Abigail Norris in conversation with Laura Ford. - Full Transcript
Abigail Norris and Laura Ford in conversation. 7/3/26
AN “I want to start with something to get everyone’s minds in the right place. I am going to read the first three minutes of a presentation that I wrote:
I want to take you on a poetic journey exploring the philosophical ideas that sit behind my creative practice, or perhaps, my philosophy of life. Either way, I feel compelled to issue a word of warning.
“The human condition is endless, depthless, bottomless and chaotic” Clarice Lispector
This small segment of my talk contains thoughts and direct quotes from different writers and thinkers that segue into and out of each other. Writers include Julia Kristeva, Erich Fromm, Julian Miles, Clarice Lispector, Margarette Duras, Carl Jung, Bracha Ettinger, George Bataille and myself . However, I will read these words as though an assimilation has taken place, as though these words have become embodied matter within my thinking….
“Words as flesh, thoughts as flesh, sensations as flesh, sight as flesh, sound as flesh”. Erich Fromm
Please fill in the gaps for yourself and start your own process of assimilation, and don’t try to make sense of my words, for making sense is the enemy of creativity.
Embodied Dereliction.
“I feel myself to be dispersed in the atmosphere, thinking inside other creatures, living inside things beyond myself.” Clarice Lispector
Meaning was created one cell at a time, brought on by tension and born from a state of painfulness and inadequate questioning, and yes, of course, the experience of touching emptiness.
”Just think - Within the collective unconscious we dream the dreams of millions of people that existed before us.” Carl Jung
History, flesh becoming.
What is it ‘to be’ in this world? What is it ‘to be a woman’ in this world? Why have I always felt connected to and yet so disconnected from everything?
“The ‘subject’ discovers itself as the impossible separation/identity of the maternal body. It hates that body but only because it can’t be free of it. That body, the body without border, the body out of which this abject subject came, is impossible.” Julia Kristeva
This impossible separation/identity of the maternal body mirrors the human separation/identity experienced with nature.
A universe existing in relation to the maternal womb.
Words are flesh, thoughts are flesh, sensations are flesh, sight is flesh, sounds are flesh.
I appear as an object in front of my own eyes and the ambiguity of existence all at once becomes clear to me.
If your soul were able to leave its tomb, where would it wander?
Cast me a spell for going forth by day, I would like to meet this oblivion.
“The experience of trans-subjectivity stems from the internal non-verbal language experienced within the womb during gestation. A language that passes between the mother and the child, between central nervous systems via the umbilical cord; an experience of knowing other through the body, female - male, female - female.“ Bracha Ettinger
“We are all bisexual…. there are more than two sexes…. we invent our singular sex in our intimate life.” Julia Kristeva
Our internal systems are in permanent communication with ‘other’ and yet we have learnt to ignore the signs.
She felt a perfect animal inside her, full of contradiction of selfishness and vitality.
“She still hadn’t tired of existing. One day she split into two, grew restless, started going out to look for herself.” Clarice Lispector
“She was lined with grey on the inside and saw nothing of herself except a reflection of her old rhythm, now slow and thick.She really had split in two, each part facing the other watching her wishing for things that the other could no longer give.” Clarice Lispector
Dürer’s philosophy of thinking, was that by observing nature precisely, one gets closer to the truth of the matter. Anything but truth, was an act against God. His prints were the first sightings of what a witch might look like. His drawings rendered an image of these women, in the mind of everyone who followed.
History, flesh becoming.
Okay. That’s enough (laughter) Now I’ve put you somewhere!
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Laura Ford: Thank you. That was beautiful!
