A series of conversations held between 2022–24, published by Thames & Hudson.
Do you actually agree with Camus that ‘At the heart of all beauty lies something inhuman?'
Beauty is inhuman. It’s an ideal we strive for that remains unattainably distant and impalpable.
Do you find the people you photograph beautiful, then?
I find aspects of people to be beautiful — not necessarily their outward surfaces, but the more elusive, inward attributes that are discovered in the act of photographing. Contrary to what society might assume, an artist’s job isn’t to capture cosmetic qualities, but to create surfaces in which people can exist inside of on their own volition. Some of my favourite photographs are of people I’ve found disgusting personally.
You are a student of Philosophy, and particularly Political Philosophy. Where do you take your own philosophy of photography from? And is there a favourite book you return to for guidance?
When I was in graduate school a professor recommended the book Absorption and Theatricality [1981], a publication by Michael Fried on mid-eighteenth-century French painting that I’ve cycled back to over the years. The book helped me understand why I’ve been drawn specifically to artworks concerned with depicting a life that appears to be full of authentic emotions even while the realities of those artworks are invented. I’ve constantly re-circled and highlighted its passages over the years to discover phrases like the following:
RURAL POETRY
FAMILIAL SENTIMENT
DOMESTIC VIRTUE
DISCOMFORT
MASTERY OF EXPRESSION
A SINGLE FIGURE
THE THEME OF SLEEP
AUTHENTIC EMOTION
Let’s talk about ‘rural poetry’. Your figures seem to exist both within and apart from the landscapes they are in: sometimes swallowed by foliage, sometimes standing on the brow of a hill, stark against the sweep of the valley beneath. What is it in the natural world that you’re so drawn to?
The artist can never escape the natural world. Nature is thus both an artistic muse and conceptual nemesis. Even while many works appear to depict the natural world, nature is in a sense artistically irrelevant, because an artist brings nature forth in new forms. While the natural world is our reality, artists create their own defiant realities separately. It’s this fragmentation of the human experience, where, helpless as children, we can reclaim our spiritual unity by inventing our own reality on top of our nature through art.
So you see nature as both an escape and something inescapable? Does that make it a luxury?
The natural world is neither an escape, nor a form of luxury. It is the only luxury we have left. It’s bizarre to even use the term ‘luxury’ when discussing something that is inherently free and abundant, particularly in working in the fashion and art worlds, where people proclaim new ‘natural’ cures to their own humanness without venturing outside of a city. Nature’s glory lies in its indifference to both privilege and an audience. It remains the only antidote to the avatar world we’ve created as a replacement for it, with our ever-glowing screens that merely illuminate the distance between ourselves.
The other words on that list are interesting, too. How would you characterize an authentic emotion, for example? When do you feel you have achieved it in an image? Is there a particular quality of truth or sincerity that you think you’re striving for?
Authenticity, sincerity and emotion are words that are rendered useless in their written definitions, for they belong to the realm of feelings. While we judge an artwork’s greatness by the sum total of its formal and conceptual parts, I almost always disregard the intention of the artist, authentic or otherwise. A person either is or isn’t authentic. Authenticity of emotion shows in the missteps of an artist, in the accidental brushstrokes that occur while a hand is realigned towards the unknown. When authentic works are realized, their harmonious compositions dance between the surface of the work, the creator, and the person apprehending it, in a triangulation that creates a collaboration.
Your work often possesses what we might call a dreamlike quality. Are you someone who draws on your dreams?
My dreams are nothing like my photographs, nor are they like anything I could easily describe in words. Ever since I can remember they have been nightmares. There is nothing more haunting than walking into a space my imagination created and not comprehending its spatial dimensions, or having any means to comprehend them. If one were to excavate into the abyss of my inner psyche, one would find absurdist fabrications constantly regenerating, multiplying ad-infinitum. How does one describe a texture that adheres to nothing, or a surface without anything underneath it?
‘Space, we like to pretend, can be inner or outer; but children know better. For them, the gates swing back and forth. Diminutive mothers and short-statured fathers suddenly shoot up and appear august, their statuesque forms looming like imperious giants and fearsome djinns.’1 Elizabeth Danze and Stephen Sonnenberg, Space & Psyche, Austin, TX, 2013, p. 169.111 Elizabeth Danze and Stephen Sonnenberg, Space & Psyche, Austin, TX, 2013, p. 169.
