Studio International Art Magazine

In Protest and Remembrance at Alan Cristea, with her large abstract works of plywood, acrylic gesso and graphite, Griffiths aims to capture the splendour of the working-class engineering at a former colliery. Mary Griffiths (b1965, the Wirral) has long been making drawings of (frequently derelict) industrial sites. A year and a half ago, she was introduced to Astley Green Colliery, a former coalmine in Lancashire, which was closed in 1970 and knocked down but for its winding house and headgear – rare examples of 1908 working-class engineering. Spending time at the site, walking around the surrounding geography, reclaimed by nature with trees, grass and mosses, and talking to the volunteers (the colliery is now a museum), Griffiths filled myriad A6 sketchpads with figurative drawings, focusing on aspects that intrigued her, from details of the machinery to a visiting colony of pigeons. From these drawings, she then extrapolated her larger abstract works, made on plywood, with layers of acrylic gesso, and even more layers of graphite, pushed into the board and burnished, before being cut into with an etching needle. Using thousands of straight lines, placed at minutely different angles, she creates an oscillating effect reminiscent of the surface geography of the region. One work, Wild Honey, for example, represents the seams of the coalmine, the waterways and the main roads. Griffiths sees her work as “an identification of the remarkable work that was done in industrial areas” across the country, and it is important to her to capture something of the “gravity and splendour” of the working-class engineering. Protest and Remembrance Miriam de Búrca | Joy Gerrard | Mary Griffiths | Barbara Walker Alan Cristea Gallery, London 28 February – 30 March 2019 Interview by ANNA McNAY Filmed by MARTIN KENNEDY

Miriam de Búrca: ‘The sites themselves are very charged: very beautiful but also very tragic’ With her detailed drawings of plants growing on the graves of Ireland’s excommunicates and other unblessed souls, De Búrca, now on show in Protest and Remembrance at Alan Cristea, hopes to restore the dignity of those the Catholic church abandoned Through her work, Miriam de Búrca (b1972, Munich) seeks to draw attention to burial sites in Ireland known as cilliní, where, as recently as the 1980s, anyone deemed unworthy by the Catholic church of a burial in consecrated ground was laid to rest – or, rather, not to rest, since theology teaches that their unblessed souls remain for ever in limbo. These unfortunate and unknown strangers include stillborn or unbaptised babies, unmarried mothers, those who have taken their own lives, the mentally ill and excommunicates. The absence of headstones adds to the wilful desire to make people forget and to suppress this long chapter of Irish history. But De Búrca believes it should be remembered – those buried should be remembered – and, by making careful drawings of the plants growing on the graves and, in the process, paying absolute attention to detail, she seeks to pay back some of the attention that those buried have been denied. Having finished with the sods of earth in her studio, she then returns them to the graves, hoping further to show a sign of respect and return some of the lost dignity. Protest and Remembrance Miriam de Búrca | Joy Gerrard | Mary Griffiths | Barbara Walker Alan Cristea Gallery, London 28 February – 30 March 2019 Interview by ANNA McNAY Filmed by MARTIN KENNEDY

Joy Gerrard: ‘I’m interested in how we witness and interpret these events’ In her depictions of mass protests, Gerrard aims to make visible those who attend. For Protest and Remembrance at Alan Cristea, she focuses on anti-Trump and anti-Brexit marches. Working with hand-ground Japanese ink, Joy Gerrard (b1971, Dublin) makes small drawings and large canvases depicting bird’s-eye views of mass protests, here specifically anti-Brexit and anti-Trump marches from June 2018. Consciously working from media images – primarily stills from helicopter footage – which she collects in their hundreds, Gerrard selects those images that she will turn into her monochrome drawings, getting to know the image and memorialising it in the process. From these, she then may select a couple to work up into a large canvas – using the same medium, but to very different, almost abstract effect. This time, she works from the drawing, concentrating on areas of tone and shade, creating a strong composition, built up in small sections. Overall, her aim is to make visible the masses who attend these protests, which she strongly believes can make a difference. Her work not only takes protest – and remembrance – as its themes, but it is, in itself, a form of protest. Protest and Remembrance Miriam de Búrca | Joy Gerrard | Mary Griffiths | Barbara Walker Alan Cristea Gallery, London 28 February – 30 March 2019 Interview by ANNA McNAY Filmed by MARTIN KENNEDY