You said, “making sense was the enemy of creation”, which I totally agree with you, in the studio. Now it's in the gallery, I'd like you to make sense of it for me. So, as we come into the door, we've got these amazing paintings, which immediately made me think of Madge Gill. They seem to be summoned up by the unconscious. But also, they made me think of the Hillary Mantel book Beyond Black. It's absolutely amazing, it's about a medium with all other kinds of spirits that live with her. And they're quite horrible, these spirits that she has to put up with because she's been through a lot of trauma, but at the end she ends up with some very sweet spirits and these are quite sweet spirits- I think- that we enter into. So I was curious, what were you thinking about when you made them? What you think of them now? And also, why you did the stitching around the edges?
AN: The paintings came about because I'd always wanted to paint. I've never allowed myself to do it. I've found the pressure, the sort of Canon of painting too much. And when Julian gave me the opportunity to have a show here and also gave me the opportunity not to show him anything before I brought it to the gallery, it gave me space to say to myself, "Okay, can I just imagine that no one's ever going to see these, and can I just devote the next six to eight weeks?
LF: Very hard thing to do.
AN: Very hard thing to do.
LF: Did you have loud music on to try and block out…?
AN: Well, I had this very strange music that my son gave me, which I found very useful at getting into a place. So, I love drawing, I've always drawn and I said to Julian, I'm going to bring some drawings along. They might have a bit of colour in them and look like paintings, but let's call them drawings.! That’s less scary! But I think what happened was that I went through this process. So, the first one that I did was the one on the left with the stitching round it, Untitled 1 (Psyche of Dreams) 2026. When that appeared, because it really did appear. I worked with this music, I was kind of opening myself up to something. I've been working with a process called Scrying, which is about bringing in or allowing a kind of communication with something ineffable. And with an intention to find something that suited this Nursery that seemed to be coming together around me. So, when I produced that piece of work, I thought, "Well, I don't I really don't understand that. I don't know what that is." And then I thought, well, this has got to be like interpreting your dreams. So, I got a Jungian dream interpretation book, and I interpreted it, and I thought, this is really interesting, because it had all these things in it that literally just went: intimacy. This is about intimacy. This is about the beginning of what it is to experience love. When we talk about nonsense and sense, things started to find a place that meant I could step between the non-sense into this sort of nursery. It gave me a lot of courage to go on and do the next one and then the next one and then the next one.
In terms of the stitching. I went to see Kerry James Marshall’s amazing show at the RA. I haven't seen a show that impacted me quite so much as that did for a long time. It's quite hard sometimes to find the thing that really gets you. It surprised me how much it got me. I loved the honesty. He was very honest about the way he presented things. He literally, they looked like an articulated lorry, you know, the things that you cover, tarpaulins. With rivet holes and screws, just pulled tight, I just thought, I love that honesty and it just gave me this idea of, that's what I need to bring to the canvas. Because I just felt like it shouldn't be mounted on a frame.
LF: Interesting that you chose blanket stitch, because they become like baby blankets.
AN: Exactly. And it felt right. It suddenly felt right, and it was a bit of a risk because I had to punch holes all the way around. But I just thought, I've got a feeling this is going to work. And somehow, for me, the stitching does something else , this dappling with the light, this rhythm that goes around it adds to it for me. I was quite pleased because they really reminded me of these rugs, when I had children, family members would make these lovely stitched things, and we'd have them on the wall, and they look nothing like my paintings!
LF: It is quite interesting when you have children that suddenly, I went from a very tough environment to everything started becoming covered with things. I’d find myself in John Lewis, which I'd never ever been in before. Thinking about soft things. Very weird. Then you go back to the soft things in your childhood.
AN: The whole nursery thing. Just felt like… in my studio, on my own. That Jungian dream interpretation really helped me understand my sculptures.
LF: So, let's move on to the gloves then. First of all, I think there seem to be two ways of making in the room. And there's these things that are very almost there, like the nurse outfit, the gloves, and then the fan, and then the others are a bit more sort of embodied. A bit more kind of present. But these are quite ephemeral and little suggestions.
