Tate Magazine Design

TATEETC. 780713 998733

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ISSUE 59 — AUTUMN 2023 £7.95

Tate Etc. Enrico Tassi, Deputy Editor enrico.tassi@tate.org.uk Figgy Guyver, Assistant Editor figgy.guyver@tate.org.uk Safi Bugel, Editorial Assistant safi.bugel@tate.org.uk +44 (0)20 7887 8606 Tate Etc. Tate Britain Millbank London SW1P 4RG www.tate.org.uk/tate-etc DISTRIBUTION UK Central Books mark@centralbooks.com +44 (0)20 8986 4854 Seymour +44 (0)20 7429 4000 International Cultureshock Media patrick@cultureshockmedia.co.uk ADVERTISING To advertise with us or to request a media pack containing our current display advertising or insert rates, deadlines and specifications for design, please contact advertising@cultureshockmedia.co.uk / +44 (0)20 7735 9263 BACK ISSUES Both current and some back issues are available to buy individually. For all enquiries call +44 (0)20 7887 8959 or email subscriptions@tate. org.uk OTHER SUBSCRIPTION OPTIONS You can also: subscribe to the digital edition (for both Android and Apple devices) via Exact Editions (individual / institution) contact us at subscriptions@tate.org.uk / +44 (0)20 7887 8959

Editors’ Note

Painting from nature,’ Paul Cezanne once said, ‘is not copying the object, it is realising one’s sensations.’ Many of us think we know how to engage with art in terms of what we can see, but how might we experience art through our other senses? This is a question that inspires Tate curator Marcus Dickey-Horley, who, with his team, has spent the past 15 years developing and delivering touch tours for visitors who are blind or partially sighted. At Tate Britain this autumn, you will find them guiding groups inside and outside the galleries, stopping to handle and discuss artworks such as Henry Moore’s King and Queen 1952–3, cast 1957, Hew Locke’s The Procession 2022 and Frederic Leighton’s An Athlete Wrestling with a Python 1877 – the scales of the snake cool to the touch and the strain in the young man’s arms immediately recognisable beneath one’s fingertips.

partially sighted children. Elsewhere, Cecilia Vicuña talks to us about the quipu, the ancient Andean system of knot-tying that will form the basis for her Turbine Hall commission, and artist duo Hannah Quinlan & Rosie Hastings teach us about the hands-on process of fresco painting. In a special feature on Cezanne, celebrating a major exhibition at Tate Modern, artists from Cezanne’s time and from our own describe the many ways in which his paintings have left a mark.

As Cezanne said, ‘An art which isn’t based on feeling isn’t an art at all.’

We have taken touch as a connecting theme for this issue, and in the following pages are the traces of many artists’ hands at work. We visit the studio of sculptor Maria Bartuszová, who created delicate plaster forms inspired by nature, as well as tactile ‘assembly kits’ for blind and

We hope you enjoy it.

Tate has a large and growing programme of activities and resources to ensure all visitors can access and engage with the national collection. ‘Everybody,’ Marcus says, ‘should feel that Tate is open for all.’ With this issue of Tate Etc., we are following suit: you will now be able to listen to our articles online at tate.org.uk/tate-etc.

Tate Etc.

Magic in this Country by Eleanor Clayton Barbara Hepworth’s love of landscape inspired the forms of her sculptures, her commitment to politics and her lesser-known fascination with the universe beyond.

I have been thinking about Barbara Hepworth (1903–1975) lately, and her connection to the land. For those familiar with Hepworth, this is perhaps the first thing that comes to mind; she famously stated that all her early memories were ‘of forms and shapes and textures. Moving through and over the West Riding landscape with my father in his car, the hills were sculptures; the roads defined the form.’

From the 1950s onwards, she sometimes titled her sculptures after specific places, often located near St Ives where she had moved in 1939, and she attributed her use of string in sculpture to the experience of the Cornish landscape, writing: ‘The strings were the tension I felt between myself and the sea, the wind or the hills.’ Yet, beyond the visual similarities between the forms of landscape and Hepworth’s sculptures, this connection offers a view into her deeper philosophy, her engagement with politics and society, and – perhaps contradictory to

the bucolic pastoral scenes they can evoke – her interest in man-made technological advances.

