Some questions for Laurence Elliott

One artist that caught my attention at this years' Modern Alchemists exhibition was Laurence Elliott. A graduate of Glasgow School of Art, his captivating paintings are a self-deprecating saga of life events and political and social subtext. I wanted to ask him a few questions about his work - below is the correspondence. Laurence's portfolio is available here.
 

'As above, so below' by Laurence Elliott

 

Ruth Hitchens: Is there a rigid process to your work? Do you follow any sort of cursory procedure in order to create paintings?

Laurence Elliott: I basically do what I think most painters and illustrators do. I have an idea and try to keep it as visually simple as possible, but I'm following 11 years worth of tailored new years resolutions which mean that there's more readings there for anyone who pays proper attention and for me to be thoroughly entertained during the sometimes many years struggle to birth these things. 

I try to draw everything on poor quality paper in marker pens, so that I'm left with dots where my hand pauses. I find this very helpful because it means the work can be farmed, combined, etc. [see below.] I always try to have a few drawn versions of anything before I'll think of painting anything. It rarely works the other way round. It has to be funny & serious. I test them out in a range of drugged, low blood sugared and drunken states, to see if I was lying on any level and to see if they'll inspire lyrics. I've got to get my kicks, or how the hell can anyone else!?!

 

'We all fight the grief' by Laurence Elliott

 

R.H: In your portfolio you mention plundering source material from everywhere, are there any particular places or people that have become a part of your work?

L.E.: Of course. I collect a true current crime magazine from Glasgow called the digger and try to find images of the gang that tried to kill my flatmate that God helped me stop and eventually get the money for this laptop. My friend James Dick is a brilliant portrait painter, so when he heard of my fight with the law over my attempted murder, he willingly gave me photographs of Glasgow's procurator fiscal. I use old photographs of myself and family. Myself, because I like the idea of documenting the decay & fall of a 'golden boy'. 

I collect pictures of Jordan's family, real people magazine, Jade Goody & TV drama actors, particularly Ian Beale at Pauline's funeral.
 

R.H.: How was art school? Did you feel the need to shake the experience off when you graduated?

L.E.: Art school was brilliant for finding the people I needed to know. It's an industry. I want to teach because I know my stuff and imagine it'd be mutually beneficial. When I was in 2nd year (3rd in Scotland), Transmission gallery put me in a group show which meant all the other ambitious collegues of mine turned on me with some real venom. When I realised that I'd probably never be able to pay my loan back because of taking it all very seriously and also in jest, there were things I wanted to shake off, but there's a lot I miss about it.

'Crossing the brook' by Laurence Elliott

R.H.: How has this year compared to previous years in your practice? Where can you see it going?

L.E.: This year was good for making work, and it was the latest. Thats all I can really say. I need a studio and have just gone self-employed, aiming to screen print hoodies and t-shirts and make money from several chasm's I see in the market. I've got favours to call in from various publications. When Xmas is over and I've done all the paperwork I need to do, get a studio and paint again. I've been concentrating on getting my new zine book together and preparing a lot of drawings to become print. Writing songs. It will go further, but I expect many more years crippling poverty. But am REALLY PSYCHED & PUMPED about what I plan to do.

R.H.: What's your outlook for the future of painting and fine art?

L.E.: Such a lot obviously depends on the economy. I just want people to be serious about their fun in this field. For years I've been aching and wishing for the most extreme form of everything mutated together in a dirty rich broth. That nourishes the soul and sense of humour. It's what my efforts have been based around for a long time. Technologically speaking I think it could be really exciting with new print technologies, techniques and methods, holograms and projected sounds so a few individuals think they're going nuts & act up.
I want the wars to stop, especially the war on drugs and that money put into culture. If that happens, it'll be really thrilling but I think people swallow the towed line waaaay too easily and the power is vain and proud and not really concerned, I feel.
 

With thanks again to Laurence for his time, I'll be interested to see what follows.

Phil Collins at Artes Mundi 5: Critical review

Out of the seven artists nominated for this year’s Artes Mundi prize, Phil Collins is the only Brit on the shortlist. However, his endeavours are as international as any other, as shown by the work he has produced for the exhibition, and his profile as an artist. Collins has shown work across Britain, Europe, Australia and the US and shows no sign of slowing pace.

