Chair: Sharon Kivland.
Katy Brown, Alison Douglas, Chris Gibson, Frances Hegarty, Carol Kavanagh, Sumaya McIntyre, Lesley Sanderson, Bev Stout, Charlotte White
FH: I need to understand where you position yourself. I know that you are an artist but I also know you have background in philosophy. This is where I have some problems in understanding what you mean. I don’t know if you mean things in a literal sense or whether there are other meanings intended.
CH: I do mean it in a literal sense.
FH: So then when you say, for example, you can walk around this drawing, well, you can’t can you? You can walk in front of it or up and down or left to right but you can’t walk around it.
CH: That’s true, but when I say 'around' I mean that you can perambulate around and see the drawing on the wall from any number of different angles, just like you can with a wall drawing too. You can’t go around the back, no
. However, you can do this with the freestanding drawings that I have started making.
FH: I kept tripping up over those kinds of signifiers you gave throughout the talk.
CH: I did study philosophy and I reached the point where I could stop doing it. I was interested in certain things, and then I stopped. I always knew that I wanted to be an artist. I know that I’m making my mind up as I go along when talking about my work.
SK: The existence of objects is a question that comes up in certain kinds of philosophical thinking - whether an object is real or not, whether it will still be there if one leaves.
CH: Yes, I suppose everyone knows the question, "is this table really there?"…
SK: A lot of furniture appears in philosophy.
CH: A lot of furniture, and apples, glasses of water … but none of that is particularly interesting when you actually get into the problem. You can see that if you are asking these question in the first place, language gives you a basis to talk about reality. We have a shared reality and language; if we don’t believe in it or if we don’t put enough faith in language to do that, then we may as well all be dreaming that our words have any meaning at all!
FH: But we do dream that!
CH: Well, we do, but then we wake up and then we realise its not a dream and are able to talk about that with eachother. It’s as if you can dissolve the problem simply by remembering who and where you are and that there are things around you. Of course it’s not a question in everyday life whether or not this is a table. It could sound like a loaded term but it’s as though we are all grounded in a way of life and that we’re human beings. We live, we die, we give birth and so on. So the process I’m choosing to work with is a way of underlining that and saying I’m a human being, I’ve got two hands, I draw by touching and looking at something.
Audience: In speaking of the drawings in which you use both your hands while looking at the subject, one under the table one around the side, you suggested that you were giving two orientations - but are your eyes not in the same place? You’re drawing with your left hand and your right hand and I got the idea that you were showing two different planes of the object you are drawing. But are you not orientated in one particular direction?
CH: If this is the plant I'm drawing, I’m literally moving around it and if I want to draw something that I’m seeing in this part of the plant over here then I can then draw that, but underneath the table while moving around it. Whereas before, with the figure of the prehistoric Venus or the peeling oranges, I was fixed, my paper was fixed and the object was moving. Now the object can stay still and I can move around it. So the drawing is visualised as if you are looking at the plant from above or from underneath, and put on to a flat surface underneath it or to the side of it. It’s showing you all of it but compressed, with as much as I can get in.
Audience (same): So you’re drawing simultaneously with both hands?
CH: Yes, I can physically reach round and look around and see behind. Before if I’d been drawing with a blindfold I could reach behind to draw it.
Audience: Would you say some thing about the stencils and how you construct them as it’s hard to get an understanding of how you use them to make all those patterns?
CH: They are like the cartoons made in the Renaissance. When they made wall drawings or frescos they would make a cartoon, putting pinpricks around the contours of the things they needed to get onto the plaster. Then while the plaster was still wet they put the cartoon up and pushed chalk dust through it. The dust is in the wet plaster, then Michelangelo comes along and paints it all. It comes from wanting to transfer something from one surface to another. When I was trying that in different ways I realised that there was no need to come along and join the dots. So I was actually joining the dots and trying to see whether I could reconstruct the drawing on a big scale. Then I realised that these atoms of colour have a story of their own to tell. They allow things to break up.
CW: Are you interested in non-intentionality or random procedures? By using blindfolds you produce something that’s unexpected. You said that by deliberately using different colours, you are cutting away like a critical response. Do you think you are trying to cut away some of the pretension that can come out of aesthetics
CH: Perhaps. Anyone could set up a process like this. It’s the idea of where the chance event meets something else, instead of using the throw of a dice to make your art you are allowing chance to meet something else coming the other way. There is a collision between the chance process and an object and myself and out of that comes something new. You hear how artists are interested in their own processes of art because they see things cropping up in their work. What I’ve tried to do, I sometimes think, is isolate that sense of surprise and treat that itself as my subject matter.
