Hannah Maybank discusses her new works made during her recent residency at Berwick Gymnasium Gallery.
This interview took place via email between December 2010 and March 2011, during one of the heaviest snow falls in Britain in living memory.
Hannah Maybank’s exhibition ‘Mute Strength’ runs 11 June – 31 July 2011
Hannah Maybank, 'Mute Strength' (170 x 200cm) 2011 - photographed by Robert Glowacki, Todd White Fine Art Photography
INFESTING: How would you describe your practice?
Hannah Maybank: I have always liked making things and did my undergraduate training/degree in sculpture. It was only really half way through the final year of my BA (in 1997) that I decided that I should be painting. However, sometimes I feel that my works are not paintings as such but are pieces made from paint. For the first year of making works in this way, back in 1999, I found it rather problematic that all of the bits that I ‘painted’ on (in latex), the mark making side of things, were stripped away and binned at the end of each painting. For some reason it took me a long while to come to terms with that.
My works contain patterned elements from nature pared down to simple silhouette forms to act like ‘motifs’. Worked most often in monochrome, these motifs or templates are repeated across the surface of the paintings to create a patterning in both the visual composition and through the process of their creation. Using construction and destruction, the works are created to echo our relationship to time and the natural world. The cycles within life, of birth and decay, are reflected by the process in which my paintings are made: layers upon layers of latex and acrylic paint are built up to be then stripped, cut and peeled away to reveal both the composition and ‘lifespan’ of the piece.
IN: You did a residency at ArtSway in 2007, how does Berwick compare? You can’t really get much further opposite ends of the country, how does that affect your practice?
HM: My residency at ArtSway was also during the winter months October –December, but was a “production residency’ with a very tight deadline for an exhibition afterwards. I had visited the New Forest a couple of times specifically for research purposes before moving down there for the residency and had gathered together an awful lot of material and ideas for works already. So, much of my time was spent in the studio making the working drawings and travelling back to London at the weekends to start the paintings for the show. Spending the last few months in Berwick has been vastly different. The emphasis of the fellowship is to make works in response to the unique location of Berwick – upon-Tweed. As the fellowship is six months in length there has been plenty of time to really soak up what winter Berwick has to offer. Being from the Midlands and living in London, I have not really ever spent that much time near the coast. Although I expected it to feel quite different to what I’m used to, I never expected to be so completely bombarded by the beauty and constant change of it all. The sky, the snow and the sea have been quite spectacular. Here there is just so much open skyline above and out to sea that there is a massive amount of freedom for thought.
IN: Do you do many works in situ based on actual locations in a traditional kind of Turner or Constable approach? Your works clearly depart from the traditional and present a certain contemporary, minimalist approach. How did you reach that point in your work?
HM: I enjoy responding to certain locations in the form of residencies, for instance, as you get to experience new places and viewpoints, but it is not a pre-requisite for making the works. I can quite as easily make a work by responding to a previous painting. In a way they are more like non-places, not really landscapes, but compositions that slowly reveal things to you about painting, about growth and decay….hopefully many things, also about travelling through certain pieces visually. I took a photograph the other day though, from the bottom of the lighthouse, whilst looking out into the rough North Sea. The clouds had come right down and the sea was smoking with the cold. Sky and sea met, there was no horizon line at all, but an amazing golden light trying to break through. It felt a bit like being within a Turner painting, but very much colder.
Hannah Maybank - 3.30pm 28th November 2010 (North Sea)
My earliest Art School heroes and heroines are people like Agnes Martin, Ad Reinhardt and Imi Knoebel, artists who have a certain restraint in their mark making as painters. I really enjoy the muteness of their works, especially Ad Reinhardt’s where denial seems a pretty important part of attempting to view the works. As the viewer you really have to spend time looking. Although perhaps Ad Reinhardt may turn in his grave looking at one of my large black sun flower paintings, I needed there to be more visual recognition to drive me to make them. Back in 2000 they did go through a much more abstract phase and they no longer made sense to me.
IN: What I particularly enjoy about your painting is the sculptural quality of the delicately peeling layers that slip from the canvas. Have you or are you planning to work in other mediums? I’m thinking specifically of deliberately three-dimensional works.