Barbara Hepworth was born in Wakefield in 1903 and grew up surrounded by the dramatic landscapes of Yorkshire. These forms would become enduring inspirations. As she entered the last decade of her life in 1965, she commissioned photographs for a book, Drawings from a Sculptor’s Landscape, of the Cow and Calf in Ilkley, rock formations that, according to local legend, were created by the giant Rombald splitting the great rock in two while running away from his angry wife. After moving to St Ives, Hepworth wrote lyrically of the impression Cornwall

made on her in her 1952 monograph Barbara Hepworth: Sculptures and Drawings, highlighting our bodily relationship to landscape but also the histories one can read within this material world, and the connection between the surface and the core of the earth: The sea, a flat diminishing plane, held within itself the capacity to radiate an infinitude of blues, greys, greens, and even pinks of strange hues: the lighthouse and its strange rocky island was an eye; the Island of St Ives an arm, a hand, a face ... The incoming and receding tides made strange and wonderful calligraphy on the pale granite sand which sparkled with feldspar and mica. The rich mineral deposits of Cornwall were apparent on the very surface of things; quartz, amethyst, and topaz; tin and copper below in the old mine shafts, and geology and pre-history – a thousand facts induced a thou- sand fantasies of form and purpose, structure and life which had gone into the making of what I saw and what I was.

A thousand facts induced a thousand fantasies – Hepworth could be speaking of the legends spawned

by Yorkshire’s extraordinary rock formations, and she found

) 1940 e and Red epworth Barbara H h Colour (Deep Blu wit Sculpture string laster and Painted p m c .7 10 × 11.5 × 15.2 © Tate ss. Photo © Bowne

Cornwall equally steeped in myths and legends relating to the land. In 1937, the scientist J.D. Bernal, a friend of Hepworth, wrote an essay on her work in which he aligned her abstract sculptures with the menhirs of Cornwall, the latter described in spiritual terms as ‘central shrines’, or ‘a means of egress for the soul’. Hepworth embraced the ancient histories of Cornwall and their spiritual significance, describing the landscape near Zennor as ‘a place to visit where we can feel at one with God and the universe’, while noting in 1972, ‘I’m very aware of Ancient Britons, just as I am aware of my great-great- grandmother.’ In refining her sculptural forms to geometric shapes, she aimed to create a universal and timeless language, one which, like neolithic monuments, also spoke to contemporary society.

A Cornish neolithic chamber tomb, Chûn Quoit, believed to have been built around 2400 BC, provided inspiration for Single Form (Chûn Quoit) 1961. This shield-like form was created during the development of the monumental Single Form 1961–4 for the United Nations Headquarters in New York. At the unveiling of the sculpture, Hepworth said that she hoped it would ‘give us a motive and symbol of both continuity and solidarity for the future’, something that was perhaps equally applicable to the ancient societies who created Chûn Quoit.

It was not only the historic landmarks of Cornwall that inspired Hepworth. In 1962, the telecommunications satellite Telstar was launched into space, and the Goonhilly Satellite Earth Station was established in Cornwall to communicate with it. Hepworth was invited to visit the site in 1963 and recalled: ‘I was invited on board the first one [dish] when it began to go round, and it was so magical and so strange. I find such forms of our technology very exciting and inspiring.’ She made sculptures of scooped semi-circles, including the interactive Four Hemispheres, cast in lead crystal, which invited the viewer to swivel the dish-like forms, to face one other – or out into space. In 1970, she wrote: ‘I think we’ve all assimilated a great deal of scientific discovery – the sensation of space, as well as a new conception of the universe.’

