Dorothy Feaver talks to Ann-Marie James about her recent work.
Dorothy: In Limited Means, you measured out the lifespan of a biro over a series of ten drawings. The drawings are painstaking. How long did they take?
Ann-Marie: From start to finish, the series took just over three months to complete.
And you have talked about the project addressing a general idea of lifespan, but of course the process of making the work took up that specific chunk of time. The process mirrors the subject. I suppose you could begin to look at any complete artwork as a measuring tool for the time it took to make. In this way once an artwork is complete it has come the end of its active life; the life is in the making process. This is a rather sad thought – macabre even…
I agree, though once complete the work can begin a life of it’s own. Most artists aim to make works that continue to function in their absence, and once the artwork is complete, it can become an element another creative practice – that of the curator. I am keen to curate exhibitions myself, but it’s perhaps more interesting to surrender my work to a third party – the work becomes an element of a broader conversation, and is open to interpretation and reinterpretation and sometimes misinterpretation, all of which are very interesting.
What about unfinished work? How do you feel about abandoned projects – because they, in a sense, are the ones that are still alive… what’s your policy on self-editing, or destroying old work? (I just threw something of my own into Michael Landy’s Art Bin, so this is on my mind).
It’s a fluid and often subconscious process, I don’t often destroy things, but I have notebooks full of abandoned ideas – some of them are terrible and should never see the light of day, and some of them have at their core something interesting to them but have yet to find their most appropriate form of expression. I never throw my notebooks away, and it’s interesting to see the core of a once discarded idea later resurface in a completely different form. Self editing is often more like a very slow process of digestion.
And did you keep the Limited Means biro? Do you go in for collecting/hoarding?
Yes and yes! I keep absolutely everything, much to my husband’s dismay. I recently cast the biro from Limited Means in plaster.
So the biro has a future with you?
Absolutely, the blue Bic Orange Crystal Fine is my weapon of choice.
The Bic biro is also the everyman pen, and that complements your source, that most universal of anatomical studies: Gray’s Anatomy. And yet, I think these drawings are very you. Were you trying to get away from the personal? Could this series be seen as a self-portrait?
I abhor the idea of making work with a first-person confessional narrative, and yet in spite of myself I am sure that this work is very much a self-portrait. I expect the less personal you try to be the more you inadvertently reveal, and that all works of art are, in some sense, a portrait of the artist.
Are some works more self-portraits than others? Are these the works you find yourself more attached to?
I have favourites, but they change constantly. Sometimes I am most satisfied by the compositions that turn out exactly as planned, other times works surprise you – happy accidents through which you end up with something that you wouldn’t have anticipated. I suppose the work I am most drawn to at any given point is at that point the most accurate self-portrait, like a kind of self imposed Rorschach test, if that makes any sense.
Definitely, although your drawings are too garnished to be mistaken for something scientific. The indigo ink and gothic patterns bring to my mind tattoos – the popular way of transforming the body on the outside. Was that on your mind at all? How do you rate tattoos? Would you ever get one?
This is something that other people have mentioned to me a lot, I agree there is about the line work that would lend itself to tattoos. Tattoos are very interesting to me. I have yet to find a willing victim for a work called The Uncertainty Principle – a tattoo in 2 parts, one to be worn by the artist and the other by the owner of the work. Both tattoos illustrate Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle, which states that the more precisely one property is known, the less precisely the other can be known. In this work I seek to explore the symbiotic relationship between ‘the artist’ and ‘the collector’, and the tattoo is an interesting medium with which to do that.
We used to draw tattoos on our arms with biros at school, in the lessons that really dragged. I used to like copying drawings of plants in science lessons, and eco-systems were fun to colour in, you could put in a lot of detail. Did you get gripped by science? How did Gray’s Anatomy come into your life?
My interest in anatomy came more from life drawing than from school – at school our biological drawings were far too removed from the body and from anatomy – we drew neat flow charts and reductive line drawings to indicate function rather than contemplating form, and our perception of our internal organs was as clean and as divorced as possible from their physical reality. I took life drawing classes at my local adult education centre when I was about sixteen, and there was a male model that brought along ropes, which he would loop around the pipe-work in the classroom so that he could flex and hold muscles for us to draw. Life drawing classes and books on anatomy were something that I sought out for myself again once I had left art school, as anatomy is not really taught any more.
Did you take anything away from all the staring at Gray’s textbook – are you more aware of which bone fits where? Would you know how to deal with a slipped disc or broken elbow?
Unfortunately not! In isolation – and particularly in photographs or in reproductions such as those in Gray’s text – bones and organs and muscle structures can be quite beautiful and make for fascinating elements of a composition. But faced with an actual sucking chest wound I’m sure I would be quite useless.
Well our insides are mysterious; your drawings are very precise though, while the arrangements are doing weird and wonderful things. They unite the illusion of control that measurement brings and the beautiful chaos that it is trying to counter.
Thank you! I’m really interested in the tension between control and expression, order and chaos – it’s something that I’m exploring at the moment in a series of works in biro and oil paint on board, and I’m very excited about pushing it further.
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Ann-Marie James | Danse Macabre is on show at First Floor Projects.
Open Thursday to Saturday 12-6pm, or by appointment until 13th February 2010.
