THE INTERNATIONAL
INTERVIEW (3)
William Radice
The painter Franki Austin has BA in Fine Art at the Central School of Art and Design in London, a postgraduate Diploma in stained glass from St Martin’s College, and a Masters degree from the University of Plymouth. She has taught in several art colleges, but is now a full-time painter and stained-glass maker. Her recent exhibitions have taken the form of ‘painting installations’ – groups of paintings or glass panels linked by a theme and placed in a context. On her website (www.frankiaustin.co.uk) she describes her work thus:
Everything interesting happens in the space between one thing and another; relationships between individuals, between societies, between times. These spaces - literal or metaphorical - and the edges that define them are the subject of my work.
I met her at Canary Wharf, east London: the hub of London’s
regenerated docklands area. Going there
is like stepping into the future, or on to another planet. Emerging from the ultra-modern tube station
that is on the extension to the Jubilee line that connects the docklands with
central London, I found myself reeling from the sight of brilliantly lit
sky-scrapers soaring into the darkening November sky, and from the chilly wind
blowing off expanses of water. I doubt
if I would have found Franki’s painting installation there if she had not met
me at the tube station and taken me along vast shopping malls to the relatively
modest shop-window that is the showcase for her latest work: ‘Stories of
Desire’. It consists of 9 canvases only
about eight inches square, each one the façade of a box placed on brightly-lit,
glass shelves. Some of the canvases are
abstract, even monochrome; others have delicate line-drawings on them, or a
single image such as the one of a green apple with bites out of each side of
it. She told me that the paintings were
inspired by three sets of myth: Adam and Eve and Lilith, the Minoan stories of
Pasiphae and her sister, the death goddess Circe, and the Sumerian story of
Ishtar’s descent into the kingdom of her sister Ereshkigal. Like other works by Franki that I have
seen, ‘Stories of Desire’ is quiet, meditative, subtle. After looking at the installation, we went
to a café to talk.
WR:
What is an installation?
FA:
It’s a work of art in which the context is as important as the content. When you look at paintings in a gallery, you are not being asked to look at the gallery too. But with an installation, the environment or social context in which it is placed is important: the viewer is being asked to relate it to its surroundings.
WR:
Your works are ‘painting installations’, or ‘glass installations’: they have canvases or panels that you have carefully painted or crafted. But many installations these days consist of ready-made objects. Why are so many contemporary artists drawn to that kind of work?
FA:
It has a lot to do, I think, with the kind of training they are getting in art colleges. Young artists are taught to be ‘public intellectuals’, to deal as much with ideas – political, philosophical, psychological ideas – as with the traditional media of art.
WR:
Is this why we hear so much about ‘conceptual art’?
FA:
Well, all art is conceptual, but strictly the term should be applied to something like Michael Craig-Martin’s ‘Oak Tree’, which consists of a glass of water placed on a shelf and transformed into an oak tree through the process of reading. In that piece of art one thing is conceived as another – visual perception is attacked by language.
WR:
So Tracey Emin’s notorious unmade, litter-strewn bed is not conceptual art.
FA:
Not in that sense – no.
WR:
Art colleges obviously have influence, but installations seem to be very popular with artists and the public. Why is that? Is the temporary nature of many installations – quite different from the permanence that so much painting and sculpture of the past has aspired to – part of their appeal? Do they have the immediacy of a performing art?
FA:
Performing arts – theatre, music, dance – are time-based, whereas an installation can be looked at any time of day. But I do think in a world that is changing so fast, people do respond to works that respond to change. The ephemeral seems natural.
WR:
Let me ask you again about the use of ready-made objects in so many installations, though you don’t use them yourself. What is their appeal?
FA:
Well, part of the reason for their use may be that many artists do not feel as confident with traditional media as they do with their creative ideas. This might be because art colleges have so many students now – and so few teachers in relation to the number of students – maybe drawing, painting, carving etc. are no longer the prime skills to be acquired at art college.
