Interview with HMP Grendon Artist in Residence
Dr Simon Harris is Ikon’s Artist in Residence at HMP Grendon. James Latunji-Cockbill, Ikon’s Producer, Art in Prisons, interviews the artist after his first three months of working at the prison.
HMP Grendon is Europe’s only wholly therapeutic prison and provides a unique context for an artist residency. How have you found the start of your new residency, based in a dedicated art studio inside the prison? What have your early interactions with prisoners been like?
It’s interesting that not only is the context of Grendon unique but having a dedicated studio, workshop and gallery in that setting provides another layer to the uniqueness. As an artist educator it was precisely this that drew me to the residency. My early interactions with prison residents have been very positive. The formalisation of a dedicated studio has had a profound impact on the range of practices that prisoners are approaching and their level of engagement within this rare environment.
You are predominantly a painter, but utilise other mediums in your work such as photography and printmaking. How are you planning to work at Grendon and what will you share with prison residents?
Printmaking and photography have always been central to my practice, however, these processes have generally been discreet and unrealised for the viewer in the finished paintings. In recent years these processes have become more transparent at the site of encounter.
I have quite a distinct process in making work that’s never a straight journey from ‘A’ to ‘B’. I tend to meander, making lots of related work, repeating ideas and motifs – all of which inform the final painting. This way of working is being shared with prison residents. They will have the opportunity to expand some of the skills already initiated through the print workshop, for example, four colour screen printing, which is a new process I will be introducing.
Your painting practice pushes the limits of the abstracted image and is informed by philosophical notions of the virtual, temporal, sublime and beautiful. What are you planning to make at Grendon and how do you think philosophy will inform your work with prisoners?
Philosophy is central as a mode of thought in my practice. It enables me to explore different concepts and apply them to the image and image making. I believe this is fundamental as a means of understanding art and equally, for me it is essential in understanding the means of production. As a strand of philosophy, I have always been interested in post-structuralism, in particular, the writing of philosopher Gilles Deleuze and psychoanalyst Félix Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (1980). Translator Brian Massumi, writer of the often-cited foreword for A Thousand Plateaus, discusses Deleuze and Guattari’s use of concepts not to exact the truth and purity but as a tool kit in which to explore new subjectivities. It is exactly these new subjectivities that move away from binary opposition that I am interested in. For example, employing Deleuze’s discussion of the virtual in his books Cinema 1: The Movement Image (1983) and Cinema 2: The Time-Image (1985) allowed me to approach the virtual of the pictorial plane in painting with a new temporality that wasn’t consigned to an historical, theoretical understanding of art.
Intriguingly, this notion of a changed temporality in painting has already started to inform some discussions around my practice with prisoners, particularly around the concept of time. This has opened the conversation further into other artists’ practices, such as On Kawara, including his exhibition at Ikon, Consciousness. Meditation. Watcher on the Hills. in 2002-03. These conversations have directly informed some of the work I plan to make at Grendon. Indeed, I am planning to make a series of works, the first being an artist book. I have invited prisoners to make a painting for each page, following a template that I made, of which I am also contributing. My original plan was to produce a book that had one page for each of the days I was at Grendon, but so far, the prisoners have been prolific, making many more than I expected. The nexus for the book works from the notion of time as explored by On Kawara but also by some of the therapeutic models employed at Grendon around hierarchies and identity. Each of the pages is identified by a maker’s mark but no key will be provided – each page will remain anonymous.
Alongside this I am making the largest painting made on linen in a prison – 11x6ft. The painting will explore each of the philosophical notions mentioned; the virtual, temporal, sublime and beautiful. I came to Grendon with both of these ideas roughly formed. Intriguingly, following initial discussions with prisoners around these concepts we started to discuss the significance of mirrors, specifically the prison issue standardised mirror, which is 10cm by 10cm and made from plastic. I now have twenty-four of these which are arranged on a drawing board and plan to take a series of reflected images using a matchbox pinhole camera. This will be explored as a separate strand of enquiry to the larger work on linen.
How do you intend to translate these images into your painting practice? Are they self-portraits?
I have been taking images of myself reflected in different paintings, artworks and a variety of surfaces for quite a few years. I utilise different cameras such as matchbox pinhole, 35mm, Lomography cameras and even my phone on occasion. In this instance I have been making works that are on aluminium using a combination of my painting practice and four colour process screen printing. I hadn’t considered the images as self-portraits as I wasn’t the subject – the subject was the act of the reflection being reflected through both the photographic capture and the surface of the resulting artwork. Also, I didn’t want something as concrete as a self-portrait, I wanted a figural slippage in the work rather than a figurative statement of fact. However, following discussions at Grendon I have started to question myself. This is something I am going to have to think about further and follow up in conversations at the studio with prison residents.
The plan was to initially translate the images into four colour process screen prints, which will also expand into a workshop for the studio community. I am unsure of how this will be translated until I have progressed the idea further, but all my paintings start from a figurative given. Historically these have been other paintings, or photographs I have taken, then I start to explore a potential for a new subjectivity within them. I guess this is where my problem with thinking or discussing the reflected images as self-portraits lies, because they come with a pre-defined subjectivity and maybe that is where the challenge begins.