Hew Locke: ‘A lot of my work has to do with the burden of history and … how history affects us today’ Hew Locke discusses monarchy, nationhood, bigotry, boats, Brexit and the seductive silliness of TV’s historical dramas, before the opening of his Birmingham show at the Ikon Gallery. Born in Edinburgh in 1959, Hew Locke was taken by his Guyanese/British parents to live in Guyana in 1966 – just before independence. “I saw a nation being born,” he says. “I saw a flag being designed. I saw the money literally being designed.” Small wonder that the icons, myths and individuals that come to represent a country’s notion of nationhood have always fascinated him. After returning to the UK to study fine art at Falmouth School of Art, he went to the Royal College of Art for his MA and has lived in London ever since. As an artist, his themes include the visual language of colonial and postcolonial power, which he explores with a keen eye for the visual and emotional resonances between ancient and current affairs. He has said: “If I wasn’t an artist, I would be a historian.” And it is through the careful, considered layering, collaging or sculpting of the trinkets, statues, costumes and military and royal paraphernalia that people see as representative of authority or aspiration, that he exposes what is going on above and below the surface. The pieces are always steeped in painstaking research, much of which, he says, is thanks to the input of his wife, the artist and studio curator Indra Khanna. Here, Locke discusses pieces he has created – and hopes to create - for the new Ikon Birmingham show, plus many of his past highlights, including Sikandar, which was shortlisted for the fourth plinth in Trafalgar Square in 2010, plus a performance piece he was commissioned for at Tate’s Turbine Hall, Give and Take (2014), as part of the Up Hill Down Hall event curated by Claire Tancons. The Jurors, Runnymede (2015), curated by Claire Doherty, is perhaps his most high-profile commission to date, the centrepiece of a celebration of the 800th anniversary of the Magna Carta: a circle of 12 bronze chairs, placed around an invisible table, each chair is richly layered with the stories of those who have stood up for a range of human rights issues. A fair few royals were in attendance at its opening, including Queen Elizabeth II, who clearly bears no grudge against Locke for the exuberant, voodoo-esque representations of her and her family he has created, often made up of plastic trinkets he has salvaged from pound stores and Brixton market. In 2017, Locke was one of the artists chosen as mentors for the Diaspora pavilion – encouraging the work of young artists whose pieces were shown alongside theirs – for the 57th Venice Biennale (2017). In 2000, Locke won both a Paul Hamlyn Award and the East International Award. He has had several solo exhibitions in the UK and US, and his work is in many international collections, including that of the Tate Gallery, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, the V&A, the British Museum and the Henry Moore Institute. Hew Locke: Here’s The Thing Ikon Gallery, Birmingham 8 March – 2 June 2019 Interview by VERONICA SIMPSON Filmed by MARTIN KENNEDY

Imre Bak: ‘In today’s language, we need to achieve some kind of balance between the local and the global’ The neo-avant-gardist recalls cold war isolation, his enduring commitment to geometric abstraction, and the importance of maintaining Hungarian traditions in his art. Born in Budapest in 1939, Imre Bak shaped his artistic identity in the culturally cloistered situation of postwar Hungary. Acutely receptive to the new tendencies proliferating in western Europe and America, from the start Bak also acknowledged the artistic precedents of his own country, both the pioneering modernism of László Moholy Nagy and Lajos Kassák, as well as Hungarian folk art. His signature works, currently on display at the Mayor Gallery, are precisely composed formal geometric structures with penetrating colour fields and sharply defined contours, the ‘hard-edge’ of the eponymous movement, or ‘hard-edge with paprika’ as it was once flippantly called. Bak would also respond to the conceptualising zeitgeist of the 70s, exploring the relationship between image, text and meaning, at times assimilating Hungarian ethnographic motifs, a distinctive synthesis informed by a genuinely cosmopolitan impulse. Imre Bak, Works 1967-1981, The Mayor Gallery, London, 13 February – 29 March 2019. Interview by ANGERIA RIGAMONTI di CUTÒ