HM: At the moment, I have no plans to move a part of my practice into more purely three-dimensional pieces, although as I said earlier I trained as a sculptor and I do love making things, so never say never. At the moment, my brain just doesn’t think in that way. What I really enjoy about making the works is trying to push the pull between the two-dimensional and the three-dimensional. I am at present trying to make the pieces flatter against the wall, to enhance the illusory qualities of the ‘paintings’, which should heighten the use of the sculptural elements. I enjoy rupturing the deceit found within painting with the truth of sculpture, if you like.
IN: What if any, theories (art or otherwise) influence your work? One immediately thinks of environmental concerns when confronted with the decaying quality of your painted trees. And frivolously, do you have a favourite botanic species you enjoy, be it for aesthetic or any other reason?
HM: There are no specific theories that influence my paintings. I am influenced by many varied things …poetry, films, music, novels, writings on art and culture, programs on the radio, the outside world, my garden, the inside world, life. I guess you could say that my main influence is being interested in painting as a material and painting as a visual subject, so I guess I am making paintings about paintings, so in turn paintings about looking, but that is what all painters do. As I mentioned earlier they are for me definitely a lot to do with growth and decay, birth and death, but I don’t need for them to be about that for other people. I hope that they are more open as works of art and that they ask questions of the viewer.
I love the end of Winter and early Spring, snow drops, the miniature irises (especially Katherine Hodgkin), then all of the different Hellebores, and Auriculas because they look just like painted sculptures, but my absolute favourite has to be the Snakes Head Fritillaries. I have them in the flowerbeds, many of them are the double-headed mauve chequered ones. I have been growing them for about four and a half years and they are getting taller and taller. They are incredibly beautiful, delicate and awkward at the same time and apparently difficult to cultivate, but mine seem to be happily self-seeding away. Last year I discovered that I now have a four-headed one. Magic!
Hannah Maybank, 'I Begin a Ghost' (105.5cm x 75.5cm) Orasol and Watercolour, 2011 photographed by Nick Moss from Todd-White Art Photography
IN: It certainly shows that you have a sculptural background, having studied sculpture at undergrad. What was the attachment that made you feel that disposing of the latex at the end of a painting was problematic for you? Was it the waste of materials and the sense that you should be creating rather than destroying/disposing/polluting?
HM: I have, since I began this way of working, enjoyed the perversity of creating works through destruction, revelling in the risk that runs alongside a very prescriptive way of working. It’s a regulated setting myself up for a possible fall, so to speak. The huge sense of uncertainty with particular works is the driving force.
It was more that I felt that I was disposing of my mark, my identity as a painter.
The application of the latex, in a way, is the application of my ‘painters mark’. Much of the time taken to create each work is through the application of the shapes made in painted on latex and so in the removal and disposal of it, I also felt that I was disposing of all of that time.
It no longer worries me.
IN: Although you mentioned no specific theories that influence you, the way in which you hope that the viewer openly takes their own experience from the work sounds particularly Barthesian, which although not being intentional referencing is perhaps intuitive as a 21st century artist. With so many artists influenced by popular culture, do you feel there is a notion that a 21st century artist can be generated in templates or is it something more of a zeitgeist?
HM: As an art student from the early to late nineties I took on board and digested the thinking that was around me at the time. Certain tutors made a huge impact. I became very aware of the need for reason within the use of materials and titles. Everything needed, for me, to have a purpose for it to exist as part of the work. I read and digested all of the texts I was given to read and more besides. What I found to be relevant to me, I took on board, that that did not resonate with me or I could not fathom, fell by the wayside. Some I found as fantastic bedtime reading if I needed to fall asleep quickly. At some point you need to make a way for yourself.
I’d like to think that we are all individuals, trying in some small way to push boundaries, so more a ‘spirit of the age’.
I enjoyed hugely the texts of Agnes Martin, though I do think them a little extreme and I couldn’t live my life the way she appeared to live hers. The texts of Ad Reinhardt, some I agree with, some I adore, some I don’t, some I don’t get. I warmed to the writings of Maurice Blanchot, through his lyricism as opposed to the dry nature of much cultural writing, though I enjoyed more his prose.
The collected writings of Bridget Riley have been hugely reassuring.
What I have returned to since being in Berwick is Dennis Potter’s final interview with Melvyn Bragg just days before he died. I was on foundation when it was broadcast; I then bought a copy of the transcript.
At the time, some 17 years ago, I was 19, what I was struck by were his words on religion, God and creativity but also, of course, his words about life and truly experiencing it.
Much more life has happened since I was 19 and what struck a chord then, really makes sense now. Influences are drawn from life and the people you meet along the way.
