Artist Q&A
Caroline Humpreys
"I am interested in the way that life/personal landscapes can flip and change through chance occurrences or significant events - either instantly or by morphing over a period".
When did you start making visual art and why?
I started drawing in pencil when I was very young – about 8/9. Looking back, it stemmed for a need for escape and quiet time – the rhythm and focus soothed me, which is probably still the case. I took art A level. My teacher was rubbish. When I presented an abstract drawing done over the summer holidays he carefully tore it into small strips in front of me saying I’d copied it off a heavy metal record cover! In hindsight, when I was small and often in pain, sometimes, my head under the bed covers half asleep I seemed to be inside my body – seeing a pulsating, wave like, fleshy world and the drawing was probably an attempt to capture this.
So I got the A level but, outraged I sort of downed tools in this period. I ended up doing an art history degree and afterwards did a bit of lecturing to foundation course students as well as working in the underwear department at BHS in Cardiff. Unable to make ends meet I set off on a different career working with people who required housing and support. And after working at Welsh Women’s Aid in an anarchical, collective environment and a stint as Director in a housing association I ended up running my own consultancy working in the field of services to vulnerable people, requiring housing with support – mostly focussing on issues relating to gender based violence, sexual exploitation and homelessness generally. It was a bit of a ride and I won’t forget the wisdom, humour and kindness of those I spoke to who had suffered hardship and struggle and had many chronic health issues – and who simply weren’t heard or valued. Along the way I kept drawing and making (ceramics and jewellery).
Four brain operations in 2006 to address chiari malformation and syringomyelia led to a reset and I went back to a more creative path – a Foundation Art and Design Course at the University of Wales Trinity St Davids in Swansea, (where I first met Bella and Amanda) eventually followed by an MA in Social Sculpture and Connective Practice at Oxford Brookes which I had to leave in the final stages due to a disruption in my shunt relating to my hydrocephalus (a response to the brain operations). I’ve managed to maintain an intermittent practice since.
How would you describe your making process? Do you use your energy and time to produce work alongside your illness? What spaces and places do you make in?
My making processes are slow, sporadic and occasional. I will collect articles, images and objects that I store, ponder and return to, sometimes years or even decades later. I have come to regard walking and making as a connected and interrelated creative process. I make at home (and should probably do more outdoors) and have a want for a bigger space where I can play big and collaborate. My art these days tends to be drawing and life drawing, (mini) installations, text and a combination thereof, sometimes involving some basic photography and digital fiddling but not much as I don’t have the wherewithal. On the Oxford Brookes MA in Social Sculpture and Connective Practice I developed some participative actions/happenings (without me in them) that involved using appropriated narratives, objects and movement as a provocation to consider different perspectives. I’d be interested to reinvigorate this.
Returning themes in my work/thinking are events, narratives (subjective, objective and historical) and the ways these are appropriated. I’m also interested in the way that life/personal landscapes can flip and change through chance occurrences or significant events - either instantly or by morphing over a period.
I try to express this in abstract terms using line, pattern and interventions which alter context and interrupt narratives. Methods revolve around playing with layers, transparency, light, shadow, line and pattern. Materials are pencil, paint, tracing paper, glass/perspex, text, tape and found objects.
Another of the overriding themes that occupy my thinking is why and how people want/choose to be heard. A few years ago I went to a talk by a buddhist monk who had written a book of poetry . An audience member asked him why he wanted to produce a book and he said ‘everyone wants to be heard’. It made a big impression on me and I’ve been pondering it ever since.
I guess the question is: Do they/we/I? And if so for what reason? And what is the appropriate vehicle/method? And what are the ethical considerations? And where does ego sit?
Bella and Amanda’s friendship, curatorial guidance and stimulating chat and seeing how Deserters choose to express themselves has been an important part of untangling this. I think it’s really enhanced my understanding of this aspect. It’s about being heard for the right reasons and has to with gentle non egotistical expression.
What inspires you? Books film art podcasts etc. Recently or in the past.