There’s a safety to your photos, though. Sometimes they take on the tone of half-recalled childhood memories: the dappled light, the blur between reality and imagination, the suggestion of all time falling away but the present. Do you see the world you create in your photos as being an antidote to nightmares?
Yes, I do. They end up providing me with a sense of safety, though revisiting the idea of what my childhood home life was. At the end of the first chapter of your life you leave your parents, and then you spend the rest of your life trying to redefine what ‘home’ means. I want my photographs to exist in tandem with the worlds full of love and mystery I first lived, or dreamed up as child — the worlds inside the paintings I saw at the museums, and inside the children’s books I read at night. But, at the same time, while I seek comfort, I don’t long for the past — hopefully my work creates new tales woven from the present colliding with my dreams.
Charles Baudelaire, writing with suspicion about photography’s claims to truth, said, ‘nothing that exists satisfies me. . .I prefer the monsters of my fantasy to what is positively trivial.’2 Charles Baudelaire, Art in Paris 1845–1862, trans. Jonathan Mayne, Oxford, 1965, p. 155.222 Charles Baudelaire, Art in Paris 1845–1862, trans. Jonathan Mayne, Oxford, 1965, p. 155. Can a fantasy, too, be monstrous?
Of course. Most fantasies are monstrous. To fantasize is to desire, and to desire is to acknowledge yourself in relation to what is absent: which is a monstrous thing to acknowledge.
Something the Surrealists seemed to understand about the depiction of dreams is their architecture: the slippage between worlds, the elasticity of form. Do you see your methods of manipulating photos beyond the bounds of reality as functioning similarly?
Very much so. The architecture of space always changes when you enter a dream. When a work of art is made it bends away from the laws of physics we understand, forming an utterly unrecognizable reality. Any time I alter the elements of my photographs, whether by adding colours or erasing pixels — it changes the design of its landscape, and becomes a dream image. [Sigmund] Freud would describe this as the second level of a dream, following an initial dream thought. It’s eerily comforting to read his descriptions of dream images in The Interpretation of Dreams [1899], because his writings almost exactly describe the turmoil behind my eyelids.
You edit your photos to drastically change the colours. Do you see it as being akin to painting? Would you even strictly define yourself as a ‘photographer?’
As much as I would prefer to identify as a painter, I am tethered to photography, because that’s the medium I chose as my base. I’m constantly made aware of that bond and debt. Even though the process of creating my work is more akin to painting, in that most of my labour is spent building colour on top of an original photograph over time, the main distinction lies in the origin of the making. My works begin with a depiction of something seen through a lens, even though the amount of transformation that occurs afterwards leaves little or no trace of the imagined reality I first experienced.
French painting appears to be a formative influence on your work. Who are the painters that have been most meaningful to you? What is it that speaks to you about their work?
My mother brought me to The Walker Art Center and Minneapolis Institute of Art once a week to expose me to the painters she admired — many of whom were French Impressionists. This had a lifelong impact on what I now value as great. I still couldn’t say with certainty that my opinions are free of those first impressions. But, in reflecting on my lifelong relationship to painting from childhood, I’ve isolated a few of the characteristics that have continued to appeal to me.
Most of which are artists who depict figurative studies that disappear into their surroundings — painters such as Edouard Vuillard, Edgar Degas, Félix Vallotton, Edvard Munch, Luc Tuymans, Marlene Dumas, Peter Doig, and Milton Marlene Dumas, Omega’s Eyes, 1988Avery.Avery.Marlene Dumas, Omega’s Eyes, 1988
You mentioned Marlene Dumas paints from photographs. You take photographs and paint onto them. It seems that you’re engaging with the idea of the surface, as well as the question of how to capture the fullness of life. . .
Painting and photography have always been intertwined in a race against each other: sometimes coexisting, sometimes in competition. I believe both mediums succeed best when they work together against their own nature.
While painting has the intrinsic freedom of being able to begin with the imagination — a place photography can’t start from; photography conversely has its own advantage of opening with a given reality that can be unthreaded into the dream of a painting. And sometimes destroying a canvas that already exists is more fulfilling than building one from scratch.
