How did you go about the layering of these works?
I suppose it is to do with the idea that I am not trying to push my views, and I do have strong political views, on to the viewer. I think I work with enough detachment and observation as well as a lot of time archiving images which lead me to using combinations of those images to make the drawings. I think all of that plays a part in how the finished pieces are perceived.
The drawings themselves are quite straightforward in a way because they are protests I would be interested, or invested in, anyway, so they are political in that I am depicting something I agree with. There is a lot of work which looks at Abortion Rights, Women’s Rights, Black Lives Matter and other subjects which would fit into the left, liberal side of politics. And I am depicting images of those particular subjects.
But, the work is also about how we visualise politics, and what that is, the system of politics, laws, governance, a system of decisions, and that is all put together in quite complex ways. The drawings depict that moment where people are trying to change the way that system, or aspects of that system, work. Sometimes these are pivotal, transformational moments. Most of the time the work is drawn from news footage I find online, and of course I take many of the photos myself. The images are moved around, collaged and played with, and then reproduced, meticulously, in my drawings.
I am not offering up propaganda. These images are put forward very carefully, where care is taken to delineate the situation being replicated. Many of the ideas I think about relating to urban spaces, or a climate of fear, or the relationship between crowds of protestors and their immediate surroundings, of the agency people have in urban spaces, all of that gets condensed into the pictures.
Precarious Freedom is more than just the large drawings?
Yes. That body of work is the drawings and the paintings, but it also has the installation of the flag piece, “The Dark Europe”, which is a conceptual piece about Brexit and about remaking the image of the Union Jack being formally removed from the assembled flags of the European Union. That piece of work is sculptural, it is spatial, and it uses quite a lot of elements that I used through the public art series as well.
Your work has a very high level of technique and craft?
I think you make the art you are able to make. I do look at artworks critically. I am not suggesting you spend all your time dissecting the composition of a particular piece, but I do think you can question how pieces of art are composed, whether it works or not. I think if you look at an image and nothing in it disturbs you, then that work is probably well composed.
I am able to make these particular kind of drawings, these large images, and I do find it very satisfying I do find it very difficult and I can tell you that before I make a new painting, I procrastinate before I start. I am quite fearful of the large pieces. But once I have started, once I am physically working on a piece, and the initial decisions have been made, then I am immersed in the work.
There is another thing to add here, in that, you do have to keep working on your craft. If you don’t paint or draw for a while your hand becomes ‘rusty’, it loses its sensitivity, so you always have to be aware that an ongoing practice matters.
Does the work get criticised?
Sometimes people will say that I am aestheticizing politics and that is a valid question, but I can’t imagine that there would be people who would object to the drawings, the larger images, politically.
I can’t imagine someone who was opposed to rights for Irish language speakers, objecting to one of my drawings about an Irish language protest. These works are not in your face politically in that way.
To see more of Joy Gerrard’s work click on the links below