I have had the great fortune to meet some truly wonderful people. It’s through these people that I’ve come to understand myself more and through them that I’ve been able to tap into the world around me. Love, loss, laughter, joy and shame, they all play their part.
Can I leave you with an extract from the transcript?
“…the blossom is out in full now…it’s a plum tree, it looks like apple blossom but it’s white, and looking at it, instead of saying “Oh that’s nice blossom”…last week looking at it through the window when I’m writing, I see it is the whitest, frothiest, blossomest blossom that there ever could be, and I can see it. Things are both more trivial than they ever were, and more important than they ever were, and the difference between the trivial and the important doesn’t seem to matter. But the nowness of everything is absolutely wondrous, and if people could see that, you know. There’s no way of telling you, you have to experience it, but the glory of it, if you like, the comfort of it, the reassurance…not that I’m interested in reassuring people, bugger that. The fact is, if you see the present tense, boy do you see it! And boy can you celebrate it.”
That has been my experience of being in Berwick.
IN: Imi Knoebel’s works are vibrant and rich in colours. Can you say a bit about the presentation of colour choices in your works? Having dabbled with abstract stuff that didn’t make sense to you, how did your experience/understanding of colour change?
HM: With the abstract paintings, I was mainly interested in creating depth and implied movement through colour. I was also concentrating on coming to terms with my working method.
Generally, my favourite paintings are the black ones, where they rely on changes in the light as it hits the relief on the surface. The large pieces, such as “In Company” 2008, that was hung adjacent to Schwitters Merz Barn at my Hatton exhibition, cannot be viewed all at once. The viewer needs to step back to take the whole of the composition in, but in doing so much of the detail is lost…it disappears back into the surface of the painting. You have to walk around the painting, come closer in and then further away. I enjoy their secretive nature….their muteness. In addition to this, I love the way that they take on the colour of the room, the time of day, the colour of the light that surrounds them. In daylight they look completely different to when they are viewed under ‘bulb-light’, as the daylight disappears. They are chameleons. My first non-abstract paintings (around mid 2000) were of black forests containing Cedars of Lebanon. As a series they were entitled “Wooden”.
Over recent years I have become more and more interested in using combinations of very opaque colours with much more transparent ones, creating unexpected colours and more depth by glazing one over another. With my triptych from 2008 “Disclosure”, that was made for my ArtSway exhibition, I wanted to use more overtly ‘traditional’ woodland colours for the overall surface, but with a much more acidic and unreal cadmium yellow underneath that disrupted the harmony of the composition. The same is true of “The Visit” also from 2008. I wanted there to be the feel of a dark woodland fore and middle ground, with the harsh contrast of an implied sunset/sunrise/sky on fire feel behind. Using a transparent black in layers over a bright vermillion gave grades of almost fluorescent looking red through to blood red, browns and eventually black.
With “Posie Bones” 2009, I wanted to create a painting that was a warm and a cold blue/white at the same time. “The Whole”, in sharp contrast, I wanted to conquer lime. It is based upon Kent lanes where the tree canopies meet to create a tunnel or hole. In the spring and summer when the light is just so, the leaf canopies appear a bright transparent lime. I chose white as its partner for its brittle nature (and lack of interference with the lime). For my Berwick Gymnasium paintings I am working on a black painting and a white one. They will be much more muted winter tones, both, I think will have glazes of other colours underneath. In response to all the snow I have experienced I want there to be a feel of life that is hidden -secrets silenced by snow.
Compositions, titles, colour all affect the feel of a painting, many approaches will be different depending on what ’feel’ I want to work with. Although I use the landscape as a motif, I don’t want the colours to be too close to landscape, nor too far away. I go back to the pull and push between reality and deceit.
Installation view of Hannah Maybank - works on paper - 11 Nov 2010 - 15 Jan 2011 Gimpel Fils, London
IN: You mentioned the experience of the sea, living by the coast for the first time. Will we be seeing more of the sea flooding into future works as a potential motif away from flowers and trees? Also, how do you fathom these experiences? Do you meditate through time alone? Reading? Drinking? Discussion? And then how do you feed that back into the work from life dissected?