The space race throughout the 1960s captivated Hepworth’s imagination, and her experience of celestial bodies from the ground was heightened by her situation in St Ives, where the sun, moon and sky are insistent presences. As she often stated, the climate there allowed her to carve outside all

year round, and at Trewyn Studio, where she had moved in 1949, her external carving courtyard was accompanied by beautiful gardens in which to situate her larger works. She wrote to Ben Nicholson, her former partner and fellow artist, in 1966: ‘It is midnight 4th May & full moon! I have just been in the garden & in this light everything is strange & new. The flowering cherries & bushes are like stars. The sculptures strangely huge & ethereal. The moon is at right angles to my new “thinking room” (no stone dust allowed!) & the fierce and gorgeous moonlight gives a new dimension to all things.’

The feeling of connectivity to the landscape was no doubt heightened by living in a

small town, where much of the industry was bound to the land, or sea. In August 1946, recovering from a bout of bronchitis while working frantically on new work for her first solo show since the war, she wrote to her friend, the political activist and writer Margaret Gardiner: ‘the weather is unendurable – rain all the time – culminating in a storm last night of such ferocity that we lost a large section of our roofing ... far worse a Breton crabber was hurled up on the rocks & all hands drowned.’

children to a horse & cattle show – set in a vast field surrounded by sea, Trencrom & all the lovely landscape. It was sheer joy to see the movement & form of exquisite hunters, trotting horses, cart horses, bulls & human beings in the brief sunlight ... I think I’m slightly intoxicated these days by the beauty round us here in living things. Too great a contrast to “all the rest” but thank God for it.’

In October 1945, some five months after VE day, she wrote to Nicholson of her delight in the newfound freedom to roam the land, its tremendous impact on her work and her delight in what she saw: ‘there must be magic in this country round here.’

Barbara Hepworth: Art & Life, Tate St Ives, 26 November 2022 – 1 May 2023. Curated

by Eleanor Clayton, Senior Curator, The Hepworth Wakefield, Anne Barlow, Director, Tate St Ives and Giles Jackson, Assistant Curator, Tate St Ives. Supported by the Barbara Hepworth Exhibition Supporters Circle. Organised by The Hepworth Wakefield in collaboration with the National Galleries of Scotland, Edinburgh, and Tate St Ives.

Magic in this Country: Hepworth, Moore and the Land, curated by Eleanor Clayton, opens at The Hepworth Wakefield in January 2023.

Hepworth became involved in local politics, particularly as they related to conservation of the land. In 1963, she wrote in protest of the proposal to reopen a tin mine near St Ives, stating it would be ‘a crime, on our part, if we do not preserve for our children what we ourselves have been bequeathed’.

In an interview published in 1970 she described the ‘menace of pollution’ as a ‘threat to life’, akin to the atom bomb that had been dropped on Hiroshima. This parallel, no doubt considered at the time as hopelessly alarmist, is now echoed in the urgent concerns of contemporary environmentalists, and Porthmeor Beach, overlooked by the studio Hepworth painted in from the 1960s, has become a regular site of Extinction Rebellion protests.

Following the war, the ability to experience the landscape anew became a symbol of freedom regained and life emerging from the spectre of death. Hepworth wrote to critic E.H. Ramsden around the end of the war: ‘I feel refreshed today, because I went with the

I studied Fine Art at Wolverhampton Polytechnic in the 1970s. Being a country girl, I found the city pretty gritty, full of urban decay and politically charged: I remember a lot of anti-Nazi protests in particular.

Wolverhampton was one of the only colleges in the country that had spaces left available in clearing, so it chose me rather than me choosing it.

I was practising to be a painter, tussling with representation by trying to paint the physicality of light coming in through a window. I found I liked the reality of light itself much more than my crude depictions of it.

I would escape college to nearby derelict houses and spend many hours there finding other ways to capture light, using torn-up wallpaper and a staple gun. Some of my interventions took on three dimensions for the first time. Little did I know then that I was becoming a sculptor – and, even more radically, an installation artist. Later in my career, I had a eureka moment when I realised that the very first art forms – cave and body paintings – were, in fact, sitespecific installations.

Another experience that led to my becoming a sculptor occurred on a field trip to the artist David Nash’s studio in Wales. A few of us lucky students got to stay there for a week and observe his practice first-hand.