AN: So, the gloves, if I talk about them all together, the ones that you've mentioned, the ones that are kind of hanging. For me, they push towards the ineffable. They're somewhere else. They tend to have their own history, they tend to have substance to them that doesn't come from me and my hands. You know, there are things that I didn't make. The gloves are vintage gloves. And they, for me, hold a lot of energy and history in them that taps into my upbringing in a way. I was brought up in a very sort of Christian manner. And my mother is a lot smaller than me, very beautiful, very delicate person, and I think all these things, like, what is it to be a woman? You know, what is it to grow up and be a woman that doesn't fit her mother's clothes and that doesn't fit in, that wants to climb up onto the roof and help my dad, but isn't allowed and has to wear dresses. You know, it's like this sort of. I don't fit those gloves. No way in hell I would fit those gloves. There's a sense of being kept out of that somehow and also being a little bit wrong, a little bit, always a little bit wrong. I don't quite fit. I think that's where the gloves come in for me. And there's the Christian upbringing. My father was very religious. My mother was sort of pulled away from it, but he stayed with it in his life and I became saturated in that, and it took me a long time to free myself. It's hard, when you think that God is watching you all the time. That's difficult.
LF: I went to a Catholic school and I wasn't Catholic, but it's amazing that those structures stay with you all your life, even if you've rejected every part.
AN: Absolutely. It's very hard, because it goes back to your beginning. Here we are in the nursery, it's nonverbal. The communication and what comes into that room is so much more than the parent that is picking you up. Histories, and all sorts of things are in there.
LF: Ways of behaving.
AN: Exactly. So with the swan feathers, I love that fan. When I found it, I didn't know what I was going to do with it, but I found it years ago, and I was very happy when I realised where it belonged. It reminds me of these imaginations that I had as a child of what an angel was like. And then the little nurse's outfit is very much, for me, about the responsibility that's put on women to be the carers. To rescue, to care, to behave.
LF: Again, you're going back to childhood. I remember having a nurse's outfit exactly the same. And you practice homemaking, you practice all of those things. So I felt that very strongly, but it is tiny and ethereal, isn't it?
AN: And it is one of those things that haunts you. You know, this caring role. It's so deeply right to care, but it tips. It tips into something else, doesn't it? As a mother.
LF: So that's interesting about the gloves and the body and the feeling too big, because the cow feels like that, and that's interesting is, women, well, certainly of our era, we were called cows if we were horrible. So I was interested with that cow, because the cow is drinking the milk and it has a neck curtain. There's a veil and it has no udders. So tell us a bit more about that.
AN: When I made Cow, which was back in 2022. It's a strange one. I don't want that to be the point. I don't want this female to have her udders stared at. That's not my point. I thought it would drive everyone's attention to milk. And I really thought, no, this is about a body, there's a different autonomy going on here for me.
LF: Can we just talk about how you made the body? Because that's interesting as well to me.
AN: So, with all my animals, they start from the skeleton up. Hare was the first one that I made, the skeleton is made of a biopolymer. Well, Hare is made of all sorts of things, because I was learning how to make it. So it's incredibly heavy and made from the most ridiculous materials. impossible to move!
LF: That's so interesting, because I think you can see that as well. Which adds to it all.
AN: I wanted that dead weight. I was inspired by Joseph Beuys’ How to explain pictures to a dead hare. Where he's telling this dead hare about art and he's got a gold face and there's honey all over him. Fantastic piece of work, obviously. And I was thinking, oh, that hare has so much more to say. And that's what inspired me to make Hare. But I started Cow with making these bones and I literally downloaded images of animal bones and then tried to make sense of the sizes of everything. I went to museums, but it's very difficult to find cow skeletons in a museum. So I had to start judging one thing up against another. And then I would use tights and wadding, or with Hare sand, to make muscles, which. Well, I didn't realise what I was doing, as my husband knows, because he's had to go to the osteopath many times!
LF: But that's what's great about it, because you know it really is a dead weight.
