Transcription of conversation between and Maryanne Coutts and Margaret Roberts about the exhibition Threads, which contains the works Threads, Breaking News and Critical Mass, and which is open at Articulate project space from 27 June -‐ 13 July 2014. MR: Threads is the launch of a new project, so can you say how it came out of your previous work -‐ how different is it and what is the continuity? MC: The Threads project came from a show in Linden in Melbourne called Throng, which has two pieces, one which was a wall-‐sized watercolour of an asylum-‐seeker boat burning on the water, an image from the media of a boat that was set alight on Ashmore Reef. To accompany that I did an animation that was of crowd scenes. This work was about borders and boundaries as well as isolation and lack of boundaries. It was really on two levels. One on a personal emotional level as a metaphor for internal states and the other in a more political, broader sense. It came from working in a show in Thailand that was about people who didn't have nationality. For me Threads is all about all that. So Threads goes back to when I first came to Sydney and I began working from news media photos. I kept noticing that there's a whole genre of newspaper photos that are masses or crowds so I made an animation that puts different crowds from across the globe together in what appears to be a seamless space. Some were schoolgirls in Sydney, some rioters in Ireland. I have noticed that crowds are always brought together by all having some common cause, whether its good or violent or whatever, and I tried to join them into a consistent space. I became very interested in that idea of crowds and that is where Critical Mass came from -‐ the individual watercolours where people are morphing into each other and the crowd photos on the screen (which should move faster). I am quite attached to crowds and groups. Then I also did drawings of a pile of rocks, something about the relationship between individuals and the whole that a lot of individuals make up. I wasn't thinking of logical threads, but when this show came up I wondered what could I do and thought about group photographs. This is a slightly different genre. The photos that the media take of the crowds are different from these here in Threads which are always taken about ourselves. These are a way of us documenting the relationships we have and the groups that we belong to, and they seem like very important things. They are usually not very artistic, whereas the photojournalist takes spectacular photos, some of them are brilliant. And I think it is also from being in a new place (having moved here from Melbourne) and finding out how I connect as well. So I think all of my work tries to have those two levels, it has to come from a really personal motivation. But it has to have a much broader political connotation as well. MR: In the Threads drawings it is amazing to recognise a person, as you see how similar and how different they are to how you actually know them. That connection
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with the person seems to over-‐ride the image in some way. The image seems to become a conduit for that connection. MC: That has been a really interesting thing with this show. I thought it would be hard to persuade people to participate. Some people say they will send me photos but never get around to it. Then there's the people that say no I don't want to be part of it, are shy or whatever, or say I don't think the people in my photos will want to be in it. Then there are the others who say, oh wow, I am in it. I didn't expect it but it is letting me find a way that, while I am still doing the drawings myself, there is some way in which the audience is part of it, taking it over in a way, which I really like. So my drive now is to find a way to put it on-‐line so people really can interact with it like that. MR: But it is good that you are still doing the drawing and that other people are not also doing the drawing on-‐line? MC: Its funny, that's what artists do -‐ it is our own touch. In some ways that is a conservative viewpoint. Some people get upset when they see work that doesn't look like it is made with a certain sort of skill set. And I am tracing so I am getting away from that as well. And my brother who is an IT person tells me: the problem with your project is that you have to do all the work, you can't outsource it. I could just stick the photos up but I wouldn't look at them as much. This way, it means that every photo I put up I have to look at and also send an email to the person who gave it to me. This means I have to do something complicated and physical about every bit of the image and that is what this project is about. I am noticing more and more that drawing is about paying attention to things. Someone was saying about the Breaking News work that there are some really violent images in there, shocking things like photos taken of people before they are killed. There is something you can do about that by paying attention—and there is a preciousness about the watercolour—you are really paying attention to that person. Even if their face and hands aren't there, its almost like their clothes are even more personal—clothes touch a person and are the membrane between them and the outside world. And that is what I am finding, when I am drawing the clothes—when clothing has a pattern on it I almost pay more attention to that than the face. I am making aesthetic decisions, that I am letting myself be drawn to things. So it is about myself, it is being ego centric, but that is what art is. For someone to be represented here they have to have met someone who has met someone who has met someone who has met me, which is taking it back to the village, which we have lost. People have to be in the same physical space to be part of Threads. I think that all art is like that—a painting by Rembrandt we can all engage with, even though he has been dead for a long time, because it has a presence in its own right…it is something about him. But art still has to come from your own physical place of being. Even Sol Le Witt still writes down the instructions. It's almost that art seems to be tapping into that individual thing. It has to have a core in an
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individual—I am not trying to be romantic about the idea of an artist, it's just that that's the work of it. MR: Breaking News seems to try to personalise the impersonal nature of the media, counteracting ways in which it uses pictures and stories of people in ways that has little regard for the person. MC: and that person is often gone—even with celebrities, like Obama, I find that when you start to look at their clothes. In the work I did before this, I was looking at world leaders—I think you are saying that the media commodifies the people. I think when you start to look into the shirt of Obama and you see sweat, and you see inside the cuff, there is something so intimate there that it can bring back the knowledge that there is a real person there. Or even with images of a refugee from Syria, and there are so many of those images, and when you look at them they are so personal, like little kids shown wanting to go to the toilet, just through a gesture. That's where photojournalists are incredible. And the danger I see journalists and photojournalists putting themselves into so that we have access to those images. So that is the other side of it, before the commodification, that's people who have got real passion, who do something really important, its really important we here know what is happening there. I am thinking of Peter Greste. There are a couple of photos of him in there, in Breaking News. I am paying attention to the people photographed. But I am also becoming aware of that whole group of people who are journalists. MR: I have been interested in the space inside of an image and its connection with the space outside it and you seem to be creating that link in a way I have never thought of. Maybe because the images are so representational, they seem mainly to be a conduit to the space outside of themselves. MC: In the past my work was mostly interested in fiction.. But this work is much more about trying to find a connection with some actual experience of someone. Its not like they are documentary because I don't want to be telling the stories. The thing about a piece of clothing is that its so revealing about an actual moment and that's the sharp thing about it. MR: It may be partly because you have not just cut the image from the photograph, you have actually painted them in watercolour, you have re-‐made them like you have knitted or re-‐woven them. It is an interesting comment on representation. I am really interested in representation, in how it works. I have always been really interested in the voice of those speaking in representation, and I am not sure how that is coming out here. Maybe that's how you convince an audience that there is truth in what you say. MR: It seems the voice and truth is independent of the picture, you seem to have just loved the little bit of picture you have put in there by putting the paint on in that way.
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MC: I have never felt this way before -‐ in all the work in this show there is something about loving what I am putting there. Even the group photos, I just love the photos. In all of this world I have found in drawing something that connects me as an artist. Its a process whereby you can give something attention, in a way that the world we live in doesn't. Everything is so speedy, and when you sit down and draw you pay attention to something slowly and then even if no one sees the drawing it's an activity that's quite important. And if people see the drawings, whether they are good or not, people see that you have paid attention to something. http://articulateprojectspace.org http://mcdrawingprojects.wordpress.com/
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