Capturing Images for the Lost Generation

I met Laura McCafferty in her studio to talk about her work and her current show which is running in the Wallner Gallery at The Lakeside till 2 July.

AC:  Laura, how would you describe your work?

LM:  My work is a mixture of “art” and “craft”, it sits somewhere in the middle.  Overall I would call it “documentary reportage”:  it is realistic, it engages with people, it involves and documents people.  I am very materials-based and technique-based. Another way my work has been described is as “fabric illustration”, someone else calls it “urban tableaux”.  These are all current buzz-words, but the work somehow pulls them all in.

My pieces are large-scale fabric illustrations which document the here and now, using a collection of archived fabrics that I have carefully sourced – someone has described me as a “textile anthropologist” - archiving the fabrics of the past and the present, and putting them into a colour and pattern chronological order and then using them as my palette to give a new dimension to the images that I gather.  I also use screen-print, hand appliqué and hand-stitching.

AC:  Do you conceive a piece of work with specific textiles or fabrics in mind or do you make a drawing and then apply textiles to it?

LM:  I see the image in colour, in the colours that I want to use through textiles.  For instance, the piece Dare To Be Different was inspired by a trip to Japan: I was sitting on a train and I looked across at the people sitting opposite me, who were all wearing black business suits.  It came to me as a big meleed, mixed-up idea, because I looked at them and I saw them in pink Japanese kimonos!  So I see a real thing and then in my head I project colours and fabrics onto it.  It comes from a feel or a mood.  It is very rarely that I make a blank line drawing and then colour it; I see it as one vision.

AC:  In your current exhibition there is a line drawing.  Was that created separately from your other work or was it a prototype that was intended to become a fabric piece?

LM:  There are about five or six processes of development of my work.  First the idea, second is researching and finding imagery, so I take photographs.  The third is when I sit down and I spend between a day and four days with a series of photographs and I create a pen line drawing: that line drawing forms the basis of every piece.  The piece you mentioned is Maggie Fowler and that went through all the stages to make it into a final textile artwork.  The finished version is not in the exhibition, because I wanted to show that the drawing, although it is background “research”, is also a piece of art, an illustration in itself.  That is the first time I have shown a line drawing.

AC:  Do you think you might ever decide that a line drawing is a finished work of art in its own right and not take it any further?  Or might you go down the route of doing more drawing as such?

LM:  Yes.  The plan chest behind me is full of drawings: quite a lot of pieces and images became drawings but didn’t ever move to the next stage.  I decided to take the artwork of one piece called The Young Card Players - which does exist in colour and fabric - and make it into a screenprint series; I wanted to celebrate it without the colour and fabric as a pure line-drawn linear image.  It was difficult, because I am such a colour-based person, I love re-interpreting a scene by adding colour in to it.

AC:  Looking at that [a screenprint of The Young Card Players in Laura’s studio] now as we are, it is a very beautiful, very detailed piece of drawing, which would be perfectly valid as a finished work of art in its own right.  Do you find that rather satisfying, that you can create more than one piece of art out of the same project?

LM:  That was what I was trying to do, because if you imagine the six stages of making a piece of work, it takes a huge input of time and effort and money, all to create one piece – I love that about it, that you have the one finished piece - but then I also needed to be practical and work out how I could put my work into repetition, how I could bring small-scale work to a wider public.  I was also thinking about exhibiting them differently, so as a side-step from textiles, I wanted to show people that I am a printer and I’m a photographer, as well as a stitcher.  So for this I wanted to prove to people that the drawing was enough and that I wasn’t using textiles to embellish my drawings, that the drawing was in its own right a finished, complete piece.

AC:  So you are creating completely different pieces of art, rather than one being simply a stage along the way?

LM:  Absolutely.  I think that the “plurality” of my work is its greatest strength.

AC:  Turning to another piece [on a board in Laura’s studio], can you explain this, it looks as if it is on tracing paper.

LM:  Yes, going back to the six stages I was describing earlier:  when I create a line drawing, I tend to use A0 so I give myself a lot of space on a page because I draw freehand, I kind of hold the photograph in one hand and just let the drawing happen, and I like it that my drawings are a bit uneven and wiggly and if I make a mistake, it has to stay.  The tracing paper stage is a print out: I scan the drawing in and print it out on tracing paper, which is then used to get the image onto silk screen as a kind of stencil, using UV emulsion.