Phoebe Boswell – interview: ‘Grief is not a personal thing. It’s a human condition’ Boswell’s latest exhibition, The Space Between Things, which includes a video of her undergoing an eye operation, uses art as a way to connect with others whose wounds may otherwise remain unseen Phoebe Boswell’s exhibition The Space Between Things, at Autograph in London, was produced in the aftermath of a significant personal trauma. Before the artist arrives for our interview, I watch a video in the upstairs gallery of her undergoing eye surgery. Later, she tells me that she made the film in black and white in order to spare the viewer the full goriness. Despite this, I still find myself looking away. Boswell, however, seems to possess the determination to stare down painful episodes, and use art as a way to connect with others whose wounds may otherwise remain unseen. Installed on the floor beneath the video of the eye, a monitor plays an angiogram of her heart, which she describes as “broken”. Boswell was born in Nairobi in 1982 to a Kikuyu mother and British Kenyan father, and grew up in the Middle East before moving to the UK. Over the past few years, she has made a name for herself as an artist expressing the multi-faceted experience of the diaspora. (She was awarded the Special Prize by the Future Generation Art Prize at the 2017 Venice Biennale.) The Space Between Things was produced between her family home in Zanzibar and London. The title of the exhibition suggests a number of interstitial spaces: the spaces of healing and grieving, between cultures and homes, and between a variety of mediums. The backbone of Boswell’s practice is drawing, but she is equally adroit when using video, animation and spoken word. In the downstairs gallery at Autograph, visitors are invited to stand on sensor pads that trigger spoken-word recordings, while watching drone-footage of the artist floating in the ocean or drawing patterns in the sand. On the walls is a mural that Boswell produced onsite: unflinching self-portraits of the artist, often prostrate and in discomfort, drawn with willow charcoal. Despite the highly personal subject matter, Boswell’s work is neither confessional nor diaristic. Instead, she uses her experiences to tap into bigger narratives: a generous and brave thing to do, and a reminder of the therapeutic uses of art. Phoebe Boswell: The Space Between Things Autograph, London 14 December 2018 – 30 March 2019 Interview by ROSANNA MCLAUGHLIN Filmed by MARTIN KENNEDY

Joseph Hillier: ‘Figurative sculpture in a public space presents a real opportunity to stir something in people’ Sculptor Joseph Hillier talks about his most ambitious project to date, its design, and what it takes to construct a bronze that weighs 9.5 tonnes. This spring, the largest bronze sculpture to be cast in the UK will be erected at the entrance to the Theatre Royal in Plymouth. Standing seven metres tall and nearly nine metres wide, Joseph Hillier’s Messenger will depict a young actress caught mid-rehearsal for a production of Othello with the theatre company Frantic Assembly. She strikes a dynamic pose, a brief, energetic crouch that the artist chose to capture and recreate on a truly monumental scale. She appears on the brink of some great leap forward, poised and ready for action, frozen in time, for ever about to launch into the future. Hillier’s huge sculpture is being cast piece-by-piece using the lost-wax technique at the Castle Fine Arts Foundry in Llanrhaeadr ym Mochnant, Wales. But this process has undergone some modernisation. The actress’s stance was captured using 360-degree Computer Aided Design and then cut into polyurethane foam by machine and broken down into 200 separate sections for the labour-intensive process of casting. The resulting bronze panels will then be welded together, with the final assembly taking place on site in Plymouth. Hillier, who was born in Cornwall in 1974, lives in a rural village near Newcastle in the UK. He is an associate member of the Royal British Society of Sculptors, with no shortage of public commissions to his name. But Messenger will be his most daring. Studio International visited the Castle Fine Arts Foundry in Wales to speak with Hillier about this project, and to see the work in progress. Interview by EMILY SPICER Filmed by MARTIN KENNEDY

The artists shortlisted for Artes Mundi 8 aim to stir our consciences on everything from abuse of the Earth’s resources to the creep of surveillance and the steel industry’s impact. Nigerian-born, Belgium-based Otobong Nkanga (b1974), has long been exploring - through drawings, installations, performance, photographs and sculptures - the links, both fragile and enduring, that connect humans to the land around us via the resources we use and abuse. For Artes Mundi 8, she is showing two large works, set within a strangely somber and meditative space at the far end of the gallery, with its own pyramidal roof. Placed on a black carpet, the contemplative quality of these pieces induces an instant hush in the visitors. We see a circle within a circle of elemental items within her sculptural piece Manifest of Strains (2018), occasionally hissing loudly (to represent air) and heating up (fire). This is framed by a large tapestry, titled Double Plot (2018). She talks to Studio International about her inspirations for these pieces, and her enduring preoccupations with the reciprocity or interconnectedness of emotion and action around the world. Interview by VERONICA SIMPSON Filmed by MARTIN KENNEDY

