrase both socially and politically. As a collective who’s work engages with working class culture, do you have any experience or thoughts about that?

We agree that it can be potentially harmful to talk about the “white” working class. We feel that a lack of wealth brings about a lack of choices and this is experienced by many working-class people, of all ethnicities. We have never defined this to one particular group as we think this applies to all people affected by poverty. This is why we have highlighted certain areas that are clearly identified as working-class pursuits, such as football and bingo. Activities like these which have been enjoyed by working class people for many years but have now been commodified to the point that working-class people are at risk of being excluded. What we have also found is that excluded people without the means to access the consumerist and social offers, will create their own. Or when their niche falls out of fashion like the soul scene did for the participants in Out of Time or the punk scene did for Three Minute Heroes, the scenes continue, driven by DIY enthusiasts and participants. The people who are on the margins of mainstream society are pushed out of necessity into their own particular brand of creativity and these expressions are as worthy of consideration and highlighting as those that hang in galleries, fill stadiums or are broadcasted on mass consumed media.

It’s increasingly hard to get on in life if you start at a place where you haven’t much money. Julie had a challenging and difficult childhood, much of it spent in foster care. The opportunities are becoming less and less for people, especially now there is no longer free education at a higher level, which we were both lucky to be recipients of. We were recently commissioned by a charity to take images for a report they were putting together highlighting the issues around multiple disadvantage, so we are aware of the disparities in society and how this affects people from an ethnic background. There is a distinct lack of opportunity for social mobility which is unfair and unequal and needs addressing. The area of race and discrimination is something we are very interested in and may well touch upon in future projects. Our job as artists is to ask just these sorts of questions.

Your “Absence of Evidence” project is a very powerful and sensitive work – can you talk about this and your experience of working with the participants?

Absence of Evidence was a very different way of working for us. We normally spend quite a bit of time with the people involved in our projects and see them as co-participants, but with Absence it was the first time we had fully collaborated with another group, An Untold Story - Voices, formed of former street sex workers. We normally have a political or social theme which underpins our work, but this time it was outright political, directly addressing a law used in Hull in the North of England to target street sex workers. It was inspiring to work with a group of people who had already done so much to try and bring about some sort of cultural shift in the community where they lived. They were all very proactive at every stage of the creative process and it was a great partnership with learning from both sides. We gave the women cameras and went together on a journey around the places they used to work and where serious violent crime against street sex workers had taken place. Collectively, we wanted to use art as a platform to share the women’s stories and to continue the conversation they had started about gender-based violence and the decriminalisation of sex work. The pandemic had shut all the galleries so we chose to use billboards, bus stops and street posters to show the work, including in Soho, traditionally regarded as the red light district area in London. This turned out to be a great way to get the message out there, on the street where everyone can see. We also held silent walking exhibitions in Hull, Kings Cross and Soho, with 14 women and allies holding 14 prints for 14 minutes to honour the 14 sex workers that died in Hull. These were very moving and empowering occasions.

We got quite a bit of media coverage for Absence, including a feature in The Guardian, and lots of debate online, which is just what we hoped for.

*Absence of Evidence, Two Little Boys, 2019, Shoreditch, London 2020*

*Absence of Evidence, Hessle Foreshore, 2019*

*Absence of Evidence, Shed Gone Back, 2019*

*Going Down, 1998, J Hammond Projects, 2018*

Do you have any else in the pipeline, any upcoming shows you would like to tell us about?

We have just concluded our Absence of Evidence exhibition but we have given our collaborators a set of outdoor prints and they are planning more performances with them around the country, and we are looking forward to continuing to support them.

We do have some new ideas. One of the ideas we keep coming back to is football at a lower non-league level. We see football as a microcosm of society, how the premier league has gone beyond silly now in terms of wealth and how that is distributed amongst the few elite clubs and the rest just get the crumbs. We would like to look at clubs like Clapton CFC, who have a much more inclusive community feel and once you are engaged with that as a fan you feel a much bigger sense of belonging. We would like to investigate this. We are personally disaffected by our own premier league clubs that we have supported all our lives. It's so expensive to go to a match, to even watch it on the telly. There is this exclusion there, a disconnect. We want to look at the lower league clubs, their fans, and their desire for social mobility up the footballing ranks.

We do have a show coming up but with Covid it keeps getting postponed, so who knows. It was to show our 360 punk film Fuck You in a toilet in a gallery Nottingham. (We are not even joking). We are looking at interesting ways to show this film, as you do get the immersive experience of being in the mosh pit at a punk gig and it’s going to be a long time before we experience that sort of gig again in real life.

We also have some punk posters about to come out in support of small live music venues like our favourite venue The Dublin Castle in Camden. These are being printed on an old Risograph machine, similar to those used to print punk fanzines back in the day. These will be on our website soon.

And we have range of T-Shirts and Tote Bags to aid social distancing (Please Keep Your Fucking Distance). So it’s basically merch all the way.

Artist’s Website

Instagram

absenceofevidence.co.uk

All images are courtesy of the artists
Date of publication: 02/09/20