Saatchi Magazine Interview: Phoebe Unwin

(Originally published in Saatchi Online Magazine)

Phoebe Unwin is an artist who revels in the use of paint, in all its tones, textures and applications. Her paintings take as their subjects the everyday familiar (bananas, a key, a man holding flowers) which she chooses to depict from recollection and imagination rather than observation from life or photographs. Then what happens when she hits the canvas is the conjuring of a world of expressive colour and mark marking, a remembered reality swathed in magical colour combinations, shapes, patterns and textures that render the world we know afresh. Such is the appeal of her work that Unwin has recently featured in both the Saatchi Gallery’s Newspeak and the Hayward Gallery’s British Art Show as well as staging a solo exhibition at Wilkinson Gallery. In July Unwin hosts a talk at Core Gallery in Deptford, but in the meantime she took some time out to talk about her practice and the process behind her continually evolving, highly regarded body of work.

You have some sketchbooks here, how do you use them?

PU: They’re somewhere where I start to work out particular combinations of form, colour, mark. Some of the images are completely abstract, although they never are completely abstract in my paintings. Then some of them are much more recognizable images. They all live together here. There might be an element of say a page of an idea that I then develop into a painting, and that might be a week later or two years later. The basis of the work is a combined approach in a way, it’s very intuitive at the beginning and then the formal qualities, especially in the process of making the painting become very important. 

It’s a reference tool, storage for your ideas.

PU: Yes, it’s very much a reference tool in that it’s somewhere to refer to that feels really close to first instinct. But it’s a longer process until it becomes a painting, there are other things that come into play, because the paintings for instance are all different scales, whereas these books are always the same size.

Another thing about working in the books is that I use a lot of different papers and a lot of different materials and those elements also get translated into the paintings in the sense that I use many different types of materials, I’m not working just with oil or acrylic, there’s a whole range. One of the main reasons for this is really the qualities of colour, because I feel that a colour in a particular paint will be different in another paint, the difference between a spray-paint mark and the colour and maybe the opaqueness of that colour in spray-paint is different to oil paint.

New writing for FAD: Nathan Cash Davidson at Hannah Barry Gallery

I'm now Moving Image Editor at FAD - www.fadwebsite.com - and here's my first review...



Nathan Cash Davidson has youth on his side and his energetic vaulting from oil painting to poetry via rap and now video installation by way of Renaissance painting, Alan Sugar, mythology and YouTube (to name a few influences) is, frankly, dazzling. He garnered a lot of favourable attention recently for mounting a solo painting show at Parasol Unit aged only 22, and is now at Hannah Barry Gallery with his latest video installation, Feather That Boa An Email.

In a darkened cinema space in the gallery’s Bond Street branch, Cash Davidson screens 24 of his YouTube mash ups – short films in which he’s taken video footage freely available on the site then cut it, looped it, stretched it, jammed it, married it to a completely different soundtrack and generally riffed with it before feeding it back into the site via his own channel... (read more)

New writing for Aesthetica: review of Barbara Kruger's The Globe Shrinks at Sprüth Magers

There’s a game children play when they want to enrage their siblings; that of repeating verbatim everything the other says. Maintained to a suitably relentless level, this method of throwing someone’s utterances straight back in their face is passive-aggression at its most potent, with humiliating and infuriating results.

Over the course of her career as a visual artist, Barbara Kruger has enacted something akin to this in her work, drawing on the crisp imagery and pithy language from her days on magazine editorial to pitch consumerism, sexism and other unsavoury cultural mores right back at the viewer. ut intriguingly, rather than provoking the wrath that childish repeating games guarantee, Kruger has managed to maintain her place as part of the mainstream that she skewers. Her striking monochrome images, dashed with red and bearing deadpan slogans like ‘I shop therefore I am’ and ‘Buy me I’ll change your life’ are so slick she even sold them to Selfridges as advertising... (read more)


Follow the Aesthetica Magazine blog at http://aestheticamagazine.blogspot.com/

Dazed Digital Interview: Maxime Angel at Centre for Recent Drawing

In the entrance to her upcoming solo show, artist Maxime Angel is creating a walk-in art work: a hand drawn pencil mural across flattened cardboard boxes covering the walls from floor to ceiling that will, by the time the show officially opens, be a fully immersive introduction to her intensely beautiful work. Fascinated by sexuality and mortality, Angel is not afraid of divulging the personal in her work and has cultivated a body of drawings that are inscribed with her life, both in terms of content and the way in which they bear imprints of the artist’s presence... (read interview)