The artists shortlisted for Artes Mundi 8 aim to stir our consciences on everything from abuse of the Earth’s resources to the creep of surveillance and the steel industry’s impact. On entering the exhibition on the museum’s first floor, the first piece we encounter is an installation by Anna Boghiguian (b1946, Cairo) exploring the steel industry and its impact on human civilisation. A Meteor Fell from the Sky (2018) unfolds like a scattered, collaged storybook, with intensely figured drawings, slices of shimmering sheet steel, Boghiguian’s signature paper cut-outs (hard-hatted steel workers), some perching precariously on industrial structures, and mini-meteors created from mesh, concrete and paint, all set against a vibrant background wall colouring of intense pink, yellow and blue; these are the same colours that apparently burn so brightly against the darkness and clamour of a steel foundry. The Egyptian-born Boghuiguian is said to live a nomadic life and, for this piece – with the encouragement of Artes Mundi founder and curator Karen MacKinnon - she travelled to India and also to Port Talbot in Wales, to draw out stories of the associated steel magnates and their workers. On one wall, she has handwritten one of several subtexts, describing how: “The industrial revolution … has transformed itself to digital revolution and virtual reality (new ways to interact, to think, to be). The mind has become a machine that responds to the input downloaded by the public. The public opinion becomes the police force that decides the moral/ethical values of our being. Treating people as criminals.” She spoke with Studio International about her travels and research for this piece, the founding of India’s first steel business, Tata Steel - which, by an interesting twist of fate, now also owns the steel industry of Port Talbot - and how this material is currently being manipulated by assorted superpowers to influence global economies and politics. The Artes Mundi exhibition runs until 24 February 2019 at the National Museum Cardiff. Interview by VERONICA SIMPSON Filmed by MARTIN KENNEDY

Magdalena Mielnicka, an expert on Abakanowicz, talks about the irrepressible Polish artist’s extraordinary life and her uncanny sculptures, currently on show at Stara Kopalnia Science and Art Centre, Wałbrzych. The early life of Magdalena Abakanowicz (1930-2017) was shaped by the politics of her time. She was born into a noble family – her father had been a tsarist general, purportedly descended from Genghis Khan, who fled to Poland after the outbreak of the Russian Revolution. He married Helena Domaszowska, the daughter of Polish nobility, and lived on her family’s estate, east of Warsaw, where the young Abakanowicz spent her formative years. In 1943, tragedy struck when drunken German soldiers broke into the family home and shot her mother, severing her arm below the shoulder. Helena survived, but this single event was to leave a lasting impact on the young artist-in-making. Following the war, when Poland was placed under communist rule, Abakanowicz assumed a new identity to disguise her privileged background. She enrolled in art school, but the regime’s institutional intolerance of the avant garde was stifling. Rejected from the sculpture course at the Warsaw Academy of Fine Arts – her work was considered too formalist – the young artist focused instead on painting. Socialist realism was the only state-approved artistic style and anything else was considered inflammatory, even dangerous. Still, Abakanowicz pushed the boundaries, choosing to paint with gouache on enormous stitched-together bed sheets. Despite these challenges, and perhaps because of them, Abakanowicz would develop her own visual language, addressing the human condition as she saw it, and building an international reputation with exhibitions abroad. Her works have such universal appeal that they are permanent fixtures in public spaces in Jerusalem and across the United States. In Japan, her Space of Becalmed Beings, a work consisting of 40 bronze, hollow backs, forms part of a memorial in Hiroshima, where her visual language has particular resonance. Abakanowicz’s sculptures are made from a range of materials. She worked with fabric, stone and bronze, nearly always on a large scale. Her mutilated human forms are life-size and often form eerie groups that have an ominous sense of waiting about them, and an anonymity that speaks to shared experience. Her Abakans, so named, perhaps, because they represented something more personal, are enormous structures made of sisal and steel and seem at once earthy and otherworldly. Perhaps that is part of Abakanowicz’s real genius. She imbued everything she made with a kind of quiet strangeness – an unease both familiar and surreal. Studio International travelled to the Stara Kopalnia Science and Art Centre in Wałbrzych, Poland, to talk to Magdalena Mielnicka, an expert on Abakanowicz’s art. The centre, a former mine, has more than 100 of the artist’s works as part of an exhibition curated by Maria Rus Bojan. Magdalena Abakanowicz: Presence, Essence, Identity Stara Kopalnia Science and Art Centre, Wałbrzych 30 September – 30 December 2018 Interview by EMILY SPICER Filmed by MARTIN KENNEDY

