In Conversation: Phill Hopkins
On Thursday 1st March I will be joining artist Phill Hopkins in the Porch Gallery at LeftBank Leeds to discuss his current exhibition 'X' along with the show's curator Si Smith.
Tickets for this FREE event can be obtained from https://www.eventbrite.com/e/porch-gallery-talk-x-by-phill-hopkins-tickets-41949600384?aff=eac2
There are still copies available of the zine produced to accompany this exhibition with contributions by Hopkins, Smith and myself.
Bruce Davies | February 2018
Smith: When you were young did you watch a lot of telly? Bagpuss, the Wombles - all that beautiful Oliver Postgate stuff? Or were you a more outdoors-y kind of a kid?
Hopkins: This is a lovely question for me. I was outdoors a lot, but I also watched a lot of telly, there were no restrictions on how much I could watch. Summer holidays consisted of Champion the Wonder Horse, Robinson Crusoe, Casey Jones, Fireball XL5, Flashing Blade, White Horses, Banana Splits, etc. My favourite programme was Blue Peter. I love Oliver Postgate programmes - Ivor the Engine, Noggin the Nog, Pogles Wood… I relied on Jackanory for my stories at home and really loved that programme. And I loved wildlife programmes - Jaques Cousteau, The World Around Us, Animal Magic...
Telly is a big influence on me I think - the scale of the things I make comes with watching telly. If you need someone on your team for a pub quiz for childrens tv of the 60’s and 70’s then I’m the one…
(And) we were encouraged to make things, lead by the tv - not just Blue Peter, more importantly Vision On. My play included lots of making - weapons, dens, digging holes, dams in streams, pigeon huts (there was always wood and nails around), trolleys… I also drew a lot. My dad would bring headed note paper home from work for us to draw on. I remember making aeroplanes from cereal box card, using glue made from flour and water…
Smith: So that makes me think about your playfulness in making things, and we have talked before about your boyhood still being present in the work that you’re making now - that playfulness, and the collecting and the organising of things...
Hopkins: I have learned to value and cherish my playfulness and to recognise where it comes from. I have to guard and protect my boy inside me as he is the driver of my creativity. I am naturally very playful… when I was a small boy I made things all the time and really nothing has changed. It’s a wonderful thing to work out how to make something by simply making it. It’s the same with putting up a shelf or setting up a new tv; there is something really powerful in making things come to life. I made a piece with a tommy gun in it for a stations of the cross show, and when I made it i felt as if i was making it for the boy that i house inside me, it was like making a gift for him.
When I was a boy, my dad made me a tool box, I can still remember waking up and seeing it, still being able to recall the excitement of it. Now I like to please myself by making things or growing veg or making jam etc. and I am amazed at how clever that boy has become…
Smith: I know that music is important to you, and it’s playing all the time whilst you work. But more specifically, can I ask where does your love of classical music comes from?
Ive assumed that it wasn’t from hearing it at home as a child, but i may be wrong about that?
Hopkins: In my house growing up, the radio was on all the time, all I heard was pop music. I remember hearing some classical music during ‘movement’ sessions at school. In my teens my peer group shared lps of The Planets and Bach organ works, it was a kind of rebellion away from pop music. There was a ‘poshness’ around classical music. In the 1990’s I watched a tv programme about Tim Rollins and Kos. They had made a piece using Schuberts Winterreise. I was stunned by the music. I’d never really heard ‘posh’ music, sung in german, that resonated with me. The sound of the words and the rhythm of the piano was beautiful. I took Schubert as my lover. After that I discovered other ‘classical’ music. I saw ‘Peter Grimes’ performed in Leeds and began to explore Britten. Through Britten I found Rostapovich. I discovered that Britten had written Noye's Fludde and putting memories together realised that I had been a lion on Noah’s ark at school when I was 11. It was Britten’s piece re-titled for a housing estate. How wonderfully progressive for children who lived in council houses.
Smith: When did you first hear Bob Dylan?
Hopkins: I was 14. My cousin had bought the album ‘Desire’ and my older brother had borrowed it. The first song I consciously heard was ‘Hurricane’. This started an ongoing love affair. I first saw him live when I was 16, I saw him at Earls Court in London and then ‘open-air’ at Blackbush. I’ve seen him live lots of times, sometime being just feet away from him…
Smith: Getting back to visual art, Robert Rauschenberg has been a big influence for you…
Hopkins: ...I came across Rauschenberg when I was at school. I had brilliant and generous art teachers. With Rauschenberg I found an immediate connection with his work. As I am someone who has always struggled with written language, perhaps he offers something which is purely pictorial and visual, and that I found very easy to ‘read’? I first saw a lot of his work in the early 1980’s in a retrospective at the Tate. I went with a former teacher on the coach from Bristol… There’s a piece by him called ‘Factum I & II’ - it’s two paintings together side by side, and he made them at the same time. I was immediately drawn to the idea of making something in a series. There is one particular area that is significant for me, it’s an off-yellow shape with drips. Something chimed with me when I saw that... I bought the catalogue, which I still have, and studied every picture very carefully. Rauschenberg’s work stuns me and it seems that he has always been with me.
Smith: Can we talk about your politics? There’s a tradition of activism in your extended family network, and also - from what you’ve told me - you were a proper left-wing activist in your younger days.
In your work now, those big world issues are clearly there, but - as Bruce alludes to in his ‘Context is King’ essay (in the zine which accompanies the X show) - it’s not like you’re not preaching or pushing a dogma or ideology. There’s no sense that you’re trying to persuade us of anything when you make the work.
So does that represent a shift in your politics as you’ve grown older, or maybe a loss of the zeal that once fired you up?
Or is it just a lot more nuanced and complicated than that…?