AN: Cow is not so much because I just thought, no, I can't do that too, this is going to be hard. So I literally made all the ligaments and the muscles to try and get it to look as real as possible. I just had a suspicion that it was going to have an impact with Hare. I just thought something's going to happen because it'll feel almost real. And with Cow I used cow hide floor rugs, reclaimed floor rugs, that people were discarding on eBay. With Hare, old fur coats that people were getting rid of, with holes and things in. I repurposed them and put them onto these bodies. So they are like elaborate frames, the underneath. But with those two, it's very much about the skin. And then what happened, once they were complete, because it really took until they were complete to sort of go, oh, right! I was looking for something that's a bit like road kill, that feeling that you get with road kill. You can't help looking at but, you don't want to look at that.
LF: But it's also had an impact, hasn't it? With road kill. So there's something wrong about it usually. That's where the curiosity comes from, I think.
AN: The sort of leaking body, which we're all frightened of ourselves, the horrors of the leaking body.
LF: So you've used a lot of those sculptures in lots of different ways. Can you talk a bit about the neck curtain and the milk bottle and the chair and how that came about?
AN: If you look at the whole thing all together as one thing, this nursery, and this search for intimacy, this search for understanding what love is, what do we need to do to be loved? I guess Cow, for me, is curiosity, because I think of the three main three sculptures as being Care, Curiosity and Cruelty. There's something really curious about Cow and the way that, as a young girl, of course my focus was, how am I ever going to have a male partner and get married? That was, I think, put on me by society, probably by my father. He was a wonderful, gorgeous, humble man, but there was this… what is it to be a woman? What makes a woman desirable to a man? And I couldn't work it out. And I guess those kind of little girl things of like dressing up as a bride, putting on your pearls, but at the same time, you want to be this potential wife, but you also want to be a baby and you want to do those two things at once. It’s a strange time.
LF: It's interesting, though, because it's in the Nursery, isn't it? And you talked about those gloves, and those gloves almost block the way, don't they? And you described yourself as this person that was too big and cows are sort of too big, aren't they? So is it is a sort of self-portrait?
AN: Yeah, kind of. But also then what it does to you, as a viewer when you are standing in there. It makes you feel small. It makes you shrink. And that makes me feel comfortable. You know, it's quite a nice feeling, having things that outscale you. It feels comforting to me. For me, the Cow sculpture was very tied to the story of the nymph, Io. She was raped by Jupiter. Then turned into a cow to silence her. And she's one of the moons that goes around Jupiter, so she’s stuck to him forever, poor love. But there's something of that in her.
LF: Then you've got this baby. That's sort of been thrown out of the cot and it's got lots of sucky things. And then there's the noise of the radiators as well.
AN: That was brilliant brilliantly done, Julian!
LF: So there's all this kind of liquids. The feeling of liquids.
AN: Yeah, I suppose in the paintings, there's lots of sense of real liquid. Psychopomp is the little creature that's on the floor, the little doll.
LF: Which is quite Eraserhead, isn't it?
AB: Yeah, it's quite a strange thing and it alarmed me when it appeared. That was a day in the studio pulling on all these sort of feelings that I was thinking about. I remember when I was little, my mum was exquisite at sewing. She's brilliant. She's gorgeous. She should be here, but I banned her so I could talk about her! She's wonderful and she's had an incredibly difficult life because she was born in Paris in 1940 as an illegitimate child. And hidden from the Nazis and then, at the age of five, left in a convent. I think this nursery is something of the ghosts of that experience for her, because obviously, she's a hard act, yes, but she's an incredible woman. Very difficult to deal with! In the nicest possible way.
So Psyschopompette just appeared. It's very like a doll. It's the same size as a doll that I had as a child, a Victorian doll that really looked like a baby, absolutely terrified me. But somehow when I was making it, and I was sort of defying my mum's “you don't stitch like that, you need to make it look beautiful”. And I can't. I actually can't make things look beautiful. But there was a bit of a conversation like that, and then this head with the tentacles. It's abject, right. Something that has no words to describe it, but when I finished it, I just went, yeah, that's it.