1 October 2018, The Mayor Gallery, London. Billy Apple is not just an artist – he’s a trademarked brand. He talks about exchanging his art for a knee operation and his new exhibition at the Mayor Gallery, London In 1962, Barrie Bates changed his name to Billy Apple, a decision that marked a lifelong pursuit of collapsing art into life. Born in New Zealand in 1935, he moved to the UK in 1959 to study at the Royal College of Art, London. As a student, he became closely involved in the rise of pop art, producing work alongside his friend and art school companion David Hockney. Over the coming decades Apple turned himself into a brand (he is currently working on a line of Billy Apple cider), produced works of art that directly address his financial requirements, and presented his own bodily movements as a form of self-expression. After leaving the Royal College of Art, Apple moved to New York, living temporarily in the loft of the sculptor Eva Hesse. In 1964, he participated in the seminal exhibition The American Supermarket – a theatrical affair in which a supermarket was installed inside Bianchini Gallery on the Upper East Side. Apple exhibited posters and prints advertising red and green apples, as well as painted bronze sculptures of the eponymous fruit, alongside Warhol’s Campbell’s soup cans, and Jasper Johns’s tins of beer. In 1974, a survey of work produced by Apple between 1964 and 1970 was staged at the Serpentine Gallery, London. The exhibition was censored on the grounds of obscenity after objections were raised over the decision to exhibit shit, semen and blood-stained tissues on the gallery walls. In the early 80s, Apple began the series Art Transactions, for which he traded and bartered prints in exchange for items and services he required – whether train tickets, cars or healthcare. (Apple is planning to trade a work to pay towards an operation on his knee.) In doing so, Apple makes visible the economic needs of artists, strategising art as a tool for getting by, while also producing a diary of his activities and movements. The Artist Has to Live Like Everybody Else 1961–2018 Mayor Gallery, London 12 September – 2 November 2018 Interview by ROSANNA MCLAUGHLIN Filmed by MARTIN KENNEDY

‘I hope my pavilions will be destroyed because that was not the work’ As Dan Graham’s new show opens at the Lisson Gallery in London, he talks about his early days as a New York gallerist, his love of music and why he doesn’t believe his famous pavilions are important Dan Graham (b1942, Illinois) has had a varied and fascinating career. A self-taught artist, his first real engagement with the world of contemporary art was in 1964, when he and some friends opened the John Daniels Gallery in Manhattan. Here he put on Sol LeWitt’s first one-man show and exhibited works by Donald Judd, Dan Flavin and Robert Smithson. It was common at that time for all artists to consider themselves artist-writers, he says, and he rapidly established a name for himself as a social and cultural analyst, reviewing everything from rock music and TV shows to architecture and urban planning. He has kept up his writing while developing a multimedia practice that includes photography, performance, installation and sculpture. Over the past three decades, his two-way mirrored or half-mirrored glass and steel pavilions – often described as halfway between architecture and sculpture - have become familiar sights on the rooftops and in the landscapes of leading cultural institutions, including the Dia Art Foundation in New York, Documenta, the Hayward Gallery in London and Hauser & Wirth Somerset. Combining the glassy perfection of corporate atria (another topic Graham has written about) with the inviting curves and tactility of children’s play equipment, and the optical illusions of fairground mirrors, he has described his more recent pavilion series – including Child’s Play (2015-16) for the Museum of Modern Art’s Sculpture Garden – as “fun houses for children and photo ops for parents”. Graham, who is based in New York, talked with Studio International in London as his 10th exhibition for the Lisson Gallery opened. For this show, he presents a new curvilinear stage-set along with oversized models that demonstrate his work within both urban and natural landscapes, and a courtyard pavilion, all of which are designed to interrogate the relationship between audience and performer. He will also be showing a video of a puppet show he devised 12 years ago, called Don’t Trust Anyone Over 30. He devised the piece, which is set in the 1970s, as a conversation starter for grandparents to reminisce with their offspring over the hippy heyday in the 1960s. It was produced by Sandra Antelo-Suarez, with set design by Laurent Bergen, music by Japanther and the theme tune was by Rodney Graham. The puppet master was Phillip Huber. Dan Graham: Rock’n’Roll Lisson Gallery, London 3 October – 3 November 2018 Interview by VERONICA SIMPSON Filmed by MARTIN KENNEDY