Saatchi Magazine Interview: Margaret Harrison & The Girls at Payne Shurvell

Feminism was a dirty word, or at least made for some obscene art, when Margaret Harrison put on a one woman show in 1971. Her beautifully rendered drawings of Captain America complete with boobs and stockings and Hugh Hefner dressed as one of the bunnies he so adores were deemed indecent by the police and promptly whipped off the walls. With forty years between then and now, Harrison is showing these works again along with new pieces, joined by The Girls (Andrea Blood and Zoe Sinclair) with a new static performance piece. Bridging the revealingly narrow gap between second wave feminism and contemporary feminist issues, Harrison and The Girls bring the f-word out of the annals of history to the pole-dancing-as-liberation generation. Together they sat down to discuss their work and inspiration…

Margaret Harrison: I’d been invited by a gallery to show some work and actually they gave me a little stipend, which was amazing because the market wasn’t great. They didn’t see all of my work until the show was put together, but it was fine except that the police apparently went into the gallery the day after it opened and warned the gallery director that it should come down otherwise they would take it down. By the time I arrived it was down, I couldn’t believe it... (read more)

Dazed Digital Interview: Sam Holden at Moves 11

As someone well acquainted with the slick imagery of newspaper supplements and style mag spreads, photographer Sam Holden knows exactly which is your good side. But glossy falsity held no lasting fascination for Holden, whose work as a video artist deliberately deconstructs the premeditated pose, taking portraiture into the moving image and seeing how it, and we react. Holden’s film Focus No.1 has been selected for Moves 11 in Liverpool this April and May; a festival that brings together the most exciting video art and experimental film in a challenging and boundary-pushing programme. Ahead of the festival, Dazed caught up with Holden to talk about his work… (read interview)

ArtSlant Review: Nancy Fouts at Pertwee Anderson & Gold

Reminiscent of a 16^th century cabinet of curiosities, Nancy Fouts’ Un-think presents a collection of curios manufactured by the artist to throw our ingrained view of everyday things, especially those from nature, thoroughly off kilter.

Taking us back to a time when collectors would gather stuffed exotic birds, pictures of deformed people or strange foreign artifacts to delight at the freakishness and strange, Fouts re-invokes a sense of the uncanny as she rolls out this plethora of whimsical and darkly humorous pieces. As the exhibition unfolds, it’s hard not to entertain a macabre, excited anticipation of what’s going to happen next... (read more)

ArtSlant Review: Wim Wenders at The Haunch of Venison

Wim Wenders’ photographs are like establishing shots; the wide angle images at the beginning of film scenes that locate the action to follow. This is no surprise since they were taken as the filmmaker scouted for locations in countries including Brazil, Japan, Italy, Germany and the US, taking the roads less traveled to seek out the enigmatic, evocative places that haunt these large scale images.

The forty photos, spanning 1983 to 2011, play out over the walls of the Haunch of Venison like a road movie, taking in a vast Japanese urban sunset in Onomichi Sunset (2005), a corner of contemporary America that still looks like an Edward Hopper painting in Street Corner in Butte, Montana (2003), and an empty al fresco cinema with bright orange rows of unoccupied seats in Open Air Screen (2007)... (read more)

ArtSlant Review: Hybridity & Mutation at The Old Truman Brewery

This vibrant gathering of works from 13 emerging and mid-career artists addresses the very prescient fact that change is the only constant. Taking a quote from Ovid’s Metamorphoses as a springboard – “nothing in the entire universe every perishes… but things vary, and adopt a new form” – the show investigates how this state of continual flux and the rethinking that ensues can be captured and articulated through the form and context of art.

The responses here come more in the form of installation, sculpture and video rather than painting or drawing, with many of the artists taking a biological stance on the subject... (read more)

The Old Truman Brewery, 4 Wilkes Street, London E1 6QL
March 29 to April 17 2011

ArtSlant Review: Ida Applebroog at Hauser & Wirth

When she paints, Ida Applebroog treats the canvas like a three-dimensional object, a structure that she annotates with her distinctive monochromatic paintings. These canvases stand freely around the gallery, sometimes in groups, sometimes physically bolted together, other times jutting out from a wall, telling a story across the room like a three dimensional graphic novel.