LF: Well, it reminds me of a sort of a baby at early stages constantly wanting to suck, which can be, as a mother, very, very exhausting. And you've got this baby that's been chucked out of the cot and in its place is this bloody great ragged Hare! So tell me about that relationship.
AN: Psyschopompette is really a bit of a time traveller.That's what it symbolises for me. It is the thing that takes you between thresholds, so heaven and hell, you know, past and present, future. It can move. It's unsettling in its whiteness and its sucky, tentacled face. But it's the thing that bridges the paintings and the sculptures. I see the sculptures as being quite exterior world, based more in reality, whereas the paintings are more interior landscapes. It feels to me like this Nursery has a little girl in it who has abandoned her nursery and all these creatures and this Psyschopompette. They've just been abandoned. She's gone now. She's walked off, she's left them. That's it. In a way, it feels complete. It feels like that's done.
LF: What about the Cat then?
AN: The Cat embraces this feeling of when you're a child and you love things, you love them so much that you might just squeeze them a little bit hard. I can see my little grandson, who is three, running around chasing his cat. And you have to say, Get off the cat, Remy, release the cat. You can see he loves it so much. And I thought, this is really interesting, this sort of stepping outside of the norm of how we're meant to behave, you know, and how. And how we deal with cruelty.
LF: And what's it doing on that step ladder? It's not tied to the step ladder. It's a kind of a suggestion that it could. So what do you think you've made there?
AN: I mean, in terms of that space, you see, you're looking at it individually, whereas I look at it as a whole. What do I think I've made?
LF: For me, quite often one can have a very clear idea of what you think you're making. And then a lot happens in between. And then at a certain point, you've got to kind of look at it and go, well, that's what I thought I was making, but I've made this. What are the elements and what feelings do they evoke, what thoughts do they evoke?
AN: It's strange, actually. You're kind of touching a nerve, because I haven't really worked this one out. So you're going to have to forgive me, right? Because I might shudder with this. Because I guess things are portraits. I mean if you think about the work being about relation, there are relationships that are binding, they are cruel, they stifle something.
LF: Because it does look broken. And also it looks like it wasn’t a very nice cat. It's quite Louis Wain, those early black cats that he does, so it's a bit of a psycho cat.
AN: It's interesting because I don't see it. I'm very fond of it. I don't feel like it's dark in that way. It feels familiar in a really companion-like way. And I do see myself in it. I can see it. There was a moment I walked past it and I went, I know that feeling of being, with my legs, like climbing the back and not quite your legs and you feeling physically like something, but you know... And you're right, when you set out to make something that's like an idea, I didn't imagine I would leave the legs bare like that. But when I saw them, I was like, oh, I must not cover those. They have this very unnerving feeling about them. They're slightly ratty for me. They sort of tip it into rat.
LF: It's interesting that you came from film. I think probably the time you were making film, it was actually difficult to make sculpture that had narrative. It was really not on, it was not allowed. And so to make that show that you've made 30 years ago would have been, like, that's not proper sculpture.
AN: I've had that said to me many times! That's not real sculpture.
LF: Well, it's interesting, because although there's a narrative, the narrative is not fixed. And it is very open, isn't it? It's not plodding your way to an end. It's interesting that film for me when I was starting to make sculpture was a sort of sanctuary because there was alot of narrative that got kind of exploded or disrupted and it's a nice way of working.
AN: It's interesting because I very rarely think about filmmaking. But I did get a sort of sense that that there was this timeline that somehow felt like it was present. I sort of recognised that, when you're doing the edit and you're going through something again and again and layering the sound and all the visuals.
LF: Yes, because it's quite theatrical as well, which was also a no no back in the day. You weren't allowed to do that.
Final question. The thing I find when I'm making disturbing and creepy work is, you've got to sell it. So how? And maybe I should ask Julian. It's such a curious thing to be doing, making really difficult work.