Ian Davenport discusses works done over the past year, now at Waddington Custot, London, as well as the three decades of his work on show at Dallas Contemporary Success came early in the career of painter Ian Davenport (b1966): within three years of graduating from Goldsmiths, he had staged his first London solo show and been nominated for the Turner Prize. But from his early monochrome experimentations to his current vital, multi-hued works, the physicality of his approach, the repetitions of gesture and rhythm – and, more recently, the decision to allow his stripes of poured paint to extend from the bottom of a vertical canvas into a pooled and sensuous horizontal puddle - have transported his works into a fascinating space somewhere between painting and sculpture. He has cited Andy Warhol and Jackson Pollock as influences – both were supreme colourists, but Warhol resonates for his courage to interrogate the power of repetition; Pollock for that heady combination of control and unleashed physical expression. More recently, Davenport has been taking inspiration from the work of other artists, taking the palette and mood of a specific work as a starting point for his own explorations. In Colourscapes, his current show at Waddington Custot, London, for example, there is a huge, rainbow-hued painting inspired by Pierre Bonnard (Mirrored Place, 2017), and another richly tinted work sparked by a close encounter with Vincent Van Gogh’s The Harvest. Damien Hirst - a fellow Goldsmiths alumni – articulated Davenport’s unique talents nicely in his introduction to the latter’s 2014 monograph, extolling his ability to “paint confidently with exploding energy, furiously and on a grand scale, using conceptual and sculptural ideas, and with his own physical techniques to create phenomenal contemporary paintings”. In this interview, he discusses the works exhibited in the Waddington Custot show, all of which were all produced in the last year, and those from Horizons, the simultaneous major solo show at Dallas Contemporary, which features new works as well as a handful of paintings from his very early days. In this conversation, he explores the combination of control and spontaneity that informs his practice, from the meticulous preparation that goes into each huge work to the playfulness and serendipity of his new “splat” paintings on paper, in the London show. Born in Kent, he studied fine art at Northwich College of Art and Design in Cheshire before moving to Goldsmiths where he studied under Michael Craig-Martin, receiving his BA in 1988. Since then, Davenport has had more than 40 solo shows and appeared in many more group exhibitions in Europe, Asia and the US. He recently celebrated 30 years with Waddington Custot. Ian Davenport: Colourscapes Waddington Custot, London 20 September – 8 November 2018 and Ian Davenport: Horizons Dallas Contemporary, Texas 30 September – 17 December 2018 Interview by VERONICA SIMPSON Filmed by MARTIN KENNEDY

Nicolas and Frances McDowall started the Old Stile Press almost 40 years ago. They talk to Studio International about the many and varied books they have produced in that time In her text outlining the background history of the Old Stile Press from 1979-99 (The Old Stile Press … in the Twentieth Century), Dorothy A Harrop tells us how Nicolas McDowall “became enraptured by visual images as he explored books in the company of his grandmother”. McDowall’s fascination with the “mis en page” – the juxtaposition between words and images and the space linking and separating them – began when, aged four, he was sitting on his grandmother’s knee as she read him an edition of Shakespeare’s Midsummer Nights Dream, with illustrations by William Heath Robinson. “It was there I gained my tremendous love of drawings, made with black ink, and just as important, of the white spaces left in between,” he says. McDowall’s career in publishing began with Edward Arnold, publishers of educational textbooks, where he quickly rose up the ranks from editor to manager to director, but it wasn’t until he established his own private press in 1979 that his “true talent as orchestrator of original illustrated editions came to the fore”, says Harrop. McDowall studied philosophy at the University of St Andrews, where he met his future wife, Frances Pickering, who was studying English and music. Frances was the daughter of the journalist and newspaper executive Sir Edward Pickering, known as “Pick” to his boss, the Daily Express proprietor Lord Beaverbrook. (Beaverbrook assigned Pickering to mentor the young Rupert Murdoch through his early Fleet Street years at the Daily Express.) Pickering encouraged a love of literature and printing in Frances, but, sadly, his participation in her life was short lived: Frances was only seven when he divorced her mother and after her father later remarried, he no longer played a part in their lives. Nicolas and Frances married in 1963, first living in Blackheath, London, where Frances (after having worked at Oxford University Press in sales, editing and copywriting) went freelance and later taught music in junior schools. Nicolas began to learn about making books, attending a bookbinding course at Morley College, London, taught by Hugh A de Coverly, and bookbinding classes at the London College of Printing (now the London College of Communication) taught by Alf Brazier and John Mitchell. McDowall’s science colleague at Edward Arnold, Joan Angelbeck, told him about a printing weekend run by John Randle at the Whittington Press in Gloucestershire. It was there, says Harrop, that McDowall “became intoxicated with the process of setting type by hand”, and, in 1978, he printed his first solo book, Cornish Haiku, a collection of haiku that, constrained by his then limited type, he had written for the purpose. For the edition of eight, McDowall made a linocut, marbled the cover papers, and sewed the pages together with coloured thread. McDowall also received direction and guidance from Will and Sebastian Carter, at their Rampant Lions Press in Cambridge, and David Chambers, at his Cuckoo Hill Press in Pinner). So began McDowall’s printing and publishing adventure and, in 1979, he and Frances set up their printing press while they were living in London and both still working. Then, in 1986, they moved to their current location in Monmouthshire, where a former stable block serves as the location for the press. Studio International visited Frances and Nicolas McDowall at their home and print studio in Monmouthshire, and spoke to them about the highlights in their nearly 40-year-long printing and publishing enterprise. Interview by MK PALOMAR Filmed by MARTIN KENNEDY