AC:  How many times can you use the same image?

LM:  Because it is on silk screen, I could use it repeatedly, like I have done with The Young Card Players as a limited edition of 25 - or more or less - but the pieces I take through to textile are generally one-off, so I usually do one print and then clean the screen and put a new image on it. This is especially so with the large-scale work, because once you’ve spent three weeks on one piece, you’re ready for the next one!

AC:  The way you describe the processes reminds me of, say Leonardo da Vinci or others in the Renaissance, creating a number of different pieces – say sketches which would exist in their own right, but would lead eventually to the finished work.  It’s almost a semi-industrial process.

LM:  It is similar to the idea of production, although each stage is quite intense and hands-on and requires effort and thought.  I don’t know if it’s just how I organise things, but I like that each stage is its own process which requires my attention but enables me to get to the next stage.  But I wanted to put the line drawing [Maggie Fowler] into the show to draw attention to it as an acceptable art work rather than just as a tool to get to the next stage.  At some point I’d like to do an exhibition of my photographs, because I’ve got an archive of documentary photography that I’ve been taking all over the world during the last seven years, and if you think about it I’ve maybe brought 200 of them into completed pieces of work, so there is a huge store of other imagery to be displayed.

I’d like to go back and look at each section, rather than just rushing through to the final textile art work, and I’d like also to explain to people how each work comes about, to kind of ‘stretch’ it back a bit.

AC:  Do you enjoy still having the complete hands-on involvement yourself, or would you ever envisage – like Tracey Emin and others – having a team of people with you to do, say, the fabric application, with you just creating the line drawings in the first place?

LM:  I couldn’t do it.

AC:  Why not?

LM:  I have tried.  For two years I had helpers - work experience students – and I outsourced stitching to a friend for some of the smaller pieces, but then I decided that I would rather make less, but what I make, I make!  The thought of somebody else cutting the piece of fabric, the thought of somebody else squishing the piece in their hands to hand-stitch it, it was “that’s mine”.  You know, you go through all the years to get to a place where you want to be - and I love making these pieces of work - so why would I give that to somebody else, when that’s the bit that is so special?

AC:  Do you respect artists like Tracey Emin who bring others in to complete their work?

LM:  Yes I do, I really like Tracey Emin’s work.  Each artist’s way of working is as valid as the next, it’s very much a personal choice.  If I could let go and have people working with me, I probably would – it makes sense because you can produce more, do more exhibitions, your work can be in different places at one time.  But for me personally, I just can’t hand it over.  I’d be sitting at my computer doing my accounts while somebody is here cutting fabrics and placing them!  No, I like to make the work.

AC:  Do you want to tell me a bit about your new exhibition at The Lakeside?

LM:  It’s entitled Lost - but it’s not that I’m lost!  I actually feel that I’ve now got more clarity than at any other time.  It was quite worrying to give it that title, I didn’t want it to be read as “Laura McCafferty is Lost”!

AC:  What does it mean?

LM:  It’s an umbrella term that all my images can sit underneath.  The idea was that, at this current moment, we are all of the digital generation, we go round capturing ourselves on mobile phones, digital cameras, laptops, CDs and they get stolen, broken.  I read an article, I think in The Guardian, about us becoming the “lost generation”.  Because my images are so “captured”, so worked into and so documented, I feel like they are going to be around much longer.  I wanted to celebrate some images I had managed to archive from my own life, that hadn’t got lost somewhere in the digital world.  That was the idea that pulled this random collection of work together.  I wouldn’t say that this exhibition is completely resolved.  I’ve tried to use it as a platform to re-introduce my work to the people of Nottingham and the East Midlands.  It’s quite a transition.  I’d done Lustre (the contemporary craft market at Lakeside) for three years (2004-6) and then I made the decision to step back and I calculated that maybe because I wasn’t doing Lustre they might give me the Wallner Gallery to exhibit my work!

AC:  Machiavellian!

LM:  I like thinking things through, to see that everything has a purpose.  The Lustre shows were brilliant because they opened my work up to the public and I developed a lot of collectors and supporters, and I wanted to do a little exhibition to showcase what I’ve been doing in the last two years, so people didn’t think I’d just disappeared or wasn’t making anything any more!

