m l: That’s my dad’s foot. cw: So that’s not a detail is it, that’s a complete drawing? m l: Yes. He had an industrial mining accident thirty years ago and as a result of that he has slowly been deteriorating. When I talked about recreating my family house, I basically wanted to tackle a project about my dad. So I began with literally going to the house and drawing him. And that felt a good way to begin the whole process, rather than training a camera on him, which was too intrusive. I thought I’d just draw him, so I started off, because he’s very sedentary most of the time. So I just started to draw. Quite a lot of the portraits are profile of hims and he looks like a statue in a lot of them. It began at that. It eventually ended up with me because I draw and I also do installations that sometimes take two or three years or longer to materialize. So it’s just been my way into it, really and a way of making him feel comfortable about the whole process. c w : There’s another drawing of your dad, isn’t there. m l : Yes, he had a bypass and he said do you want to draw that, so I said okay. So you can see the colours of his feet, you can see he has issues with blood not pumping round his body. That’s a watercolour. I like to draw in all sorts of different ways really. c w : These are very conventional subjects aren’t they, portraits and plants? They’re very much in the tradition of what drawing is about. The self portrait, there is another take on self-portraiture which is rather an amazing drawing. [Left: Radcal Orchidectomy, 2005, coloured pencil on paper, 56.8 × 75.7 cm, shown on screen] m l : That’s my penis. I had cancer at the same time as my dad had his bypass: he didn’t know I had testicular cancer.
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c w : Did your dad not know, or was it that you didn’t know? m l : Yeah, I had just had the operation, and he asked did I fancy drawing his operation and that’s when I told him. So I just thought I’d draw my operation. kc : What strikes me is that there was a prior discussion this morning about how there is a connoisseurship in drawing and a lot of people talk about how your drawings have obsessive amounts of detail, and there is this feeling of well that’s what good drawing is. This also falls into that category. Where it differs is the repellent subject matter, which is really interesting … . m l : Well, I don’t know if I’d call my penis that repellent … you can all have a look later on. kc : The medical conditions, which I think separates this body of drawings from the rest. m l : This is ‘Homage to New York’. A lot of these drawing techniques are techniques that I learnt between 16–18. These are drawings made with glue and gouache. Jean Tingueley is a Swiss artist who made a work called ‘Homage to New York’, a self-destructing sculpture that he built at MoMa New York and it only lasted twenty-seven minutes. ‘Break Down’, when I got rid of my belongings, lasted two weeks and all of it went to landfill. At the end of ‘Homage to New York’, that all went to the New Jersey dump basically. I liked the parallel and Jean Tingueley is someone whose work I loved as a student. I was a textiles student for a while and I went to Tate in 1982 and his kinetic sculptures were there dancing. I could make drawings out of them and I wanted to recreate this sculpture and so I began with just drawing it. I found lots of different ways to draw it, so this technique is literally me just squeezing the glue out.
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