Interview with Alison Kennedy of A-OK magazine, April 2020. Original interview: https://www.a-ok.work/home/nataliemather
What was your first encounter with an artwork? How did this impact upon you?
I actually don’t remember my first encounter with a “real” artwork, the first time I met one in the flesh. But I grew up in rural Australia, and I do remember being obsessed with a collection of mail-order books my parents had – the kind that are issued each month, alphabetically, by artist. I pored over them, carefully, repeatedly, until the pages were grubby and soft. I particularly loved an image of a woman with red hair, floating in a flower-strewn creek bed. I now know it to be Millais’ “Ophelia”. I think what I loved about that image was how transporting it was: it utterly removed me from my drought-stricken, 1990s childhood reality and planted me somewhere imagined, beautiful, surreal.
Who would you consider to be an art hero or an inspiration to you (can be anyone or anything)? Why are they (or it) influential?
I love a lot of the mid-century Americans – particularly Frank Stella, for his willingness to venture as far into his wild visions as is physically possible. I love Eva Hesse – she’s the only artist I’ve had tattooed on me in any form – for her critical rigour and persistent self-belief.
To me, your work seems to critique the medium of painting that can emphasise virtuosity, planned compositions and artistic authority through presenting something provisional that simultaneously presents a series of contradictory points of view. In rejecting this view of art and substituting gesture, improvisation and allusions to figuration – where does this position the artist?
I don’t know if I set out to critique established or historical norms of painting and perspective or anything quite so grand – the work itself does end up toying with perspective and in so doing, questioning the authority of a view or vantage point as enjoying primacy. I like the idea of a viewer – and considering the artist to be the primary viewer – having multiple, shifting positions throughout the process of making and viewing a work, all with equal weight and significance.
The artist, in my case, is a purveyor of a dreamed-up imaginary, as well as a constructor, a builder – patchworking improvised scenes from fragmented and apparently unrelated elements.
Virtuosity has no place in the paintings I make, except out of the necessity to render something the exact way that I want to, or to have the skill to solve or incorporate accident and error. I am deeply open to influence, but I work and I work until the influence is almost completely filtered out of the work I make, indistinguishable in any way.
This was a hard question to answer!
The work reinvigorates the orthogonal frame, through intentional slippage in the multi panelled works. Could you comment on your intention in this strategy?
This strategy is creativity born of necessity. The size of the space I work in means that if I want to work on a monumental scale, I have to break it into panels. By accepting this method as a pragmatic solution to my working space issues, I saw the opportunity in it: the goal in my work is often to play with disruption and immersion – to suck a viewer in and then spit them out, keep them at bay, lure them back in, ad nauseum. The slippage between panels allows for an intentional disruption of the whole view, and yet functions as a pictorial device that is ultimately folded into the whole.
Why do you use a vibrant colour palette? How do you select your colours and the level of saturation and what effect do you think this has on the works?
I am an unabashed colourist. I thrive on colour throughout every aspect of my life – but I’m wary of splashing colour about on a painting indiscriminately (believe it or not!) – I use it carefully, strategically, to vibrate uncomfortably, to contrast, to create spatial relationships. I use vibrant colour to simultaneously engage and deflect, seduce and repel. Also, I’m a child of the 80s and 90s, so the more synthetic and toxic the colour, the more at home I feel working with it! ~
You appear to use collage as a basis for your works. How do you arrive at the collage?
Collage is a relatively recent introduction to my practice. It allows me to have a substructure to my painting, to guide the overall shape of the work, and give me a jumping-off-point, compositionally. I don’t use anything digital apart from my iPhone camera, which captures the collage before I disassemble it again – the collage pieces, this way, are reiterated dozens of times. I arrive at the collage somewhat blindly – it’s like a quick version of making a painting: I pull together elements, remove some, rearrange them, until I’m satisfied.
How do you entitle your work? What function do you intend the titles to fulfil?
I have a provisional poetic practice as well. Often the paintings’ titles are combinations of words I have been arranging and rearranging in my head like some demented semiotic ikebana. By the time the painting is fully realised, I usually have a good sense of what combination I’ll use. They’re often oblique references to things that have been happening as I’ve made each work.
How and why did you decide upon the scale of your work? (For example, it appears both inviting close inspection yet also enveloping the viewer.)
I think I am chasing different iterations of immersion in painting – for this, a large scale is the tip of the iceberg. It allows intimacy with the work, and in this intimacy, de-emphasises the edges of the work, and as you say, enveloping the viewer. The view becomes almost - but not quite – a world-view. This liminal space is significant, although I’m still figuring out how, exactly.
Do you refer to a particular time period in your work?
The 80s play a big part in my painting aesthetic – it’s the visual language I grew up with and around. The 80s has a huge nostalgic draw for me, but its aesthetics are important for another reason. To me, 80s design and pop culture aesthetics (Memphis Milano, neon signage, music videos) typify a kind of shiny, quasi-futuristic aesthetic that nests within an almost-apocalyptic neoliberal violence. I love the contrast – the interdependence of the saccharine and the violent has always appealed to me.