Hauser and Wirth’s Saville Row space is cavernous enough to accommodate many of these Marginalia paintings, across which Applebroog depicts human forms with bold outlines and economical detail using oil and resin. They are everymen, -women and animals but each body is damaged or restricted – blindfolded, bandaged, handcuffed, or bound... (read more)

Hauser & Wirth, 23 Saville Row, London W1S 2ET
March 17 to April 30 2011

Little White Lies Review: Oranges and Sunshine

Wearing its social conscience well and truly on its sleeve, this theatrical debut from esteemed TV director Jim Loach (son of Ken) hardly breaks the family filmmaking mould. But that’s not to disparage the director’s talents in bringing this extraordinary tale to the screen with a measured and very subtle approach.

Oranges and Sunshine tells the personal stories behind the apologies issued by the British and Australian governments to thousands of British children in care who were systematically shipped to Australia and other Commonwealth countries over nigh-on a hundred years until the 1970s.

It was a shady little secret until the 1980s, when a Nottinghamshire social worker began to make contact with the victims, some of whom were as young as four-years-old when they were told their parents were dead before being shipped out, alone, on a boat to a ‘better place’. Not only were some of the children’s parents very much alive, but the institutions in which they were placed were more often than not physically, mentally or sexually abusive. All this in the name of saving a few pounds... (read more)

Little White Lies Interview: Jim Loach

It must be hard to stand in your father’s professional shadow in any industry, but in film even more so and much more conspicuously. That Jim Loach’s heritage looms large even before the similarity between his socially conscious style and that of his father is noted must be endlessly frustrating. So when LWLies met up with him, we didn’t mention it. Instead, the director talked about the challenges of adapting a powerful true story to the screen for his directorial debut, Oranges and Sunshine, while caring about the repercussions for those living with the real version; avoiding turning the sentimentality up to 11; and the joys of co-producing a film between countries on opposite sides of the globe.

LWLies: Can you tell us how the project came about?

Loach: I first read Margaret Humphreys’ book and I went to see her – this was about eight or nine years ago – and she’s got a small office in Nottingham above a sandwich shop. I just sat opposite her and I was just completely spellbound by what I heard and the story that she had to tell. I found her a deeply inspirational person, slightly intimidating if I’m honest but nevertheless very inspirational. At that moment I knew I wanted to make the film because I was straight away taken by the personal dilemma set against the bigger story, so it was when I first met her that I knew I wanted to make it. Then I just got to know her over the years and spent a lot of time going up to Nottingham. I was doing different stuff at the time. Then Rona came and met her and we started to work on the script.

Did Margaret take some convincing to do the film?

Yeah, she was pretty wary. She was quite wary about what the film would be, what it could do and I think she was worried that it would be sentimental. It’s a question for her really but I would think that she was worried it would be sentimental or mawkish or offer easy answers, all of those things. Also she’s quite a private person so I suppose she didn’t necessarily want to put herself forward as a subject for a film particularly.

Stills/Inspiration

These are some stills from my installation Murder Disco!, created around the time that pixelisation and atomisation of imagery really captured my interest. The reason I post them now is that I still refer back to them regularly and consider them a piece of work which is a fair articulation of my themes and concerns. I'm also really interested in the idea of the film still as an entirely different beast from the photograph, and various the implications of this.

La Petite Mort - a project in progress

This drawing is part of La Petite Mort, a new series of ink on paper drawings that I'm working on at the moment. This one is nearly done and there are more to follow, but as you can imagine they're pretty time consuming, hence no posts of my own work for a while. But I'll keep dotting and keep posting...

ArtSlant Review: Morgan Fisher at Raven Row

Across the elegant floors of Spitalfields’ Raven Row, Morgan Fisher’s work delves deep into the belly of Hollywood. Specifically classic Hollywood, where 35mm film was the standard industry format and Fisher began his career-long obsession with peering beyond the confines of the silver screen to reflect on the art form and the means of its production.

The film Standard Gauge really helps establish the artist’s mindset. An ode to 35mm narrated by Fisher, it brings together off cuts of film that he foraged since his first job in movie production; the bits that did not serve a purpose and were subsequently binned. Fisher reveals what film tries to hide, and what audiences habitually ignore; namely its constructed nature, its mechanics and fakeness... (read more)