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I’ve got a few important books that I return to: things that I keep close and refer to often:
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I read the first chapter in Thomas Hardy’s ‘Return of the Native’ when I was in my late teens and it remains a go to. It is abstract in that it is unpeopled until the final sentence, there’s no hint of a plot and instead it focusses on the beauty and grandeur of Egdon Heath. It still blows my mind that anyone (particularly using a quill) could write anything so breathtakingly moving. It was the first thing I read that made me think dwelling on text/studying was worthwhile.
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I grapple with Henri Lefebvre’s Marxist essays contained in ‘Rhythmanalysis: Space, Time and Everyday Life’. It redefines space as not being passive but rather as active and dynamic – creating patterns from political/social structures and how we live. His premise is that: ‘Everywhere there is an interaction between a place, a time and an expenditure of energy, there is rhythm’. It offers a whole new world of seeing, listening and observing.
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Doreen Massey’s ‘For Space’ is a good treatise on our appropriation of nature and offers different ways of thinking about geography and history, time and space.
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I love quiet protest and gentle, firm communication:
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Han Kang’s book ‘The Vegetarian’ is about a woman who refuses to eat meat, is force fed and then refuses to eat. Near the end of the book, not long before her death she escapes to the forest from the psychiatric hospital. When she is returned, near death she stands on her head, tree like in an effort to return to the solitude and peace of the woods. It’s a really strong image that speaks for steadfastness and the strength of personal and minority action, particularly in relation to illness.
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I have an article from Sunday Times magazine from years ago about ‘The Children Who Won’t Wake Up’. It’s about 100s of refugee children in Sweden who succumb to a mystery illness that keeps them in a sleep-like state for years with intravenous feeding. Most of them wake up when asylum claims are resolved – remarkable! A want for suspended animation as a response to emotional/physical pain feels like a completely logical path.
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There was an Outlook episode on Radio 4 about a man, John Francis who following an oil spill in San Francisco Bay in 1971, decided to stop speaking and just start walking as a form of protest against environmental destruction and capitalism. He walked silently, doing odd jobs for 17 years. – 6,205 days, despite a lot of challenge and criticism.
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Artist inspirations are Helio Oiticica, particularly his Meteasquamas series (it speaks to me of the comme ci comme ca nature of life) and that however things change we are still with ourselves, and also Parangoles for it’s gentle, peaceable protest. I love Georgia O’Keefe and Agnes Martin for their choices, refusnik lifestyles and Martin for her slow, meditative and exacting work with colour and line. Paula Rego I like for her fearless portrayal of the dark side of life - the strength and depth of her colour, texture and imagery. Landscape artists like Michelle Stuart and Richard Long who’s art emerges from journeying and walking also appeal.
Above: Agnes Martin.
Left: Richard Long
How would you describe your relationship to the wider world?
It keeps changing. But I’m clearer these days about what works for me. When was young, living in the borders of mid Wales my close friends and I all failed our A levels. We had a sort of enforced local gap year while we decided what to do with our lives. We had a glorious year. It was the punk era – we danced our socks off, rowed down the canal accompanied by cheap wine, slept out on hill sides and saw loads of live bands while deliberating our futures and the meaning of life. We had a phrase we used when things were great in the moment (and we had a sense that it was a special time) we used to say to each other: ‘Have you got the passion’ to which the response was ‘I’ve got the passion’. Life is different now but I actively look for that feeling. There’s something pure and straightforward about it – no hype, no ego, enjoying nature, music, dancing and friends and I think it’s just about having that ‘passion’ and feeling good in the moment.
This TS Elliot quote From ‘The Four Quartets’ sort of says it for me:
At the still point of the turning world. Neither flesh or fleshless;
Neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance is;
But neither arrest or movement. And do not call it fixity,
Where past and future are gathered. Neither movement from nor towards,
Neither ascent nor decline. Except for the point, the still point,
There would be no dance, and there is only the dance.