Bao Pei uses ink and paper in the tradition of Chinese ink painting, but makes her work abstract, and uses knives instead of brushes because she believes the delivery of the ink, the markings, are more forceful that way, conveying greater emotional depth and range. She talks about the void in her work as a visualisation of space-time and existential in content. An empty chair in one of her paintings might symbolise that which has yet to occur as well as that which has already past, she says, a metaphor for the human condition as one of perpetual change, of constant becoming, being. She also seems to say that something is gained but more certainly, something is lost. Intersection: International Art and Culture, Arthur M Sackler Museum of Art and Archaeology at Peking University, Beijing 27 May – 27 August 2018 Interview by LILLY WEI Filmed by MARTIN KENNEDY

Tai Xiangzhou is committed to a traditional lexicon, his ink paintings magnificent, deeply indebted to classic Chinese ink paintings while they simultaneously demonstrate the influence of baroque and mannerist paintings and contemporary practices. Intersection: International Art and Culture, Arthur M Sackler Museum of Art and Archaeology at Peking University, Beijing 27 May – 27 August 2018 Interview by LILLY WEI Filmed by MARTIN KENNEDY

Teresa Lawton’s paintings are inspired by her love of Dorset, where she explore the shapes and colours of the landscape, always in awe, she says ‘of the silence and mystery of nature’ Teresa Lawton travelled extensively throughout Europe, America and Greece, before studying painting at Winchester College of Art, and then returning to her home county of Dorset, where she now lives and paints. Spending hours in the Dorset landscape Lawton begins her day “up with the lark, before most people are out of their beds” walking her dogs “miles into the forest or along the coast”. Lawton explains that she “likes to be alone, alert and quiet”, watching as “the landscape changes with the weather and light, creating so many variations” that she is “never short of inspiration or ideas”. Lawton is interested in “isolated and unloved places with a story to tell, rooms full of light, shadows in the woods, changing light falling into the sea”. The Dorset coast is full of stories both ancient and modern. Smugglers and pirates knew their position at night on Chesil beach by the size of the stones where their boast made landfall, fossils of molluscs and brachiopods are common finds along that part of the Jurassic coast, and Meryl Streep in The French Lieutenant’s Woman stood battling the wind and heartbreak, wrapped in a cape at the end of the cob in Lyme Regis. Lawton’s paintings explore the various shapes and colours of the landscape, the ploughed pink fields, the pale rocks, and the different forms of trees, patterned environments occasionally visited by birds or animals. “Always in awe of the silence and mystery of nature,” if she is not walking in the landscape, then her studio is her favourite place to be. Teresa Lawton: Tipping the Balance The Gallery at Duke’s, Dorchester 12 – 26 July 2018 Interview by MK PALOMAR Filmed by MARTIN KENNEDY

Joana Vasconcelos: I’m Your Mirror Joana Vasconcelos has filled the Guggenheim Bilbao with work from the past 20 years. She talks about craft, the importance (or otherwise) of scale, and how she seeks to expose and explode the myths and realities around female experience. Joana Vasconcelos: I’m Your Mirror Guggenheim Bilbao 26 June – 11 November 2018 Interview by VERONICA SIMPSON Filmed by MARTIN KENNEDY

The exhibition True Colours, curated by Damien Hirst at his Newport Street Gallery, brings together three female painters, Helen Beard, Sadie Laska and Boo Saville, whose practice encompasses interestingly different usages of colour, form and subject. Helen Beard’s striking and marvellously simplified, flat colour images, take you by surprise in a number of ways. The fresh colour forms pack a satisfying punch even before the viewer has undergone the gradual realisation that the paintings portray a varied range of sexual acts. True Colours: Helen Beard, Sadie Laska and Boo Saville Newport Street Gallery, London 6 June – 9 September 2018 Interview by MK PALOMAR Filmed by MARTIN KENNEDY

The exhibition True Colours, curated by Damien Hirst at his Newport Street Gallery (opened in 2015 to display Hirst’s expansive collection to the public), brings together three female painters, Helen Beard, Sadie Laska and Boo Saville, whose practice encompasses interestingly different usages of colour, form and subject. New York-based Laska, who is both a painter and a drummer, brings her improvisation skills into her wall-based works, using collage, small objects and brushed colour in flight. Each work embraces the tactility of materials and the motion of thoughts and actions in the process of making. True Colours: Helen Beard, Sadie Laska and Boo Saville Newport Street Gallery, London 6 June – 9 September 2018 Interview by MK PALOMAR Filmed by MARTIN KENNEDY