AN: When Julian and I started working together, Julian did say to me, he said, "I don't know how I'm going to work with you." And I said, " yeah, I don't know how you're going to work with me,” because I have set myself not to ever think about that at all, in terms of the sculpture. Because I can't make the work I feel I need to make. Which sounds so grandiose, and I apologise. I'd love to temper my ego, but I feel that I've waited so long. You know, I really tuck myself into a little box. Many, many years ago.
LF: Well, I suppose it feels down to why you're making it.
AN: I mean, I'm making it because I feel like I need to. I have an absolute need. I was kicked out of Art college when I was 19. And then I became a mother within a month. When I found out I was pregnant, it was a very difficult time. And in a very difficult relationship for about 10 years after that. That compression, once it was lifted, and then I had to sort of work out who I was, raise my kids. I waited 35 years to go back to college and go, this is what I should have been doing when I was 19. You know, I should have been doing this, I should have been doing Fine Art.
LF: Would you have been doing that at 19?
AN: Probably not exactly that, but I wish I'd been on a Fine Art course, not on a crafts course. Following my father’s footsteps. Pleasing people. So to answer your question, it's really hard for me to do that. And I want to, because I want to make it work, but the only way I can make it work is, my husband is a textile agent and designer. And he sells textile designs, which I do to earn money. And Julian does his absolute best to take my work to places!
LF: Can we open it out to the audience? Curious to see what questions people have.
Q I'm really intrigued that you actually built the whole skeleton because I thought you would go to an abbatoir and get some dead animals … it looks like you partly constructed them from real animals. It has this kind of feel to it. I associate your work with Berlinde de Bruyckere who uses the flesh of animals. And the Cat hanging over the ladder, the animal displaced in a human state of being, I find that really quite moving... I really liked the whole uncanniness of it and the tale telling. I find it highly unsettling. Are you meaning to unsettle people? Is that a way to create a dialogue? Or is that an accident?
AN: I think there's a bit of both. I think it appears, it comes across. I can't really control a lot of it, because once I see that it's right, once something's there and I'm looking at it and I judge it. I do a lot of research wise, philosophically, I think about, attitudes. I think about my own history, I think about where we are in the world, the whole thing and then I go, well, that's it. And I guess we are not exactly living in a settled world, and that will be seeping in, you know, that the nursery is not necessarily, the nursery of my children, it's the nursery of my mother and my grandmother and my great grandmother. It's a passing down of things.
Q: Because it feels like a sacrifice, that scene, to me. A sacrifice, that has to be done in order to collectively function. In an ancient way. Where they might sacrifice the king. And it needs to be done, not always in a literal sense.
AN: That’s interesting. I haven't thought of it from that perspective, but sometimes I think of art making as laying your innards on a butcher's block and waiting to see what people are going to do with that. And I think that there is an element of that, I feel like there are some real personal histories in that. I don't want to burden people with that. I'm not interested in burdening anyone with that, but it is part of being human, right? I mean, all of us, all of our families, our histories, affect who we are today. We can't help that. And we've, all of us, through our ancestors will have experienced war and difficult times, bad relationships, all sorts of things, and I feel that, sometimes those things aren't discussed, here in Britain. You keep those things to yourself. What I love about my kids is that they seem to be so interested in learning about this. Sometimes a little bit too much! They're so interested in understanding who they all are and how they behave with each other and the impact that they have on each other. I really enjoy that. My daughter came down yesterday to see the show. And we were just talking afterwards, and I was thinking, this is amazing, she's so self-reflective. I really enjoyed that.
Q: You said the word flesh many times. When I looked at your work, it seemed much more about skin and surface with the implication of a volume and the implication of the skeleton. But I didn't feel I had any access to what was inside it. So I’m interested with this difference between skin and flesh. Because flesh seems to be this embodied thing. And then you mentioned about spreading your guts on the table. And I was wondering whether the flesh was a psychological thing or whether it was a real thing.