Marlene Dumas once said, ‘I have never painted a dream (nor an ideal). I have dreamt about paintings but never ones that I have seen or wanted to see again.’3 Quoted in Thomas Knubben and Tilman Osterwold, eds, Marlene Dumas: Wet Dreams, Watercolors, Berlin, p. 46.333 Quoted in Thomas Knubben and Tilman Osterwold, eds, Marlene Dumas: Wet Dreams, Watercolors, Berlin, p. 46.
Let’s discuss a particular photograph of yours that you took of an old man in Bath, England, when you were younger. It was one of your first colour photographs, and it bears resemblance to Henri Cartier-Bresson’s ‘decisive moment’, which is how a lot of people understand photography: this idea that each photo should perfectly immortalize a small slice of life. Your work is resolutely not that. But you often use the word ‘absorption’ when speaking about the way you approach image-making, which would suggest some sort of relationship with the moment. . .
I grew up revering Henri Cartier-Bresson’s photographs for holding the idea of time in a perfectly romanticized freezeframe. But as I became more comfortable with the camera I realized that most of the photographs I actually wanted to make were in complete opposition to his theory of the ‘decisive moment’. I prefer to invent reality rather than capture it. That’s not to suggest that Bresson didn’t invent a new reality with each of his images, because he did. However, his search for the ideal moment pre-existing in time, as we understand it traditionally, was never what I wanted to create.
The photograph of the old man, on its surface, could be easily viewed as an homage to Bresson’s ideal — captured, candid, and encapsulating. But, when I look at the image now, I don’t view it that way at all. As I see it, the photograph of the old man was more of a mystical happenstance that made me realize I didn’t ever want to capture someone else’s reality — and that I couldn’t even if I wanted to. I wasn’t capturing anything essential in the old man; I had just seen myself in him. I saw him less as a novelty to be celebrated or frozen in time than as an accident, or the occasion for some other act entirely. The old man became myself later. I was a kid who photographed him cowardly, who stole a moment and ran away, without being seen. The analogy is similar in explaining why I have an ethical problem with photojournalism — to me, it’s thievery meant to capture awards rather than actualize a humane ideal. Real artistic absorption is the opposite of running away; it’s about looking inside.
You didn’t always work in colour. When did you make the change? Did it feel like Dorothy entering Oz, leaving the black-and-white world behind?
I worked only with black-and-white 35mm film for a decade, making what I would now consider derivative photographs from early 20th-century photography — mirroring Cartier-Bresson’s ‘decisive moment’, André Kertész’s sombre street scenes, and the graphic images of the 1960s Americans — Harry Callahan and Aaron Siskind, all with a bit of Robert Frank’s spontaneous poetry. Yet while doing this I was also in love with the impressionistic colour used by early experimental forms of photography, like photograms, dye transfer prints, and cyanotypes. But for many years I never considered bringing colour into my own photographs because I naively assumed photography was only pure in its historic black-and-white roots.
That was until I encountered William Eggleston, whom I consider a burdensome shadow that changed photography forever. When I first saw his work at the MoMA, I thought his injection of realistic colour was like viewing an old film on a contemporary high-definition screen — in that it eroded the mysterious surface that separates us from becoming lost in our fantasies.
Photography isn’t meant to be representative of how we actually see the world. It never has been, nor could it ever be, even if it wanted to. Since its inception, photography has been untruthful at its very core, through deceiving the public into assuming it is truth, or evidence of existence. It took me two decades to understand and accept the influence that Eggleston’s work has had on all of us, watching the public accept banality in place of beauty and accept arguments for mediocrity as mastery. Yet, Eggleston propelled me to work against using colour photography as an art primarily concerned with using colour to depict the world as a mirror, so I am thankful to him.
Many writers have also grappled with colour — for example in books such as Maggie Nelson’s Bluets [2009], Goethe’s Theory of Colours [1810] and Derek Jarman’s Chroma [1994]. All these books circle around attempts not just to define or understand colour, but also somehow to hold on to it. Do you ever feel that way with your work? As though you are also trying to understand something about colour, or maybe make it yours?