Hopkins: In my late teens I was definitely going to change the world. I had helped Tony Benn - who was the MP in the constituency next to ours - during an election. My family were strong trade union members and my uncle was an area officer for a print union. My family were all Labour voters. I joined the Labour party Young Socialists and even got Michael Foot to sponsor me for a fundraiser. I dabbled a bit with the militant tendency and even stood on the street and sold the ‘Militant’ newspaper. At that time I was listening to The Clash and making work about Ronald Reagan and Nicaragua. I think we all calm down a bit as we get older. I’ve gathered some wisdom over the years, but I still try to honour how I was brought up and I would still say that I am a socialist; it makes complete sense to me.
Smith: You’ve been described as “an archaeologist of the present” - i think that’s a really good way to represent what you do, and I know from chatting with you that you’ve embraced that description… can we explore that a bit?
Hopkins: I like the idea of uncovering things in a work. As I’m a person who worries a lot, or I did up until recently, its good to try to uncover the thing I’m worried about. I like to analogy of worrying about something being like the story of the Princess and the Pea - often, after digging, realising that the thing you were worrying about - or the pea - is very small. I relish the process of exposing the things I worry about/could worry about, and realising that they are indeed very small and very un-powerful. So in works like the houses on the paint charts, you might say that every drawing is a mini dig, rather than using a trowel to remove earth, I am using a paint brush and white paint to ‘remove’ what ever is on the surface of the substrate. The process may in fact be very simple and possibly primitive (to apply paint) but the process that goes on in my mind and more importantly in my heart is extremely powerful and has the potential to be life changing. From the outside, what we know of the simple process is one thing, but what goes on under the surface of the drawing - and under the surface of my skin - is something else.
Si Smith: …just thinking a bit more about archaeology…
In the past, when trying to describe your work, I’ve talked about you obsessively mining the seam of an idea - it’s interesting that there’s a ‘digging’ metaphor going on there too…
Hopkins: I think at heart I am someone who is very physical when I make. You might say a ‘sculptor’. I have always ‘made’ things. The way I paint or draw is very physical, I’m not just trying to form an image, I am also making a surface, a texture, a skin. I am aware that I am trying to form something out of matter/something else, to make something into something else.
Here's a Seamus Heaney poem - ‘Digging’ - (he’s on one of my postcards in the show)
Smith: So that leads me to what I see as a lovely paradox in your work…
There’s the digging and the archaeolgy and the mining, but then there’s also a lot of covering-up and obliterating - the whitening-over of the paint cards for example. Or the dripping on top of existing images. The scratchy clouds obscuring faces and hovering above David Smith and Bob Dylan. The layers of paint on found images and surfaces….
These things would seem to be at odds with each other - the digging down and the covering up…
So Im wondering what’s going on there… or if that’s a paradox that you’re even mindful of?
With the drips etc. there may be something going on to do with ownership and identifying something as my own… I think its also connected with drawing on book pages …the written word didn’t have much use for me as a dyslexic whilst I was growing up, in fact they were quite tortuous as I couldn’t read them very well. So to cover words with white paint and then draw on the surface makes a book page very useful to me.
(And) maybe the image isn’t what I’m reaching for and it’s possibly a vehicle or something to draw or paint. The image may not be the subject. The pictures with the house motif aren’t about houses, perhaps it’s what they are made of, what homes are made of or not… and there are so many as I like collecting things. My paintings in the ‘Post Truth’ series are missing one painting as I sold it; I still grieve for that work as there is a hole in my arrangement. That’s when collecting or making in series makes links to loss…
Smith: Thinking about your use of found objects, I wonder if there’s some kind of redemptive thing going on there, if you’re resurrecting the found materials and - in making them into artworks - giving them a life above and beyond anything that they’ve had before. There’s something kind of noble and very hopeful in that…
Connecting it back to the boyhood thing, it's like Bagpuss or the Wombles, or Stig of the Dump...
Hopkins: I do think about honouring the simple materials I use. I remember when I was at Goldsmiths and asking Richard Wentworth (one of my tutors, very posh, Eton.) why he used working class materials in his sculptures. Obviously I was very naive and very working class. But it was a good question as it could be said that there was a class to the objects he used. It’s about using things that readily come to hand.
Smith: Just going back to your Princess and the Pea analogy, it strikes me that with some of your later work - the Syria/migrancy paintings, drawings of exploding Libyan buildings, IS fighters, ukrainian protests etc - maybe when you get to the heart of those problems they're actually not manageable - they're still huge and terrible.
Is it fair to say that your most recent work is a reaction to that?
Hopkins: I had had some paintings of seascapes by Lowry in my mind for a long time. The loneliness in his seascapes really resonated with me. I can easily find sadness within myself, and so those pictures of his of the North Sea chimed with things in me. To give my recent work context, you have to remember that Brexit and Trump had happened and I was really devastated with those political outcomes. I was filled with sorrow and anger about how self-centred and stupid people can be. I tried for a time just to make very simple pictures, trying to get lost in the making. I made a lot of paintings (when have I not!) and took a lot of photographs of the sea. I was using a lot of pink, which connects to the colour I painted my daughters bedroom when she was a small girl, and I found some hi-vis clothing, a jacket and two vests. So I had the idea of painting on the fabric, and I did. I think of the hi-vis like Ii do about painting with white gloss paint of white gloss melamine, it sets up an interesting tension or conflict, like oil and water. These works were very much about resolving personal conflict.
With all the bad politics of late I found myself looking more and more into myself, into the things around me, my garden, the birds that I invite in by feeding them, the butterflies I attract with the plants I nurture. There is a desire for some kind of equalibrium in these works, getting things in balance for myself, grounding myself. I like the simple act of juxtaposing an image of a butterfly in my garden with one of Trump. That’s a funny thing to do…
X zine