Interview with the Art(1st)

Can you name a moment when a contemporary artist has really inspired you?
Yes, it was when I had our first child and I went to a gallery and was trying to find something I could relate to, and I saw this piece by Mary Kelly about her little boy starting nursery. It was her recording of his words and daily life. She was quite obsessively documenting his first days, and I just thought ... it's so brave, so radical, so heart-felt. It made me think this kind of art really is important. It's part of life and I'd rarely seen it so succinctly put. By contrast I remember some really unbeautiful photographs of women having just given birth strapped up with sanitary towels and blood dribbling everywhere and it was like they were trying to make it look like a bloody battle. The Mary Kelly work ... it was just so much more profound than that.
What is the principal theme of your work?
I suppose nurturing. Yes, nurturing. A kind of motherhood. I see my work as inherently feminist, though.
Are these themes under-represented today?
Well ... (laugh) ... I think my version is.
Would you like your children to be artists?
I wouldn’t be able to stop them.
Do you think artists need to go to art school?
Yes. I think they do. Definitely. It’s a way of questioning things. A way of learning to deal with things like criticism. You do have to be answerable to your work sometimes, and to your influences. But if it’s a great time, it can also be a very difficult time. I was pretty much left in a studio and just told to get on with it, which is better than it sounds because you then did something you really believed in. Quite a few people were having nervous breakdowns around the place, though, and there wasn’t much back-up for things like that, not much of a safety-net.
What is your favourite work of art?
Oh, I know exactly what it is ... it's this. (swiftly producing postcard bearing image of The Painter’s Daughters chasing a Butterfly by Thomas Gainsborough.) It symbolises to me a kind of complete innocence, a wonderful spontaneity. The older girl is slightly protective of the younger one and ... it's just the peachiness of the skin, the translucence, and the way the older one is holding back and more informed. I really love the way the dresses are painted and the linking of hands and the light travelling across. Oh and the fact we know now one of them had such a problematic life later on. And of course the whole thing's quite manufactured, very staged. The butterfly. He painted a dead one. No, the whole thing, it's ... really joyous to me.