One of my favourite lines from Bluets is when Maggie Nelson adapts a quotation of [the eighteenth-century man of letters] Joseph Joubert: ‘“Truth. To surround it with figures and colors, so that it can be seen,” wrote Joubert, calmly professing a heresy.’4 Maggie Nelson, Bluets, Seattle, 2009, passage 122.444 Maggie Nelson, Bluets, Seattle, 2009, passage 122. I’m not trying to understand colour in the same way those writers are, but colour is both the medium and the subject of my work. The figures inside my photographs and their corresponding landscapes remain secondary in importance to the colour that blankets them — not the other way round. I’m not on a quest to apprehend colour; I submit to it as an ideal. And in doing so, I try to create my own language within it, even if most of the time that entails reducing a more complex chromatic reality to red and blue, like salt and butter overpowering the bitterness of a verdant meal.
So much of your work happens after the shoot. Do you regard photography as intimate or collaborative?
The act of photographing a subject isn’t intimate for me, it’s almost always awkward or uncomfortable. I wouldn’t say it’s necessarily collaborative either. In most cases, it’s best described as a dance between anxiety for the present moment to be greater than it appears to be and trying to direct a thought that hasn’t fully formed yet.
I’m also not a verbal director. I prefer to observe things as they are, and allow mistakes to happen, which frustrates most of my subjects and makes intimacy near impossible. The actual intimacy comes afterwards, when I’m disassembling and editing what I’ve captured.
You mention surfaces. Is that what ultimately makes a work beautiful —
the right alignment of form and shade? Or is there something more to it?
The final result — the visual object — is ultimately a surface. And since the viewer was never a part of making that surface, to suggest it could ever be anything else to the audience would be untrue. But surfaces come in all opacities, and to create them you need the right alignment of parts —
which includes the audience. Art is birthed from experience, and for a work of art to truly be apprehended as beautiful, it requires a viewer to bring it to life with their experience, thus creating the final work.
Various photos of yours read as inadvertent echoes of some of those favoured painters you’ve mentioned: whether in composition, colour, or atmosphere. Why do you think these accidental mirrorings happen? Does it say something about your own standard of beauty?
All artists borrow and absorb — we’re sponges. How we choose to express ourselves through our collected visual encyclopaedias is what makes us unique. With that said, I find it interesting that in any art form comparison often becomes the barometer for qualitative judgments. I never intend to re-create the likeness of an artwork I’ve seen before, but I’ve always wanted to create photographs that could stand next to the master paintings I grew up admiring — in both formal greatness and sincerity. So it’s no coincidence that a photograph I made in Wales ends up echoing a Caspar David Friedrich canvas of a man staring off a cliff; or that a photograph of a sunset that I made on the cliffs of Dover holds traces of a Rothko abstraction after I’ve reconstructed its colours.
Those references are buried deep inside our psyches and invariably end up rising to the surface, no matter how much we attempt to repress or dismiss their significance. They will always come out. However, if two disparate works appear similar across time despite not having any communication with each other, I believe the resemblance has little to do with the works themselves and more with the synchronicity of human experience. The role of the artist is to chase the sublime, and that results in similar brushstrokes. The comparison conundrum becomes crass when artists turn from the spontaneous pursuit of beauty to the conscious negation of older works for spectacle. When cynicism is the motivation, art misunderstands its own Philip Guston, I Paint What I Want to See, 2022purpose.purpose.Philip Guston, I Paint What I Want to See, 2022
Many of the photos featured in this book are revised versions of older works. Why did you want to go back and change them? What drove the impulse to re-create these images anew?
Time is both a generous patron and a deceptive thief. In youth we create without experience, while later experience may overshadow creation. This book is a certain purgatory between both worlds. Each book I’ve made prior has been crafted on an unrealistic, self-imposed timeline, where deadlines become the driving force behind making work fit inside pages. In this case, the work was born out of the same restlessness that drove me to create the images in the first place, but with the added privilege of time’s passage. I am older now. Years have passed, and my life has taken many dramatic shifts since most of these images were first taken. The separation of time has allowed me to take a look at myself through the lens of the work I’ve managed to keep from various stages of my life, and layer myself now on top of my past self.
As I write this it’s the early hours of Father’s Day, and I can’t help but think of how different my life and work would have been if I’d never had children.
Different in what sense?
Incomplete; unfulfilled; maybe easier, but without a love that I wouldn’t have known without having my sons — a love that I could never imagine living without. Children, like art, become a true mirror of ourselves, at the centre of a world we don’t entirely create. I would never have been capable of finding my place in this world without having my sons show me that, despite my missteps, I am full of love.
