UK-born visual artist Phoebe Collings-James spent some time in SA, so I caught up with her to have a chat about her work and her evolution as an artist.
Phoebe’s desire to become an artist came from an impulse as a child. Being influenced by her dad who did photography at night taking pictures of bands, a lot of the work she did when she was younger was based around photography and filmmaking. She started studying art and textiles when she was 16 and continued to do a foundation in a Bachelors until 21. Although the specific intentions of each of her works are usually quite different, all of her work is connected by some sort of intersection with the politics of race and feminism, and influenced quite heavily by what has been happening around her and in the world at the time.
Drawing and painting on paper is something that underpins most of Phoebe’s work, and the mediums she turns to do a lot of storytelling. Another part of her artistic practice is a more sculptural aspect and collecting objects that feed into those same narratives. The works for her current show, Atrophilia, showing at Company Gallery in NY with Jesse Darling, are from materials she has been collecting over the past few years. These range from fruit nets to vegetable sacks to woven sacking. Their made up word ‘Atrophilia’, meaning a desire for collapse or stasis, brings together the word atrophy and -philia. Phoebe explained that atrophy is something that she and Jesse have both been thinking about a lot in their work; this idea of the body in atrophy, our community in atrophy, the world in atrophy. They are also exploring how there is some sort of desire based in witnessing that collapse. The objects that have been discarded in the wake of that leads into the materials that she uses for this collection of works. These are discarded items which do not take on the idea of ready-made objects; their use date has now gone and they are immortal waste objects. Bringing atrophy and -philia together resonate with the actual materials and the intentions and ideas behind the works. For Phoebe, her ideas and the concepts she explores are becoming increasingly organically linked to the materials she uses to create her works.
In thinking about who she sees as her audience, Phoebe explained that, the way that things immediately appear to those who experience her artwork has always been incredibly important to her. “It’s always been important to me, for it [art] to be immediately engaging with someone who doesn’t have excess experience in academia or in the art world,” Phoebe explains, “I guess that’s partly a motivation from growing up with very working class parents, from the fact that I did not have a lot of interaction with fine art or high art, commercial gallery art until I was a lot older”. Interested in creating work that involves a lot of research and thought but at the same time able to create an object or experience that anyone can understand, and on some level appeals to the foundation of what it means to be human. “I don’t think the art [I make] is for everyone but more that the art is for a sensitive person and a thoughtful person,” Phoebe expresses, “And to me that might also, potentially look more like a woman, a woman of colour, a woman of a certain class. But it really could be anyone.”
Her work on her own identity has been coming through more and more in her recent production which coincides with more personal shifts in her life. Her father’s family is from Jamaica and her mother’s family from England. Being born in England she hadn’t been to her father’s home country before. Moving to New York and going to Jamaica for the first time last year opened up ways for her to understand her identity as a whole and had a big influence on how she is interrogating her identity.
Three years ago she was making work which was higher and wider than her body, and were just huge black voids. Now she feels that her interrogation of that Blackness becomes more apparent to her; it was so much about dealing with things she felt she did not have space to say at the time. An overarching theme in her work is that of communication, or a suffocation of communication; people who do not have the opportunity to speak or have a suffocated voice. “I have been making drawings for a long time called ‘Choke on your tongue’ and they are these sort of dog monster kind of things with red, bleeding big tongues in their mouths. And I think somehow now if I analyze it a little bit I think those works were some sort of interrogation of some sort of silencing I was definitely feeling and wanting to be as big and Black and loud as I possibly could”. From those works, Phoebe moved on to ceramics and to painting delicate, brightly coloured watercolours full of expressive animals. Her interest in using watercolours came from a political impulse to use the lightest, most fragile material; something that would erode and wouldn’t last forever, as a sort of “anti-work” in comparison to her large oil black paintings she had been making for a long time. She sees a strong theme of talking about her identity and experiences as a way to enter into talking about lots of other issues.
Phoebe expressed that in being an artist, the most challenging thing for her is what goes on in the studio; just figuring out what you want to make, how you want to make it, what you want to say. The other major challenge is not letting the annoying, negative and exhausting things from outside into her studio. “The art market works in exactly the same way as every other system of white patriarchal supremacy…in terms of simultaneously fetishizing and excluding people of colour.” For her, the trick is figuring out how to make work within that system and if there are ways of creating new ones outside of it. Now she tries to work as often as she can with people she feels are on the same page as her in terms of how she feels and the kind of work she is trying to produce.