AC:  You recently had a long show in Bath?

LM:  Yes, at the Bath Fashion Museum.  That show had an interesting context.  The Museum contacted me – they’d seen my work in an exhibition or a magazine – and they were looking for somebody who could showcase “ordinary fashion” of our time, but in a way that could be stimulating and interesting.  If you imagine, the collection of clothes they have in the Museum is amazing, so you can’t really put a Marks & Spencer’s cardigan on one of their mannequins!  It doesn’t have enough prestige.  But they wanted to show that ordinary fashion, people on the street, could be celebrated just as much as a Victorian dress worn by some great royal.  So it was a great context for my work, and it was received brilliantly: it was a three month exhibition, and the Museum ended by buying a piece of my work for their collection.

AC:  That has presumably exposed you to an even wider set of collectors?

LM: Yes, and it also helped me to think of my work in a different sense, because up to that point I had no idea that I was “documenting fashion”.  Rosemary Harden, the Museum manager, did a little synopsis of each piece in terms of what everyone was wearing: she referenced hoodies and Rocket Dog boots and picked out generational things that people are wearing, and pointed out just how important fashion items are in the moment.  It gave me a whole new angle on how people are viewing the work.

AC:  When we first met, when you were awarded the Craft Award at the Nottingham Creative Business Awards last year (October 2008), I remember we had an interesting discussion about the distinction between ‘Art’ and ‘Craft’: you regard yourself as - and you certainly are - an ‘artist’ and yet you won a craft award.  Is that an issue that causes you difficulties?  Or have you resolved it now?

LM: I had about a year of beating myself up, a year of having a great big chip on my shoulder, because I found it quite frustrating.  To me, there are no boundaries between art and craft, they are both created by artists or artisans, people who are professional in how they handle and make their work and develop their ideas.  I got annoyed that people looked down their noses at craft-makers, and I didn’t get it: why do people think that a “fine artist” is better than a ceramicist?  I could see the same depth and the same professionalism in the creation of work in both fields, and I got so angry.  But I think I’ve managed to handle it!  Scale has helped me deal with it: I’m doing work on a much larger scale and the Lakeside exhibition is my first real opportunity to showcase my large scale work in Nottingham.  It’s a small gallery (the Wallner) and I’ve put a lot of large pieces in it.  I wanted the chance to show people that I am a ‘maker’, I’m an illustrator, I’m a textile artist and I don’t like the idea of being boxed.  I believe that whatever you do, if you do it well, with clarity and with belief, and you execute it professionally, then you are no better or worse than the next person, no matter what they do.  So, it has been resolved!  And I did win the Craft Award.

AC:  That – winning it – is presumably not a problem for you?

LM:  No, it’s not a problem.  I just hope the work will do the talking, so it was good to get the Award as a recognition of what I do, rather than a pigeon-hole box.

AC:  You’re obviously about to have your first child.  How do you see the immediate future – will you carry on working?

LM:  Absolutely.  I had this discussion with my boyfriend yesterday, I said that in a few weeks I just won’t want to do anything.  And he shook his head and said that who knows, maybe I will want to do something.  And that’s right – obviously, I have no idea how I am going to feel or whether the baby will need more of my attention.  But I am confident that I will be continuing my working life.  Having a baby now, I feel that I can have some breathing space. I have been working very intensely for six years since graduation, and I feel, well, I’ve given the development of my work six years of my life, so maybe I can just have some space!

The biggest change in the development of my work has been inside me.  About two years ago I realised I needed to come up for air: I had worked for four years solidly trying to survive, make money, develop my website etc.  Two years ago I said, hold on a minute, I took my blinkers off and opened my eyes to the world and to artists and what was going on. I did a lot of contextual research and looking, going to exhibitions, talks, seminars, and getting a real understanding of other artists.  I’ve really expanded my knowledge and how I view myself. So now, I’m actually setting myself larger ambitions, I’m thinking bigger than ever.  It didn’t say that in my baby books!  But I’m rethinking how I approach my work, and I’ll probably be more specific, I’ll have to learn to use my time more constructively.  But it’s not the end, not by any means!

Laura McCafferty’s exhibition Lost continues at the Wallner Gallery, Lakeside, Nottingham until 2 July 2009.

For more information go to www.lauramccafferty.com