Your approach is reminiscent of re-tailoring an old garment rather than buying a new one — using what you already have and crafting it afresh. Does permanence matter to you? Do you see your way of working as a commentary on the value we currently bestow on images?
Nothing in this world is permanent, least of all art; and if art is meant to be an extension of ourselves, it must continue to be redrawn, just as we redraw the boundaries of how we govern ourselves in hopes of better understanding who we are. Nothing I’ve created in this book is necessarily new, nor is it old — it’s a meditation on our inevitable death through re-colouring time.
In these conversations over the past few months, it has been possible to sense in you a creative restlessness. You need to make, make, make. But there are all sorts of vessels to hold an idea. It might not necessarily be a photo. How do you approach the question of form?
Form follows sentiment, and restlessness is the result of being hopelessly romantic. I feel empty when I’m not creating, or thinking, or thinking about creating. As a result, I’m passionate about most forms I’ve had contact with. As you say, it’s not just photography; music, sculpture, video, perfume, dance, painting, and drawing intertwine as different means of articulating the self. The will to create is more important than being technically proficient in any one medium.
I wouldn’t describe myself as a skilled photographer. Most of the time I mechanically stumble through photo shoots, relying on the ability of my assistants to sort out the technicalities. But I trust my intuition, and know something great will come if I allow it to. That’s the joy and the terror of being an artist: making mistakes that lead you to the unknown.
Let’s talk about your previous project The Garden(2021), which featured some of the images included here. That represented a major break from the work you’d been doing before, most obviously in its turn towards your family and home. How did it come about?
The Garden was born as a response to my restlessness, but not through my own volition. I was married abruptly, and after two years we had our first son Felix, and my whole world-view changed. Suddenly, I had the financial responsibility of a family and had to refocus my work away from strictly art on to more commercial ventures. But with each advertising job I took, I felt my artistic restlessness replaced by a new restlessness to support a family. And in time, I came to resent the camera.
Every August I fell into a malaise, as my industry went on a summer vacation and I didn’t know if there would be money to feed my family. After a few years of this cycle, my wife suggested I photograph her and our sons, as a way both to distract me from my anxieties, and to relieve her from having to deal with my restlessness. It was the first time in years I picked up my camera for myself again, even if it was still being dictated by someone else.
At first I disliked the exercise. I wanted to keep my career and family separate — which is ironic, because I fell in love with photography after seeing a book by Harry Callahan, who spent most of his career photographing his wife Eleanor and children. So it came full circle. Just as my mother placed a camera in my hands to relieve my teenage angst, Brianna put the camera back in my hands for a similar reason. Both were acts of kindness that propelled me to discover and rediscover creation as an end unto itself.
But The Garden wasn’t just a story told in photos, was it?
Photography is not the best way to describe people. It’s flat and illustrative. People are three-dimensional. They smell, and speak, and drag their feet through life, creating sounds. The Garden naturally evolved into an autobiographical account of my family, so to present it only photographically felt incomplete. So I engaged other artists to help bring the project to life three-dimensionally. That included an accompanying musical score titled Safe Passage; two perfumes; and a short film.
It was the first time I truly collaborated with other artists, out of necessity, because I was completely oblivious as to how to work within these foreign mediums. I knew what I wanted to bring to life. I just couldn’t create the other parts myself. In the end it became the most honest self-portrait, because it forced me to move away from how I knew to create, and made me uncomfortable again.
Is it important to feel uncomfortable when making art?
Discomfort is the only state an artist can operate in, otherwise we merely create illustrations. Artists fall into mannerism and self-reproduction by being comfortable.
Beyond your own work, you have a general, magpie-like approach to the world of culture. You’re always saving images or sending them to people. You collage poems out of phrases you’ve noted from books. Do you feel you’re trying to collect — or even preserve — something particular?
I’m actually a discombobulated collector. My archive is scattered. I constantly lose old work by saving my photographs haphazardly on hard drives that are erased by accident over time. Which is deeply upsetting if you wish to revisit a sketch from a year ago, but it’s also an important part of my process — misplacing, forgetting and redoing. There’s a certain beauty in knowing that some things are meant to be forgotten. It forces you to paint over their memory with experience, releasing you from the burden of past choices.