David made interventions in the landscape, planting trees in circles and fletching them (cutting them partially and bending them over) so that they became intertwined, forming a kind of espalier. Some of his works take years to be realised; some are planned beyond even his own lifetime.

to capture this grey landscape, which was alien to me, that I had another of my epiphanies. I had a jar of powdered graphite that I was rubbing into my paper to give it a grey patina when some large raindrops descended, splattering onto my drawing.

Then the wind picked up and a gust blew the powder across my paper, leaving these beautiful marks where the rain had fallen.

Nature itself was making the work. This was a similar realisation to the one I had come to in the derelict houses, where I had allowed (real) light to be part of the work rather than struggling to depict it.

I devoted the rest of my degree to making sculpture. At last, I had found something that was second nature, informed by a childhood working with my hands on my family’s smallholding. Material and process have their own history; all they need is corralling.

Cornelia Parker, Tate Britain, until 16 October.

Curated by Andrea Schlieker, Director of Exhibitions and Displays, with Nathan Ladd, Assistant Curator of Contemporary Art, Tate Britain. Supported by the Cornelia Parker Exhibition Supporters Circle, with additional support from Tate Americas Foundation, Tate International Council, Tate Patrons and Tate Members.

h g i the L

Cornelia Parker is an artist who lives and works in London.

Blaenau Ffestiniog, the town where Nash still lives and works, was once a slate-mining centre and is surrounded by grey shale slag heaps. Being Wales, the weather was atrocious during our visit, and trying to draw in the wind and rain was challenging to say the least. But it was while I was doggedly trying

g n i e Se

Cornelia Parker stands in front of the White Cliffs of Dover on a sunny day. She holds her right hand up to shield her face from the sun. Her left hand is on her hip.

Cornelia Parker at the White Cliffs of Dover, 1999 Courtesy the artist and Frith Street Gallery, London. Photo: Jeff McMillan

t h

C Each new generation inherits the world of its predecessors, deciding what to keep and what to reject. Values, tastes, stories and art can be cast aside, or continue to resonate, sustaining or even gaining relevance over the years.

Paul Cezanne was born in Aix-en-Provence in the south of France in 1839. His father, a respectable businessman and banker, wished his only son to attend the prestigious local

law school. Cezanne had other ideas. He wanted to be an artist – and more of a rule-breaker than a rule-follower at that. In 1861 he travelled to Paris to join his school friend, the celebrated author Émile Zola, and his creative circle. Here, he rejected what he saw as the stale practices being taught in the leading art schools, and the conservative paintings that were lauded at the annual state-organised Salon exhibition. Cezanne preferred to associate with lesser-known

‘With an apple, I will astonish Paris’, Paul Cezanne once claimed. Leaving his native Aix-en-Provence for the French capital in his twenties, this is precisely what he did. Here, we gather an array of artists from Cezanne’s time and from our own to tell the story of his extraordinary legacy.’

and more derided artists: Claude Monet, PierreAuguste Renoir and Camille Pissarro. So it was that Cezanne set about dismantling the old rules of art and building anew. ‘With an apple, I will astonish Paris’, he proclaimed.

Seen first as a fringe member of the impressionist group, recognition came only gradually in the later years of his life when a younger generation of artists lauded him as their hero. ‘My one and only master’, Pablo Picasso would later call him; ‘the apple of my eye’, said Paul Gauguin of Cezanne’s

THE APPLE OF MY EYE ARTISTS ON CEZANNE

The EY Exhibition: Cezanne is presented in the Eyal Ofer Galleries, Tate Modern, 5 October 2022 – 12 March 2023. Curated

by Natalia Sidlina, Curator, International Art, Tate Modern, Gloria Groom, Chair and David and Mary Winton Green Curator, Painting and Sculpture of Europe, Caitlin Haskell, Gary C. and Frances Comer Curator, Modern and Contemporary, Art Institute of Chicago and Michael Raymond, Assistant Curator, International Art Tate Modern.