CW: I was thinking more about your remark that removing sight takes away your critical responses to a line, rather than making decisions while you’re drawing, as drawing usually involves making decisions. It is as though you move towards the haptic.
CH: It comes back to the subject matter as well doesn’t it? If I choose to draw the Venus of Willendorf or a Bangladeshi model of a leaping tiger and prey, what am I choosing to say about myself by doing that?
CW: Unless you get other people to choose the objects…
CH: Which is exactly what happened at the residency at the Henry Moore Institute.
Audience: I want to ask you a question about the plaster cast of the head. I know that it’s probably for a practical reason that you used a plaster cast head rather than touching a real head but it seems that you chose to draw something external rather than internal … or you avoid touching real skin, a real head.
CH: I drew a lot with my girlfriend Jo at one time and she very patiently put up with that. What came out of that was a much more flowing experience. If you draw someone’s eyes by touch, you are limited in one way - you don’t want to poke your finger in their eye! You have to find ways around that problem - she had her eyes closed, which was a mirror of me. The subject of the plaster cast has his eyes closed for the business of making the cast. I can’t say I prefer drawing a plaster cast but it is fixed and it doesn’t need cups of tea every half an hour.
CG: How important is it that people understand the process behind the work?
CH: Thinking of the tiger drawing, I found that people would always want to know its source. I was told about a group of Somali school children who were put in front of the wall drawing without knowing anything about it. When asked what it was, they shrugged their shoulders and said that it was obviously a lion. In fact, most viewers interpreted the drawing as an animal of one kind or another, and from the look of the work its possible to follow the tactile movement of the drawing. More recent work which involves the folding of surfaces will tell you other things to do with the processes, and with the mirror-writing on some of the drawings that were made with the paper facing downwards under the worktable.
CG: I was thinking about the later more abstract drawings. I too can see the tiger, but later I am not quite sure what the objects are. But as you explain them, I recognise them and that changes my reading.
CH: There’s no way around that.
SK: Chris, are you suggesting that there might be an occasion where one would be a pure viewer untouched by any knowledge of the process: that there may be an encounter with a work while knowing nothing about it. Or are you asking, if the work is founded on a process, if it is still a work if the process is not make evident in some way?
CH: I don’t think it’s a bad thing to have these kinds of questions - they can be very fruitful. In an ideal sense, it would be good if people could look at something in the way you describe, not to be told anything about it, just experience it. In practice they can find out other information to do with the processes and then go back into the work if that interests them.
KB: You have been one of the main inspirations of my work. I’ve been working with blind people; blindfolding myself and drawing certain objects and then getting the friends that I have met in the institution to draw the same objects. Does memory played a big role in the drawings? Is there a difference in drawing those object you have seen, with those you have not?
CH: There is a difference. If they are objects you know you have to find ways so that memory doesn’t keep pushing you in certain directions. I did take a group at Kettles Yard with a group of visually impaired people. We were drawing under and around surfaces, drawing plants. Then the drawings were put through a machine that raises the marks so they can be felt with the fingers. Before that, when we looked at my show there, they were quite upset that there was nothing for them to feel – it was all so flat. Then they had made flat drawings which became raised and we realised that we started from the same place, but they went that way (gestures to the right) into something that they could feel. I went that way (gestures to the left) into something I can see.
KB: How long did it take to draw your brothers’ face?
CH: I realised I could get more into the drawings if I used biro, to keep putting marks on for one or two hours and still be able to see them later. If it were charcoal it would just become a mass of black. A friend suggested I look more into this, and that’s what I did over several months. That’s when it became clear to me, that the drawings changed in strange ways and followed the head if I moved it, that I could push the drawings and the object too, that it wasn’t a repetitious thing. It was a way of looking into that process to see what it means rather than just what it looks like.
Audience: Your subject matter seems accessible with the plants and the things that are close to you like the tiger. It seems like still-life material. How much importance does tradition and accessibility have in relation to the pleasure that people have in seeing your drawings?Does the work echo tradition in a way that makes it more pleasurable?
CH: I hadn’t thought of it like that. It’s a way of literally getting in touch with something that has some significance for you or has an undiscovered significance. Why choose to draw the tiger? It’s actually quite an aggressive object in what it depicts but has a humour to it, which attracted me.