When I collage together quotations from books that once seemed significant to me, they form new poems devoid of any allegiance to their past. And in using the same layering process to create my photographs, I’m able to make those words become my own. Preservation never crosses my mind; if anything, my work erases, deletes, and paints on top of its source material, ultimately erasing the past.
There’s a great sense of theatricality to your images. A scene is set. A costume is chosen. Is that the way you would characterize your work?
‘Theatricality’ is a term used to describe art derogatively. It lingers with the same disdain as suggesting a work is merely decoration — even if some are. The truth hurts. And in truth, I would say that the incorporation of fashion into my photographs makes them theatrical by definition. I wouldn’t outwardly describe them as such, though, because I find theatre to be saccharine: a stage devoid of truth, infested with the emptiness of performativeness, irony and criticism. I want to believe that my work is the opposite of all those things.
Even if I didn’t purposely clothe my subjects, I’m not sure the work would be any less theatrical. What truly constitutes theatre? Is it found in the dramatic shift in colour that exaggerates reality? Or is it in the fact that my subjects become actors by walking in front of my lens? There’s always something artificial, which is often what people mean by theatrical. Even if my process populates a stage of a certain kind, my work is always aimed towards beauty as an ideal, which is the antithesis of theatre. But the problem with that mode of thinking is that it prioritizes intention over what a thing actually is. And this is the question I can’t move beyond, because I fundamentally believe an artist’s intention is rendered irrelevant once a work is birthed into the Wallace Fowlie, Rimbaud: A Critical Study, 1966world.world.Wallace Fowlie, Rimbaud: A Critical Study, 1966
What about theatre in the specific sense of the theatrical medium: plays, dance, even music? Is there any relationship between those forms and the work you make?
In the sense in which ‘theatre’ refers toa specific art form — where actors perform lines or move around on a physical stage — my work has an antithetical relationship to it. I was twice commissioned to photograph performances, first for the Metropolitan Opera, then for the New York City Ballet. I found the assignments extremely difficult, even though, looking back at my negatives, I find them beautiful. To authentically depict a stage set by someone else is like being tasked with making an original song by way of creating a remix. It can only become an illustration. Yet when you’re a commercial photographer, your job is to make it work. So, for the Metropolitan Opera’s La Traviata, the best solution I found was to delete and rearrange the actors from their positions on the stage by doubling the photograph and flipping it backwards, ultimately dissolving the stage into a demonic duotone composition of red and black. It created the necessary distance between the audience and the false narrative I was meant to depict, by providing an intermediary screen for imagination to flourish on again, like a film.
Tell us a little more about clothes. You often profess an uneasy relationship with fashion, but clothes themselves are a crucial part of your visual toolkit. The colours, the fabrics, the shapes, the textures. . .it’s impossible to imagine your work without these elements offered by dress.
The way I use clothing is akin to how a director casts a character actor in a film: the garment plays a pivotal role in the overall story, but is never the main actor. Although it may not appear to be — and although most of my photographs have been commissioned by fashion publications to represent the very thing I believe they don’t — my work is ultimately a rebuke of fashion, instead of a celebration of it.
How so?
It comes down to the difference between what fashion and art are each concerned with. Fashion is inherently constructed within, and in response to, the social parameters of the time when it was conceived. Fashion, by definition, is forever changing and amorphous. This is its true importance and identity. Fashion is a mirror to our present reality, and must act under the same assumption that photography has historically been burdened with: that it exists in order to capture a moment outside itself. But while this is true for fashion, it’s an incorrect assumption for photography and almost all other creative mediums.
With that said, when you distort fashion inside of a photograph, reducing it to the shapes and colours of its materials, it transforms into a pure visual object and becomes a costume. In this act, photography removes fashion from its contemporary context and relegates it to the same plane of existence as the grass underneath a model’s foot.
Trends disappear almost as quickly as they are formed, which isn’t a problem for fashion editors. To them, it’s the underpinning of the thing they’re interested in. But to me, it implies that fashion can only be a distraction from beauty as an ideal, which is enduring and transcendent of change. Beauty in fashion is something else: a servant to change and novelty. In the sense in which I take the word, I would argue that most fashion actually works against the beautiful, placing a greater emphasis on the representation of the self, by means of a hierarchical importance for its own end.