AN: The only way I can relate to that question is thinking about the body as a cosmic thing that, when I say history, flesh becoming, when you think about, say, in relation to witches. When you think about what happened to those women's bodies, because they were seen as witches, the cruelty that was attached to that. There's a real link to the body. Skin is really important, but it's what it holds. Skin holds something. And for me, I'd hope that the animals are entities and the entity is the body. For me, they all feel quite female, those bodies. And it's a very mediaeval philosophy of thinking, that your body is connected to the universe. That they used to be able to tell what was wrong with them, or medicate each other by reading the stars. I'm really fascinated by that because I feel that, when there's a full moon, as a woman, sometimes you really know that, through your period. That might be really affected. We are linked. For me, that's my belief, my philosophy, that we don't finish at our skin. Things are moving around us, through us, in metaphysics. We are very leaky, and we're very entangled. You know when someone moves into the room who isn't okay for you, you know that feeling, you know that you want to pull away, but you don't need to say anything or do anything, you just know.
LF: I think the paintings are really fleshy. They're very bodily.
AN: Yeah, because I think they really do come from, goodness knows. I don't want to analyse them too much, but they do feel sort of almost central nervous system and you get a sensation from them. I can't really explain them. Every now and then I see things in them. And go Ok! I said to my daughter, "Can you see anything?” She's like, "Oh, yeah!”
I really love Bracha Ettinger's thinking where she talks about the child in the womb, this non-verbal communication, this communication of waves or vibration, the child experiences through the mother, and that it just links out! It goes out. Everything is connected.
Q: How long has just the milk in the bottle in the cow? Is that fresh milk?
AN: It is actually. Well not fresh anymore!
Q: I was just wondering whether that was done deliberately.
AN: I honestly couldn't tell you why I insisted on that. Sometimes, you know, going back to what we were saying, you do things and you just go, I know that that's the right thing to do.
Q: I’m just thinking, what's going to happen to it? It reminded me of Helen Chadwick. What happens if it explodes?
LF: Does everyone know about that Helen Chadwick piece that she had in the ICA, which was filled with rotting vegetables and they forgot that these become very hot and explode and the whole of the ICA had to be refurbished after that show. It made me think of that as well.
AN: And it's liquid of a body. It's lifegiving.
LF: It’s gone sour!
AN: but it's. But it's also creating its own little bacterial thing going, you know, it's mouldy now. But I think that the fact you thought of Helen Chadwick, for me is essential. Because at the beginning, it's an assimilation of information, I have a very, very poor memory. I can't reach for things, which is why I sort of held onto this text like a dummy in a way, because I wasn't sure what I'd be able to give you, you know, because I can't reach out for words sometimes. And I think that art making for me is about those poetics, it's about creating, allowing an image to exist that might take you somewhere, that I have no control over, that I enjoy the fact that you'll go off and find these things, and that these references that I have will somehow just pass through, you know?
Q: When I saw the veil I thought, oh, she's a bride. And then, oh, maybe it's her christening.
AN: Yes. And it's all of those things. But it's none of it.
LF: But it's also a curtain, isn't it? It's interesting that it can be all of those things and still a horrible old curtain, really.
AN: I remember when I was doing that, I felt really nervous about doing that. I thought, oh, God, this is so different to me. I don't normally do things like that. But it really reminded me of my kids when they were growing up and the dressing up box.
LF: Yeah, it's just so exciting.
AN: It's so exciting. Yeah. And I thought, yeah, I'm going to do it. I'm going to put it in1
LF: Things that stand in for things. Really exciting
Q: There are humans and animals, in the environment that you've made, and the humans are gone and they've left their skins behind, coming back to the nurse’s uniform, the gloves and the fan. But the animals are so present, but dead. And that dead weight of the hare, even though I know that the construction is different with these new ones you filled. They still have that incredible feeling and just weight and sadness and there's so much there. So I wondered, what are you thinking about? Because when you were talking about narrative being missing from sculpture, to see animal forms also feels like something that I haven't seen for such a long time. So, can you just talk a bit about animals please?!