Audience: Am I right in thinking that with one work you had a plan view and then a side view of the plant and then superimposed those images? I found difficulty in that, in the sense that these were intended to be like an experiment, you are not sure what’s going to become of the process. There is a critical decision of composition – is that the pleasurable aspect? With the choices you are making it seems not to be so random as you suggest.
CH: If you push chance so far you just end up throwing a dice and that’s not particularly interesting. But if you can get chance to dovetail with things that are interesting - the subject matter - then that will produce something unexpected. In the case of the plant paintings the starting points for each drawing are the same, where the plant emerges from the ground, so I just positioned those points over each other so that the overlap or the intersecting of the two drawings happens.
LS: Tell us about the way that you move from the initial drawing to the scaled up pieces of work. There seems to be some thing experimental and investigative about the drawing. It is very rough, then when you take it on to the wall-drawing or the finished painting, it becomes more fixed, more beautiful. Is that an intention of the transferring of the one image to the other?
CH: To take the example of the plant painting and drawing, on the linen ground, for each colour I have made a different shape of dot and then below there is a similar related mark of the same part of the same plant. It is as though one pixel here relates to another pixel mathematically, but there is no fixed way of saying that one relates to a certain point.
LS: The two drawings are seen side by side so you can make that literal comparison. Are you interested in the translation of the image, from drawing to painting?
CH: Yes. At Kettles Yard, one visitor said the paintings as they looked like they could have been made by another person altogether. I think it was meant as a good thing. Perhaps that is what the technique is trying to get towards, as if I were a spectator on my own work.
LS: The gesture is removed?
CH: Yes - you are left with the content. Its constituents are broken into patterns, like an Islamic tile pattern in which certain elements lock together, describing actual three-dimensional relations. In other words, although a line here is put next to a line there, they could be at very different depths. They are seen on a flat surface so they are right next to each other but that allows you to find your own interpretation of the patterns. If the objectivity of the technique can allow that sort of dialogue to happen then I’m quite happy.
SK: In that sense the process or technique becomes a structure for what occurs afterwards in relation to the viewer and their engagement.
CH: Yes - it is like an armature, something to hang ideas and other things onto.
SM: I am curious about what you choose to draw; you seem to be saying that you are interested in drawing from the experience of the object you choose. You seem to have got a lot of animation from the still ornament like the tiger, but when you come to draw a person you have drawn from a plaster cast. It seems like a flirtation with experience but not quite daring to get into it.
CH: It depends what you mean by experience. In peeling an orange, someone once said to me that to do it blindfold, to have the experience of the smells and the textures while drawing it, could turn out messy.
SM: But you are actually drawing something made out of wood on the tiger that doesn’t really come through in the drawing. It would appear that your knowledge of what tigers are about comes into it as well.
CH: It probably would -because of the shape.
SM: So it is the formal drawing experience you are talking about?
CH: It is a mixture of the two. If you imagine touching something which has a three-dimensional contour, how you actually choose to put that mark down onto something flat, that is an interesting experience in its own right. But you are also drawing a thing which has its own story and even a small experience is more than enough to deal with - if that is what you are driving at - I could have drawn a real tiger or something…
SM: When you come to draw your brother, how much of what you know about him is coming into the drawing, above the touch of the plaster cast?
CH: It is impossible for me to say because I cannot see my own marks. If I was drawing and looking at my marks but not seeing the object then I would be able to choose my marks. There is no way of knowing whether memory is helping or hindering, what that means is left undecided. You can never exclude memory - it is not like memory is going to be left out entirely.
SK: This suggests what Derrida takes up – that the draughtsman is always blind at the moment the mark is laid down.
CH: Ah, like the story about Cy Twombly and his friends were in the army, they wanted to keep on drawing so they sat on their bunks and kept drawing after official 'lights out'.
SK: Yes, he is also looking at Chardin’s self-portraits - paintings made when the artist can’t really see himself. One may think of the letter from Diderot to Sophie Volland - he comes home late one night and writes to her that he is glad he had seen her that evening, that it is the first time he has tried to write in the dark without knowing whether his hand forms the characters. He writes ‘Where there is nothing, read that I love you’. Several days previously, his last remaining parent has died and there is another kind of absence or darkness that haunts him. Sumaya is suggesting that any act of writing, drawing or speaking is founded on memory and also on what one does not remember - what is excluded from memory and from speech.