Your use of pattern, particularly, is reminiscent of the painter Edouard Vuillard, whom you are a great admirer of. Sometimes there is very little separation between the surroundings and the garment; the patterns merge and bleed into each other, or clash. Elsewhere, the clothes become block silhouettes. How do you think about this interaction between clothes and environment?
The first time I saw a Vuillard painting in the flesh it astounded me in its simplicity. When you see his canvases from a distance they appear to be overly decorative, covered with an abundance of brushstrokes. But actually, they’re not opulent at all. Vuillard’s mastery lies in depicting a mundane part of daily life by bringing all the planes of visual space together onto one surface. Lines and figures blend together with no hierarchy or division between subject and space.
I rarely read artist biographies, because I feel art shouldn’t be understood by the maker’s personal life. But in reading Vuillard’s biography I actually discovered more similarities between ourselves than I’ve found with anyone I’ve ever met in the flesh. I love being proven wrong. It felt like reading a book from before, to the extent that I don’t believe there could be any coincidence that his paintings resonate with me as much as they do now. It made me realize I was meant to let his work guide my own, like listening to the wisdom of a great-grandparent upon entering adulthood. Much of my life has been about believing in coincidences and following their lead. I’m not religious, but I trust the unknown more than I trust my own judgements.
‘The Tapestry’ is a resonant image: the weaving together of threads, the slow creation of an image piece by piece. Why did it feel like a fitting motif for this project?
The Tapestry is an ideal synthesis of all the parts that come to us in a fragmented, uncontrolled way in our lives. It’s the fabric we piece together by re-creating those fragments as a dream in an art object, where the whole presents itself only once it’s finished. I knew this book had to write itself, and I hoped that if I allowed it to, it would guide me in re-examining my life from a new, solitary point of view.
‘I want to consider solitary people and those who seek solitude as essential threads in the human weave — “figures in the carpet”.’5 Fenton Johnson, At the Center of All Beauty: Solitude and the Creative Life, New York, 2020, p. 130.555 Fenton Johnson, At the Center of All Beauty: Solitude and the Creative Life, New York, 2020, p. 130.
Why is solitude important? What does it offer?
Solitude offers you the space to confront yourself honestly and spontaneously. It provides you with the ability to live your life without the embarrassment of the world peering in.
Tapestry-making is a slow, exacting craft. Was there something in that physical process of making that seemed apt for you, right now? The image of Louise Bourgeois as a child comes to mind, helping her mother to restore the antique tapestries that her father then sold in Paris. Apparently Bourgeois was tasked with sketching out the feet, because they were often the first part of a tapestry to fray and fall away. Do you think there is anything you’ve been trying to repair here?
To your analogy of Louise Bourgeois: over the past three years my sense of self unravelled almost completely, leaving me staring down at my feet, only to discover they had frayed away. My mother passed away in my arms; some dear friends also passed away, and then I underwent a divorce. Consequently, I also said goodbye to the comfort of ‘home’. I emerged threadbare and needed to understand how I had arrived at such a place. So in a way, this book is an abstract sketch of my feet.
In Camera Lucida [1980], Roland Barthes spends a lot of time searching for his mother in the photos he possesses of her. In a more general sense, do you still feel the imprint or presence of your mother in your work?
I feel the presence of my mother in the love I have for this world, and especially in the love I have for my children. She taught me how to love unconditionally. But at a certain point I know she would have wanted me to stop crediting her for the work I make, because she no longer has a hand in it. I know that, as a parent myself, you can give only so much to your child before you have to let go. My mother will forever be half of me, but I doubt she would have understood the work I am making now; and that would have made her proud.
Though it’s mixing metaphors slightly because weaving is separate from stitching, these lines from Virginia Woolf in Orlando [1928] seem pertinent: ‘Memory is the seamstress, and a capricious one at that. Memory runs her needle in and out, up and down, hither and thither. We know not what comes next, or what follows after.’ She’s writing about how memory pulls together disparate scenes from our life: ‘a thousand odd, disconnected fragments’. All photos are memories, but yours are not trying to preserve something that is available only in the moment. Stitched together, what do these images amount to?
They amount to a life imagined that’s also been lived — a fairy tale of auto-fiction that remains unfinished.