I’m very slow at drawing. People sit that far away [holds his hands about 75 cm apart], so we’re looking at each other’s faces and I hadn’t looked at my sister for years and she hadn’t looked at me. I love looking. So looking at someone’s face, no one had a neck, so literally it was just these faces as they stared at me. It’s very personable and you find out all sorts: it’s confes sional. That’s not why I took two days to draw them, to get out as much information as possible, but I just like looking and trying to articulate that really, through a pencil. These are life size. It was a very, very intense period. I drew all my family members, then I moved on to draw everybody I knew. Not everybody, but I drew about 70 people, so I literally drew people in the morning and afternoon every day, booking people in like a hairdresser, and some would only come in for a few hours and other people would come in for a whole day. Some could commit for the whole two days. Sometimes, I’d draw someone and it wouldn’t look like them at the end of the day and you’d have to explain why. Maybe the top half or bottom half looked like them but put together it didn’t look like them and I could never understand how I could spend two days looking at someone and not get a likeness. I put that down to an off day. [Ethel, 2007, HB pencil on Fabriano paper, shown on screen] That’s my Mum. Maybe because the bottom of her head is flattened out it looks like I’ve beheaded her, but I actually like my Mum. I love detail, I love looking at detail and trying to transcribe it. I recreated my family house at Tate Britain. I did a photographic inventory of the whole outside of the house because everyone’s house is different, but when you walk down the street you don’t really look at them. When you walk down the street, you get a vague idea that they’re there, big built struc tures alongside you, but when you start to look at your house, you see it has details of its own. My dad had completed various half-finished bits of DIY around the exterior of the house.
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kel ly c h or pen in g : I want to ask about the role that memory plays in your work. Looking at that Break Down drawing, it’s been 12 years now, and you’re looking at possessions that you no longer have. Do you look at that drawing now and think about the objects that you used to possess? What’s your con nection with that work now? m l : No, I don’t. I have the list. If I look at anything, I look at the inventory where I listed everything that I owned. If I was going to look at anything, it would literally be the actual written list. kc : And similarly with the portraits of people that you know. The people have changed, but you’ve arrested their likeness at a given point in time. m l : Yes, it’s like we’re looking at each other but we don’t really look. I’m looking at Colin but it’s not really until I’ve got a pencil in my hand and I’m trying to translate what I see onto paper that I’m really looking at him. I’m not sure if memory plays a part. I grab things at a particular time, so that drawing is about that particular time. col in wig g in s: Let’s move on to some other very detailed drawings that you made. What I love about these is the white space of the page. You talk about your obsession with drawing but there is a lot of white space in your drawings. m l : I didn’t actually draw at Goldsmiths, it didn’t seem the time to draw. There was life drawing but I’d done that from 16–18 and there was nowhere to go with that. I like looking and drawing, I could look and draw and make the connections between the lines but with this, as I said before, you just kind of simplify the process. That’s the living plant, a buttercup. They’re all plants or weeds (a plant out of place). They’re very delicate plants but stoic as well. Gardeners think of weeds as a nuisance and dig
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