The exhibition True Colours, curated by Damien Hirst at his Newport Street Gallery (opened in 2015 to display Hirst’s expansive collection to the public), brings together three female painters, Helen Beard, Sadie Laska and Boo Saville, whose practice encompasses interestingly different usages of colour, form and subject. Boo Saville’s fields of colour shimmer, each massive painting drawing you in and, once you are up close, their surfaces seem to conjure immersive spaces, as though the air has suddenly been coloured and there is space to fall in. Such a physical and emotional impact is reminiscent of Rothko’s Chapel in Houston, where his 14 black and coloured hue paintings cover the internal space. True Colours: Helen Beard, Sadie Laska and Boo Saville Newport Street Gallery, London 6 June – 9 September 2018 Interview by MK PALOMAR Filmed by MARTIN KENNEDY

The exhibition True Colours, curated by Damien Hirst at his Newport Street Gallery (opened in 2015 to display Hirst’s expansive collection to the public), brings together three female painters, Helen Beard, Sadie Laska and Boo Saville, whose practice encompasses interestingly different usages of colour, form and subject. For those who have not visited Newport Street, the gallery spaces are cathedral-like in scale and use the idea of a white cube to maximum effect. There is room to view every work from a good, airy distance, and while taking a first look at this exhibition, it is impossible not to be astonished at the immersive colours of the works. The catalogue (a fabulous, large-format, newspaper-type object) and the small A4 fold-out gallery plan are both lovely and, in any other circumstances, the difference between the printed images and the objects in the gallery would not be worth mentioning, but here the gap between the two is significant and unavoidable. First, my apologies to the patient gallery lady whom I marked 0 out of 10 for colour printing of the works. Second, I credit Belinda Bowring, director of communications, for pointing out that this is one reason we need galleries and paintings in the real world, because the physical impact of the works and the immersive emotional resonance of the colours are impossible to imitate even backlit online, let alone on any sort of paper. New York-based Laska, who is both a painter and a drummer, brings her improvisation skills into her wall-based works, using collage, small objects and brushed colour in flight. Each work embraces the tactility of materials and the motion of thoughts and actions in the process of making. Beard’s striking and marvellously simplified, flat colour images, take you by surprise in a number of ways. The fresh colour forms pack a satisfying punch even before the viewer has undergone the gradual realisation that the paintings portray a varied range of sexual acts. Saville’s fields of colour shimmer, each massive painting drawing you in and, once you are up close, their surfaces seem to conjure immersive spaces, as though the air has suddenly been coloured and there is space to fall in. Such a physical and emotional impact is reminiscent of Rothko’s Chapel in Houston, where his 14 black and coloured hue paintings cover the internal space. This is a fabulous exhibition, in scale, subject and colour. None of the documentation (on the website or in the printed accompanying matter) can do justice to the works; it is an exhibition that has to be experienced in person. True Colours: Helen Beard, Sadie Laska and Boo Saville Newport Street Gallery, London 6 June – 9 September 2018 Interview by MK PALOMAR Filmed by MARTIN KENNEDY

Patricia Guzman’s expertly executed realism makes her paintings appear photographic, as she documents faces that attract her sympathy, often closeup. Here, the deep-set eyes of her subject, an elderly man, gaze steadily outward; if you look carefully, you can see a figure reflected in them, which is that of the artist, but it could also stand in for the viewer, who can imagine he or she has been integrated into the painting, held by that unflinching, encompassing regard. Intersection: International Art and Culture, Arthur M Sackler Museum of Art and Archaeology at Peking University, Beijing 27 May – 27 August 2018 I nterview by LILLY WEI Filmed by MARTIN KENNEDY

Frieder Nake’s work is from 1965, a pioneering example of computer art in which the image is wholly machine-generated. It has “zero meaning”, he likes to say, even if somewhat ironically. A series of black lines in a kind of sheaf is a reminder of the simple, if groundbreaking beginning of the genre, a far cry from what can be done today. Intersection: International Art and Culture, Arthur M Sackler Museum of Art and Archaeology at Peking University, Beijing 27 May – 27 August 2018 Interview by LILLY WEI Filmed by MARTIN KENNEDY

Mark Fox, who was brought up as a Catholic, has issues with certain of the religion’s doctrines and belief systems, in what he calls a “love/hate response”. His work, Offering, is a jumble of tangled words taken from religious text, each cut out individually as if it were a bead on a rosary. The cutting suggests a form of penance or prayer, each word handled, considered, the whole reassembled doctrine then draped over a ladder that had been utilised in the installation. Fox says that the ladder represents his family, who are blue collar, as if to reiterate that the tenets of Catholicism are upheld by such salt-of-the-earth people – who should be able to access them without intermediaries, a contention that has long roiled the Catholic church. Intersection: International Art and Culture, Arthur M Sackler Museum of Art and Archaeology at Peking University, Beijing 27 May – 27 August 2018 Interview by LILLY WEI Filmed by MARTIN KENNEDY