WR:
So installations using ready-made objects can be a short cut, or a mask for inadequate skill.
FA:
You could say that, yes, but they are more likely to be a choice made from the kind of skills that artists now possess.
WR:
How important is tradition still? Many modern art-works seem cut off from any tradition. Is that another source of their appeal? Old master paintings often require a lot of knowledge of history or mythology. Maybe it’s liberating to be able to enjoy art without bothering with all of that.
FA:
Yes, it can be a relief not to require such knowledge, but I think tradition remains important to most artists. It’s certainly important to me.
WR:
Why?
FA:
Well, art has to come from somewhere. And you can’t break through to something new unless you know what has come before. The past certainly weighed heavily on me for a long time, until I felt I had found my own style. But when you do find your style, tradition can open the way, not tie you down, because it can point to new, untried possibilities.
WR:
How important is craft to you?
FA:
Very important, because I need the act of making in order to develop and complete my ideas about something. It’s also a protection against becoming too spiritual, too drawn to the numinous. It earths what I do.
WR:
What for you is the connection between art and religion?
FA:
Religious content in art has always been important to me. I had a Christian upbringing, but I soon became drawn to myths and symbols in various religious traditions. But more than that, I want my works to inspire meditation: not to tell people what to think, but to make them stop and think.
WR:
So for you, both the making or art and the appreciation of art is contemplative – religious in that sense.
FA:
Yes.
WR:
Does art do any good?
FA:
I like to think it can do, if it has a context. That’s probably why installations have come to mean a lot to me. By putting ‘Stories of Desire’ in the middle of a busy shopping mall, it just might make people stop and think about whether, by spending money in the shops, they are actually getting what they desire!
WR:
So your kind of art, placed in a commercial context, can a counter-force to materialism? Does presenting your paintings as an installation, rather than in a gallery, make them more useful?
FA:
Possibly, yes – and that may be why installations above all appeal to me and other artists. Art can be more socially useful that way; it can do a job; or at any rate the chosen context increases the chance of it doing some kind of job.
WR:
Are you an ‘English’ artist? Does nationality matter any more?
FA:
My background was quite mixed, quite cosmopolitan. My grandfather, though a Scot, worked in Russia. My art studies began at the University of Hong Kong. But nationality is relevant in that you express who you are, and you are largely made by the society to which you belong.
WR:
Is it significant that you are a woman?
FA:
It’s not necessary that the audience for my work should know that I am a woman, but it is of course relevant to who I am. As with nationality, you express who you are, and I am a woman as well as an English woman.
WR:
Are female artists different from male artists?
FA:
It’s perilous to generalise, but I think they are. And they can certainly be differently treated. The influential critic Herbert Read, for example, never treated Barbara Hepworth as if she was in the same league as Henry Moore. In painting, women do, I think, apply paint differently from men.
WR:
You mean in the actual, physical use of the brush?
FA:
Yes – it’s something to do with the way women go round things more, approach a task from all directions at once. Men tend towards a linear approach, and like to build things up step by step.
WR:
In other works of yours that I’ve seen, you’ve used words quite a lot. Why do you do that?
FA:
I like the idea of simultaneity: if there’s a word in the painting or on the glass the viewer takes it in with one half of the brain as a word, and with the other half as an image. But I don’t know how successful this is. It brings in words intuitively, not always intentionally.
WR:
Most artists have a potential ‘second art’ – what they would be if they weren’t what they are. For example, I’ve always felt I would be a musician if I wasn’t a writer. What would you be?
FA:
I’d be a writer. Maybe a poet. Words in poems can make people think and reflect – like the images in my paintings, I hope. And words in poems move about like images in art – they can seem different according to how you look at them.
WR:
‘Stories of Desire’ certainly works like a poem. It’s a shame there isn’t some way of determining how many people have stopped in front of the window to look at it – like ‘hits’ recorded on a website!
Before we parted, I asked Franki to take me back to have another look at the installation, and she took some photos of me in front of it.