The Cardiff-based prize is in its fifth year, having established itself as a visual arts initiative aiming to “provide an opportunity for wider discussion of the role of artists in society.” Other artists represented in the prize this year are Teresa Margolles, Tania Brugera, Miriam Bäckström, Apolonija Šušteršic, Darius Mikšys and Sheela Gowder. The works on show span enormously in their formal differences, however a thread of social engagement runs through all of the selected pieces. Collins’ part in Artes Mundi is perhaps one of the more traditional - if such a term still applies - forms of contemporary visual art.

Born in Cheshire, the now Berlin-based artist has put forward two pieces for the prize, installed across two sites: free fotolab is an automated slide projection based in the contemporary gallery of the National Museum Wales, and This Unfortunate Thing Between Us (otherwise abbreviated to TUTBU) is a video installation at Chapter Arts Centre in Cardiff.

Free fotolab began in 2004 as a curatorial project in Milton Keynes. Collins offered a service to the public to develop their 35mm films in exchange for the right to use them any way he saw fit. This element of voyeurism is crucial to the work; without it, Collins is just a lab technician at Jessops (as he once was).  The project went on to expand and exhibit across Europe, and the resulting slide installation in the Museum is a culmination of years of processing, analysing and archiving.

The premise of free fotolab is to question the reproduced image; Collins is probing the boundary between the ownership of these images and the exploitation of the subjects within them and their original creator. They are surrendered to Collins willingly by the original author, to be appropriated as he sees fit, therefore the slideshow before us is not made up of covert or found photographs, but of images selected for a special purpose. Accordingly, the images presented in free fotolab are evidence of the beauty of the snapshot and perhaps even the fragility of human interaction. As an audience, we marvel at the mystery of them: who took the photograph, where and when it was taken, why was it selected? These questions shroud the piece in a nostalgic presence, which at best appeals to aesthetic conventions, but may be considered to conceal the meaning of the piece.

Accompanying free fotolab for Collins’ entry is This Unfortunate Thing Between Us, a two-part recording of a scripted teleshopping channel, broadcast in Berlin last year on live television. The recordings are shown on screens in two caravans parked outside Chapter. TUTBU tv is a parody of consumerism, where the viewer has the option to purchase one of three ‘life experiences’: the chance to be interrogated, Stazi-style, on live television; to play a part in a period-drama sex scene; or to wake up on your deathbed and tell your loved ones exactly what you think of them.

It makes for compelling viewing. Beneath the comedy and quirkiness of the actors’ garish costumes and wigs, there is an underlying sense of commercially-tinted unease. Collins’ dissection of the teleshopping format brings the issue of modern desire to question in an explicit and demanding way. Although it seems that there is no clear, forceful message through the piece, the viewer is undeniably made to consider his or her own agenda in relation to it.

Of the two pieces, TUTBU is probably the more revealing of Collins’ motives as an artist; his practice is highly referential to popular visual communication and in particular, the television programmes which utilise reality in their production inform the work in several ways. We are confronted with a hyper-real version of the everyday, prompting a heightened consciousness of our own lives. Now Phil Collins asks: is this what we have become? More specifically, he asks: how does the camera produce us? By using television as a way to propose opportunity, Collins engages with the notion of communication as an art form. This is nothing especially new to the arts scene, and Collins has been leading to this for several years, however the platform on which the work is distributed offers a different way of thinking through seeing. In the work we discover ourselves, and our own experience of human joyousness, suffering, indifference - Collins does not put a name on it, but offers us its meaning instead.

The key motive that forms the basis of his work is the investigation of human behaviour under the influence of contemporary media. Speaking recently at the Artes Mundi conference at the National Museum, Collins revealed a little more about the works: “snapshots were referred to in derogatory terms but they were remarkably beautiful to me … the centrality of an object which holds an account of memory [is] related to trauma and life experience. What are the modes of address in which we record emotional landscape?” It appears that Collins, as an artist, is oriented towards the mediums that document life itself.

Regardless of winning the £40,000 prize awarded for Artes Mundi, it appears that Collins will inevitably gain a wider audience through his populist approach. Screening TUTBU live on German television has made him a name in the arts scene there, and with the Artes Mundi prize coinciding with the more recognised Turner prize this year (which he was once short listed for) perhaps this will be a year to remember for Phil Collins.