The exhibition is part of The EY Tate Arts Partnership. Supported by the Huo Family Foundation, with additional support from the Cezanne Exhibition Supporters Circle, Tate International Council, Tate Patrons and Tate Members. Organised by Tate Modern and the Art Institute of Chicago.

Bequeathed by Gwendoline Davies, 1951. Ar fenthyg gan / Lent by Amgueddfa Cymru – National Museum of Wales

Still Life with Fruit Dish 1879–80, his prized possession: ‘I would part with it only after my last shirt.’

Growing admiration from artists still did not translate into widespread recognition. In 1896, the French state turned down three Cezanne paintings, and in 1921, after his death, Tate declined an offer to borrow and display The François Zola Dam 1877–8, a work later described by the critic Roger Fry as ‘one of the greatest of all Cezanne’s landscapes’.

The tide, however, was irreversible. Tate changed its position to become the first UK national museum to display Cezanne the following year, and the first to acquire his work in 1925. At Tate’s landmark 1996 retrospective, Cezanne attracted a recordbreaking 408,608 visitors. A spectrum of 1990s superstars clamoured to see it, among them Princess Diana and Meat Loaf.

We now look at Cezanne through new lenses, with new questions. How did he react to the turbulent political and social transformations of his time? How did he balance the influence of metropolitan Paris with that of his beloved rural homeland?

Should we continue to revere this one-time rule-breaker, now a core figure of modern art? As Cezanne himself said: ‘we should not be content with holding onto the beautiful formulas of our illustrious predecessors.’

What the following contributions demonstrate is that Cezanne remains a paramount source of inspiration and astonishment to today’s artists. This exhibition presents a once-in-a-generation chance for you to discover, or rediscover, Cezanne for yourself.

Michael Raymond is Assistant Curator, International Art, Tate Modern.

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The artist duo talk to curator Amy Emmerson Martin about the elusive art of fresco painting and how they keep things harmonious in the studio.

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Amy Emmerson Martin: What work have you been making for your Art Now exhibition at Tate Britain?

Hannah Quinlan & Rosie Hastings: We are presenting six new fresco paintings and a large graphite drawing. The paintings depict scenes of exchange, conflict and camaraderie in public spaces – on street corners, down suburban roads, in parks and public gardens.

When developing our compositions, we were drawn to ideas such as authority and obedience, questioning the types of authority that exist in public space: legal authority represented by police in uniform, moral authority represented by well-dressed ladies and suited men who observe and perform outrage, and the authority of the street represented by hustlers, loiterers and sex workers who take control of their territory in and around the pavement. The opaque scenarios depicted are imagined in part as an urban territorial battleground between these various forms of authority and in part as the natural surge and swells of people in overpopulated and under-loved cities.

Your practice encompasses video, installation, etching, egg tempera painting, and drawing. Why has fresco felt like the right medium for your recent work?

Fresco painting is often found in places of political, legal and educational importance and is executed at a monumental scale. Traditionally, frescos

depict scenes loaded with ideology and symbolism while presenting themselves as neutral or universal. A fresco often represents the moral code of the time within which it is painted, intended as an instructional and educational medium that reinforces dominant perceptions.

How do you go about making a fresco?

Fresco is the practice of painting with pigment mixed with water onto freshly laid lime plaster, usually on a wall or – as we do it – on wooden panels. It is an obsolete medium, in part because it’s so horribly difficult to execute, due to the speed at which the painting must be executed (while the plaster is wet), and also because of its hideously technical nature.

Plaster that is one millimetre too thin won’t absorb the pigment correctly, leaving the surface powdery and chalky. Plaster one millimetre too thick will cause the lime in the plaster to mix with the pigment, leaving a milky bloom on the surface of the painting and hairline cracks as the plaster contracts in the carbonation process. Between these variables are the perfect fresco conditions where pigment, unimpeded by any painting medium other than the carbonated plaster, glows as if illuminated by an inner light. Elusive and very difficult to achieve, this is the part of the process that fascinates and motivates us endlessly. We chase these moments through each very long, physically and mentally draining fresco day.