CH: That’s a good way of saying it. You can’t absent yourself from being a person, and part of being a person is memory. It is like treating memory as a substance that is malleable. Of course it is built into the drawing, but you don’t need that much experience to realise that even a small experience like peeling an orange is a complex thing. Diderot also writes … about a blind man who is asked what he most wishes for, apart from having his sight back, and he says, ‘I’d like to have very long arms because I want to know what the moon is like’.
At one time I drew a water fountain, putting a grid through it, and drawing it onto graph paper by scanning through the water at different heights. I then had seven sheets of paper and put them all together in the computer to form one flattened, stretched out image of the fountain in some lightboxes. That’s like trying to visualise something that is moving. It is another kind of experience entirely and, like the plants, it has a certain order, it spouts in certain directions but what it does on the peripheries is unpredictable. It is a bit like the Surrealist game, Exquisite Corpse, in which you fold the paper and leave two lines for the neck for the next person to carry on. Instead of doing it with someone else, I was doing it with myself over an extended time, so later on when I put them all together (this also happens with the plant paintings) it is to see whether there is some kind of coincidence present.
CK: I’m wondering about your thinking including the cast and the blindfold piece in that particular work in the Saatchi gallery in relation to the viewer.
CH: Going further back than that, there was a show at Hales Gallery in 1995, which had two of those images directly on the wall plus the blindfold and the mask on facing walls. The idea was, in order to look at one you had to turn your back on the other. It had the same kind of effect in the Saatchi Gallery, allowing a different sense of pairing, although in that case there were four head paintings. It allows people to see that the images have sculptural elements, so why not think of a drawing as being like a sculpture, even though it is on a flat surface and you can only walk around the front of it rather than all the way around it?
CK: You said that drawing was the only way to record for you - in the age of technical reproduction, why are you still drawing?
CH: You have got all these things you can use: cameras, digital cameras, 3-d rendering, the moving image. All those things are very good at giving you something determined, for example if you have a 3-d scan of someone’s head it is a completely determined thing. That doesn’t interest me although it can be rather beautiful.
FH: There are post-productive stages.
CH: It is possible to take certain strategies from these things. I made reference to pixels and three-dimensional space in the talk. Like with the plant drawings - I'll read out a quote from a statement of mine from that time -'in working from plants it will be interesting to see whether it is possible to set them down just as they are but as if rendered by a three-dimensional computer program that has taken a holiday from mathematics'.
FH: But you use such knowledge of geometry. You understand planes, and you understand geometry.
CH: Just what is to hand. Like most people, I am self-taught.
AD: At the beginning of your talk, I was a bit sceptical. It didn’t interest me very much but by the time you got to the peeling of the orange I was gripped. That is partly because I had more information, but also you were becoming more interested in your own method. What I am particularly interested in is how your work appealed to all the senses. A computer head can show you what a head looks like but not what it feels like. I found your last canvases very aesthetic, not as dynamic as earlier work. Where are you going to go now?
CH: Sometimes when you make a painting or a drawing it feels like you are rehearsing for something that you haven’t quite reached yet. I want to get certain things right but at the same time I am trying to open the door to other things. I am pleased if you think that they look aesthetic - there is nothing wrong with that. Because I have been working with this non-optical technique I have felt a certain freedom to make objects that involve the eyes in an exaggerated way. I can always say that they were not made by-the-eye-for-the-eye, and there is still a lot of work that I need to do to find out where that leads. I may be finding out a bit more about geometry, but just to see whether these multiple-plane drawings have different things to say about the same object, and whether that can become a language in its own right.
BS: I am interested that the drawings are experiential and that they are bound by a strict set of rules that you set yourself. How do those rules come about?
CH: My father, Peter Heath, is a conceptual artist and he has worked with lots of different mediums. Through him I came to people like Sol Lewitt, one of my early heroes. I love that he could make a decision like making the woodcut print 'Arc From Four Corners', drawing four arcs coming from four corners in a repeated wave, then sending the drawing to be printed in Japan. When the proof was returned, it didn’t seem right to him. The wood-block cutters had in fact followed every single wobble that his pen had made, reproducing these perfectly. He had to consider whether this was part of his concept, and decided it was. It is this kind or process that interests me, that the wobbles of a pen may become something. Lewitt’s latest gouache works have sometimes become messy-looking by comparison, losing the geometry. There is room for new formulations there.