AN: Where do I begin? There's so much to say on that. How can I talk about this? I'll take it back to a real personal memory first and then hopefully it'll help me spring out. When I was little, in my first five years, my father was an architect and he'd had a breakdown. He was not very well. So we moved from London out into the sticks, Oxfordshire, Northamptonshire border. And we moved into a derelict house that had no roof, and my dad set up a tent and a caravan and said to my mum, who was a Parisian woman, "You're going to cook at this fire and raise the children out here whilst I build this house.” I mean, imagine it! It’s just unimaginable now, in a way. That particular scenario, with next to no money. And so I grew up in the garden. And my parents were in their own world. And I was tiny. I learnt to walk by holding on to the edges of the tent and you know, I must have been covered in mud all the time. My brother was two years older than me. And our family dog was my absolute world. I knew nothing other than this dog. It was a big red setter. Much bigger than I was. And we spent all our time together. And I was with the bugs and the creatures, and one of my biggest memories was looking at these ants and things and just thinking, God, they're no different to us! And I remember that pre five, and it is the essence of everything I do, is that moment of just going, they're no different. Why is everyone saying this is different? It's not just an ant. It's not just a dog. No, that dog was everything to me. Absolutely everything. So what I would say is, from that, when I think about Hare, when I made Hare, thinking I was making this hare, that was inspired by Joseph Beuys, when it was finished, I was laying next to her, and I thought, oh, my God, it feels like my dog. I’m really sorry. His name. I've almost didn't say it, but his name was Flappy. I feel embarrassed every time I say it. He was the first gorgeous dog.
LF: But I suppose we all grew up with reading stories, don't we? Children's stories are full of animals, that live human lives, really.
AN: And I think as a young child, your connection with animals is intense.
LF: Yeah, and you really project all your emotions.
AN: Exactly. And they're nonverbal like you. A lot of the time. You're trying to catch up with the adults of the world. But actually, they're lovely, safe places as children. But then when you flip into now and you look at Hare, again, another layer to that was looking at how the wildness of the UK has gone. Where is it? It's a kind of loss. So as my tutor at the RCA said to me, "Your works are about the poetics of loss. And I thought, wow, okay. It took me a long time to get my head around that, but I do think that that's true. And I think that Hare is very much a statement about that loss in terms of the wild. Cow is very much about what on earth is happening within industrial farming. It's insane. These are bodies, these are real beings on this planet, and so, yeah, I think it's very much that. I feel very connected to those.
Making Cat was a very new thing for me. I thought I don't want to get into this making sculptures that have to have animal remnants. It has to work in a particular way for me. I don't want to get into buying leather or I don't want to get into buying things. That encourage any kind of maltreatment of animals. So when I made Cat I wondered whether there was going to be the magic in Cat that there is in Cow and Hare, and I don't even know if it just felt like I can be cruel to you. I can actually tie you to a ladder and do whatever I like to you. I couldn't have done that to Hare or Cow. So that's kind of telling in its own right, I think.
Q: Can I just ask about the paintings? Do you think they are a departure from your past work? Or do you think there are a pause? Or are they linked?
AN: I think they're very linked for me. I mean, I wish I could just cut myself in two and go off in two directions at once. I feel very excited about what will come next with the painting, because it's such a new thing for me. But I also feel wedded to my sculpture. And I think that actually in reality, I see the two very much hand in hand. It's going to be fascinating to see how they come together and go apart as time goes on. I think that's how I look at it. That they inform so much for me. They allowed me that interpretation that I did, that dream interpretation that I did on that first painting. They allowed me to put the nursery together. That was really exciting. They helped me see who these creatures were and understand that Cat was the next thing to make. So I think that's quite interesting.
In terms of time, I wish I could just divide!