To prepare for painting the frescos, we make full-scale preparatory drawings called cartoons. We plan each detail down

Photo © Angel Li

to who will paint what, the colours that we will use and the size of each day’s painting, which is known in the fresco world as a giornata, or a ‘day’. On the day of painting, we apply two layers of silky intonaco plaster – a fatty mix of lime putty and sand aggregate – to specially prepared boards.

When the plaster is firm enough to paint, we transfer our cartoon, which has been traced and pricked with thousands of tiny holes, onto it and we dab pigment through the holes onto the plaster to be left with a map of our image to work from. We race to cover all the white plaster with a watery layer of paint, which seasons the plaster and helps keep it moist for more detailed work.

How have you learnt to work in this tricky medium?

We are largely self-taught. In 2020, we did a one-week course with Fleur Kelly, an experienced fresco painter based in the south of France, where we learnt the essentials. But the only true way to learn to paint fresco is through experience and the development of a symbiotic understanding of the materials and their characteristics.

We work to keep the painting style bold, graphic and monumental, since fresco is not a subtle medium. In certain areas, such as faces, we work more intensively, building up layers of pigment until we are able to blend on the surface of the fresco.

In other areas, we use only a single layer of paint. When we paint, we don’t sit down or talk or change the music. We are so anxious about the plaster drying before we can finish the image that we work in a state of heightened focus. When it works, it feels transcendental; when it doesn’t, it feels like hell.

The nature of painting in giornata, or section by section, is a highly unusual way to approach a painting because with other mediums such as oil paint, the painting is typically built up as a whole in layers. The surface of the fresco has scars running through it where the plaster joins; the small changes between colour mixes day-to-day can create a completely different feeling from piece to piece. There is naturally a degree of uncertainty as the painting changes so radically in the drying process.

We decided to embrace this aspect of fresco painting, to heighten rather than disguise its sculptural qualities. We love how visible the process is on the surface of the painting – how the fresco has its own architecture, and how the plaster and pigment turn to rock that will last forever.

Studio Visit Hannah Quinlan & Rosie Hastings Photo © Angel Li

Photo © Angel Li

Photo © Angel Li

The architectural qualities of built environments also feature prominently in your recent paintings, as they do in a lot of your work. Why is this something you keep returning to?

Exterior and interior architecture has always played an important role in our work, from our first collaborative project @ gaybar, when we built fully functional gay bars in studios and galleries and hosted live event series, to UK Gay Bar Directory, a moving image archive of gay bars in the UK. We are interested in architecture as something that shapes people’s behaviours, desires and orientations. For some, domestic architecture represents power – each property owner is the king of their castle – and for others, it represents repression and is a space encoded with rigid ideas of gender roles and sexual behaviour.

Have you drawn on specific artistic influences when creating your new works?

Our fresco series is heavily influenced by the Masaccio, Masolino and Filippino Lippi fresco cycles in the Brancacci Chapel in the Church of Santa Maria del Carmine, Florence, Italy. The frescos in the Brancacci Chapel depict biblical stories of saints who raise the dead, heal the sick, aid the poor and suffer imprisonment.

These saints move through the palazzi and public spaces with a sense of authority and social standing; they are often depicted as stern and powerful – prosperously clothed among a sea of rags and standing upright among the sick, dying and poverty stricken. We are interested in the way that these religious stories unfold within public spaces, where we witness an unruly clash of registers: the disciplinary power of the state versus the political and communal charge of the streets.

Meanwhile, the graphite drawing is roughly based on Paolo Uccello’s painting The Battle of San Romano c.1438–40 in the National Gallery in London, a battle scene featuring soldiers in armour and many horses. In our drawing, the battle scene becomes one of police militarisation, featuring mounted police in full riot gear. We have been thinking about the militarisation of the police in light of the new Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill and a ‘tough on crime’ political approach that results in urban gentrification, sweeping police powers and an expanding carceral system.