HM: The sea to occur as a motif in the paintings, who knows. It is far too soon to answer that. Some things are best left as memories. I have some amazing photographs, a little film and lots of words on pages. What I am acutely aware of is that it has been an amazing experience. I have never been so completely engulfed, or ever before allowed myself to be, by a place and by a situation. For the majority of the first two months I spent my time almost completely in my own company and lost the ability to sleep. For the first couple of weeks I had novels for company, but as time went on, the lack of sleep stopped me from being able to focus on the words. This lack of sleep pattern, alongside all the quiet, heightened my senses. These heightened senses probably, made me more open to all that surrounded me, and all of the thoughts and feelings that were not interrupted by the day-to-day activities of life in the city. So, in turn, this compounded my inability to sleep. Strange thing is, I didn’t feel physically tired at all.
I go back to my day at the bottom of the lighthouse as a particular and stunning example. Although I was standing on concrete, looking out over a concrete wall into the north sea, the sea spray, the freezing fog were all around me, the rough waves crashed and rolled on and on and on, light behind the mist and fog kept changing, the loan seabirds flew in and out from behind the fog, the below freezing temperature numbed my head. I no longer felt aware of my feet on the ground or my arms leaning on the concrete in front of me. I had been completely swallowed up by what I was experiencing visually. Did I feel more present or did I feel more gone? Can’t answer that one either.
Upon my return to London over Christmas and New Year, it was through trying to explain my experiences that I had to force myself to put them in to words. A particular gem of a friend gave me a book, Sara Maitland’s ‘A Book of Silence’, which has helped a little to fathom my experiences (and to reassure me that I wasn’t loosing the plot). Which I am now able to read, as my sleep pattern, thankfully has returned to normal.
In some ways I do feel changed, but how I’m not sure. Whether it will feed into the work, absolutely it will, but how, who knows? Only time will tell.
IN: Really cool answer to the botanic species question. How does nature make those two tones chequered patterns on the Snake Head Fritillaries, awesome, very ska-esque I thought. What type of music to you enjoy? and do you listen to music while you work?
HM: Fairly varied on the music front really. A little classical…Puccini’s Madama Butterfly and Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas….but also love Alison Moyet’s version of ‘Dido’s Lament’ very raw and from the guts. Thomas Tallis, to transport me to a time way long before me.
A touch of folk
A little hip-hop and dub-step
The Smiths of course, ‘Hatful of Hollow’ in particular for their best album, but also ‘London’ as a single top track for me.
My Winter Berwick soundtrack consisted of ‘Everything But the Girl’ for walks home in the dark and in the rain,
For mornings walks it’s either P J Harvey ‘White Chalk’, Angus and Julia Stone’s ‘Down The Way’ or Thomas Tallis’s ‘Spem in Allium’ (latin: hope in any other) dependent upon the light, weather and frame of mind.
When staring out into the North Sea, that amazing day, funnily enough it was mainly Ian Brown’s ‘Remixes of the Spheres’.
For the best Spaghetti Bolognese of my life, had outside, alone on a chair in the garden in the freezing cold late on a Berwick Friday night, under a pitch velvet starlit night, with a snow chilled glass of white wine for company, it was Anthony and the Family Johnson’s ‘I Am A Bird Now’. As the temperature plummeted, hit track 8, for a feeling of being present and absent at the same time.
At the moment it’s Fever Ray, difficult to chose a favourite track….’When I Grow Up’, ‘I’m Not Done’, ‘Coconut’. Very difficult to choose.
Do I listen when I work, when I walk yes, when I write, sometimes yes, to get me started. I find music stops the day, stops the interference, shuts out the noise and helps to unlock things. It stops time in a way and connects me with my fire. I get a rush…I suppose that’s endorphins. It can open up visual and cerebral experiences, makes me aware of them, and helps to make sense of things perhaps. I find it helps me to connect to and to think in words. True quiet is very rare, but incredibly rewarding when it comes. When it does, no music is needed or warranted.
In order to create my works, to really think about them and to work out how to make them and why, what they are to be ‘about’ I need silence. To help make the paintings physically, I can live with or without the music or the silence, it doesn’t seem to matter, unless I’m working late into the night and then a good bit of bass can keep me awake and working. It stops my face from falling into and sticking to the latex.
IN: How did you enjoy George’s [Shaw] show* the other night? I noticed a similarity of the way in which he paints trees in comparison to your style. Did one of you teach the other or just coincidence? And thinking about George’s exploration of memories, what are your earliest memories of producing and discovering an ‘art’? (*George Shaw’s exhibition ‘The Sly and Unseen Day’ was at Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art from 18 February – 15 May 2011)
HM: George was the year above me at the Royal College and during that year I was doing very different work to what I’m doing now. I can’t remember whether he was painting trees at that time, but I wasn’t. My trees came into the picture some months after I left. Originally my tree silhouettes were made using marker pens on scraps of paper. It was in 2007 that I began to use the shellac ink and so they became much more fluid. It was great to see one of George’s earliest council estate paintings (‘No 57’), at his Baltic exhibition in all its rawness and good to see ‘Ash Wednesday : 8.30 am’…again, it’s such a cracker. I’ve never really thought that there were many similarities between our ways of working apart from sharing an appreciation for Dennis Potter.
Earliest memories of creating an art….drawing circles over and over as a small child, seeking the perfect circle must have been fairly boring for my parents, making a coloured sticky paper duck, that my second year infants teacher kept all this time and returned to me a few years back. It’s all I really enjoyed at school, apart from English Language and Literature.
George Shaw, Ash Wednesday 8:30am (91cm x 121cm) Humbrol enamel on board, 2004-2005, photograph by P.A.Jackson
IN: I want to ask you about feminism without being typical. It seems to me that there are obvious conclusions to make about femininity of flowers but yours connote certain feelings of masculinity with the destruction they’re born of. Is there a sense of being a post-feminist artist, or in keeping with Nicholas Bourriard’s latest coining, perhaps alter-feminist? Simply put, I’m wondering about your view on being a ‘feminist’ spirit of the age. And what feminism means to you. You mentioned Bridget Riley’s writings being influential.
HM: I have never really thought in feminine or masculine terms as a painter or as an artist, just as an artist.
Although the older I get the more I realise that being a women can present certain hurdles that men never have to confront in matters of biology.
Lots of men throughout history have painted flowers and still do. I know male painters whose work could be viewed as appearing feminine and female painters whose work could be seen as masculine. There are male painters making masculine looking paintings and feminine paintings made by women. I’ve had periods where I have made pieces that are delicate and quiet and perhaps fairly ‘feminine’ in appearance then they have gone through a period of being bigger and much more aggressive and perhaps ‘masculine’.
All artists take on the traditional female role of ‘creators’ if that how you like to see it, one could say, and like the female black widow spider one can also create utilizing the act of destruction.
Bridget Rileys’s writings are, as I said, hugely reassuring.
I last read them during my residency at ArtSway and am reading them again now, during this one. I also like to re-read her autobiographical section from ‘The Eyes Mind’. Reminds me that there will be good times and crap times. It can be a very lonely life sometimes and at other times so hugely full, invigorating and rewarding.
I really enjoy also her very down to earth, spade as a spade way of talking about her work.
There is a particular section of ‘Dialogues On Art’, where she is in conversation with E.H.Gombrich, that reminds me of the boundaries of my process;
“…in the early 1960’s I realised that the most exciting way of setting about work was to establish limits, in terms of each particular piece, which would sometimes push me and the work as we evolved together into such tight corners that they yielded surprising riches. It was like a forcing house: through limiting oneself, even severely, one discovers things that one would never have dreamt of.”
IN: And back to the work finally; ‘Mute Strength’ you mentioned as being the possible title for the exhibition. I’m going to ask the obvious here and say, where does this come from? Is it musical, spiritual, historical, ecological or a jamboree of various? I detect from our discussions a wink to Reinhardt.
HM: ‘Mute Strength’ is the title for the exhibition, but also for one of the paintings (a black one, of course). It is yes, a nod and a wink to Reinhardt, but also to so many other things:
Mute Strength as opposed to Brute Force.
The power of the sea, (although it certainly roars sometimes).
The strength of nature to die down and begin again rising from ‘the earth’ year after year, decade after decade, century after century ad infinitum…..we hope.
The Strong and Silent type.
Just because you don’t shout or announce your presence with a trumpet doesn’t mean you have nothing to say.
There is a wealth of interior world, which gallops on without audible noise.
So much that lies under the surface, be it that of the earth, the sea, that of the snow, that of the quiet mouth or of a painting’s surface…..The power and strength of what has been and what is yet to come.
Hannah Maybank, 'Mute Strength' (Detail), (170cm x 200cm), 2011, Photographed by Robert Glowacki from Todd White Fine Art Photography
Hannah Maybank’s exhibition ‘Mute Strength’ runs 11 June – 31 July 2011
Infesting.net 