Have you been looking beyond art history too when carrying out research for these paintings?

For these frescos, we worked heavily with archival street photography from London, Paris, Berlin, New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco. We sifted through hundreds of images during our research and cut up sections of photographs that we then used to make collages for our compositions. Certain characters depicted in the frescos are Frankenstein’s monsters, assembled from many different gender expressions, body parts and costumes. Working with street photography archives – some dating back to the advent of photography – we were able to make our own history of the street, with the freedom to play with an infinite number of potential interactions between the figures. The result is that each painting speaks of many eras, expressed through architecture and costume. Working with existing archives or creating our own has always played a significant role in our practice. We are interested in creating an emotional and sensual relationship between the viewer and a historical moment. We are also interested in a horizontal rather than hierarchical relationship to history, and building empathy and understanding across generational divisions.

Working with archives also allowed us to make historical interventions and revisions. For example, one of the fresco paintings draws from images of two pairs of drag queens being arrested from gay bars in New York in the 1950s. In the 1950s and 1960s in the United States, the ‘three-article rule’ was used to criminalise LGBTQ+ people, especially so-called ‘cross dressers’. The rule stipulated that each individual must be wearing at least three articles of clothing assigned to their biological gender at any given time and resulted in a huge number of arrests in gay areas, such as Greenwich Village in New York, where police raids were frequent and brutal. In our fresco, we removed the offending police officers and the handcuffs from the arms of the drag queens, transforming the scene into one

where the queens are walking home from a wild night down a leafy suburban street. Interventions in art-making can’t heal the past or absolve it of its violations and abuses, but it can help you to reimagine the future, especially when drag performers, trans and non-binary people continue to shoulder the burden of such disproportionate political vitriol.

How long have you been working together in this way?

We have worked together for eight years. At first, we argued constantly as our individual artistic egos battled for space and our attitudes towards making clashed. Now we have a way of working that allows us both to flourish. On a good day, we have a deep understanding of our own vulnerabilities and strengths, we help each other grow, and we surprise each other constantly.

In order to work harmoniously, we follow a regimented approach to producing work and managing our studio. In relation to the frescos, we have a series of rules that apply to creating the composition, drawing the cartoon and finally painting. We design each giornata so that there is enough for us both to paint each day. People consider our way of working, especially on drawings or paintings, highly unusual, as they think about painting within the context of modernism and the myth of the artist as an individual genius. We think about art-making within a broader historical context as early practices of art-making were highly communal. Large groups of artisans would work together under the control of a master to produce works: one artisan would specialise in painting flowers, while another would paint the architecture. We work like artisans, but we have no master.

Photo © Angel Li

Speaking of flowers, where did the title of your new show come from?

We struggled to find a title for this exhibition as we didn’t want to privilege one aspect of the narrative or define the viewer’s experience of the work. In the end we settled on Tulips, which refers to the foliage that runs through all the work in the exhibition. In public spaces, tulips exercise a form of control over green spaces where what is grown or not grown is tightly managed. This form of urban planning is reminiscent of the ‘broken windows theory’ in criminology, where visible signs of crime and disorder are seen to incite further anti-social behaviour and civil disorder. If broken windows signal disorder, tulips signal order. We see this desire for control and order in dialogue with notions of the commons, and the cultural and natural resources available to all members of society. In the urban scenes of the fresco paintings, the commons would ideally represent the streets and the public garden. These spaces, however, are subject to increasing surveillance, policing and privatisation, prescribing who uses these spaces and how. We think of Sylvia Plath’s description of the flowers in her poem ‘Tulips’:

They are subtle: they seem to float, though they weigh me down Despite the weight of tulips, the promise of the commons perseveres, like beautiful weeds growing in the cracks.

Hannah Quinlan & Rosie Hastings live and work in London.

Amy Emmerson Martin is Assistant Curator, Contemporary British Art, Tate Britain.

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Their redness talks to my wound, it corresponds.

Hannah Quinlan & Rosie Hastings in their studio in London, June 2022, photographed by Angel Li Photo © Angel Li