Ally Rosenberg
“I’m really interested in materials that have inherent properties, that allow for slicing or casting. Rather than a surface quality, colour and image can have integral qualities running through them like Blackpool rock candy.”
Interview by Sonja Teszler
Could you tell us a bit about yourself and your background? Where did you study?
I was born and grew up in Manchester. I moved to London to study, first at Byam Shaw School of Art, then onto Central St Martins. It was during my BA that I took part in an exchange programme in New York and spent a semester at the Pratt Institute. The approach there was so different to what I was used to and I loved that I could take classes in any subject. I wangled my way onto the graduate philosophy course, which was much smaller than the undergraduate one, with a wonderful professor who held the classes over dinner, from her Brooklyn home. These classes were formative and are what first planted the idea of studying neuroscience after my BA.
Your background in neuroscience sounds very interesting. Could you talk about how that led to becoming an artist and how it informs your ways of looking and your practice?
It was actually the other way around. I went from a BA in fine art, to an MSc in neuroscience, language and communication at UCL, with the intervening summer spent in Boston, at Harvard’s neuroimaging lab as a sort of pretend intern. It sounds like a massive leap, but at the time it felt like a logical extension of what I was thinking about aesthetically, and it wasn’t intended as a move away from art. In fact, I felt more like an artist than I had at CSM, just intruding on another discipline. Which isn’t a bad thing, I don’t think. As an outsider, it gives you license to ask stupid questions and learn without too much fear of being exposed as a fraud – everyone already knew I was a fraud. Looking back, it sometimes it feels like the master’s degree was more about shaping how I present myself, than how I look at things. I got an expensive piece of paper that I hoped made me sound impressive, but actually involved a lot of blagging. In honesty, I wasn’t much of a scientist. However, it did definitely inform my thinking. Designing neuroscientific paradigms for a group of participants has some similarities to presenting art to an audience. Both involve a kind of simulation, description or provocation of a conscious experience, while having to account for the way that context interferes with it. If you’re using an MRI scanner to look at humour, love, language or any other human experience in the brain, you can’t ignore the massive, noisy, magnetic donut that the subject is lying in while you observe them. This interacts with what’s being experienced and what’s being observed. In cognitive science, as in art, a moment of consciousness doesn’t exist in a vacuum. So I think a lot about the authenticity of experiences.
Your colour palette and materials such as foam add to the sense of the stylized, toy-like representation of the body – in Some Compliments Aren’t Worth Accepting (2020) you use the aesthetic of building blocks or bricks to make up the body for instance. Could you talk about this and how it informs your subject?
I’m really interested in materials that have inherent properties, that allow for slicing or casting. Rather than a surface quality, colour and image can have integral qualities running through them like Blackpool rock candy. I think a lot about this integrity in materials and how the process of using it might reflect the subject matter. It started with looking at ‘Nerikomi’, a Japanese ceramic technique of layering coloured clays and slicing them to reveal a cross-sectional image. I love this interface of sculpture and drawing, but also the way that an image can be duplicated, not by copying, but by division. It’s so biological, it’s like mitosis. Using these sculptural techniques to draw, your draughtsmanship skills are compromised, so the modular, cartoonish representations of the body are somewhat caused by that. Stylistically, I think there’s also an element of distance that this gives me from the work, which is something I’m trying to address at the moment. A lot of these processes have an inner logic that I feel like I’m supposed to stick to. In Some Compliments Aren’t Worth Accepting, it’s the first time I have included manmade forms in this body of work, like bricks. I suppose there’s a cellular thing going on, which still plays with the pseudo-anatomical subject matter. But it’s a hollow-cast piece, made of two parts (as opposed to multiple, actual bricks) and I have faked the aesthetic of the inner shape having been cut-out of the outer one. Also, I’ve used papercrete, which is pulped cardboard mixed with cement to make a cheap, lightweight alternative to brick or concrete. I have given in to practical considerations, breaking my own arbitrary rules, but I quite like how it’s like a theatre prop, with the faux-brick cladding and the steel hinge.
I Never Had an Imaginary Friend, But Sometimes Imagined That I Did, 2020
Some Compliments Aren't Worth Accepting, 2020
Bilateral Symmetry, Slice 3, 2019
My impression of your sculptures is they could be the shameless overspillings of a libidinal consciousness - there is a sense of awkwardness and at the same time a childlike, ‘naughty’ brashness with the focus on genitalia, breasts, taboos. Could you talk about these themes and how they reflect on the human psyche?
I’d really prefer not to subconsciously spill my libido all over the place, but maybe by definition, I wouldn’t know if I did. I don’t set out to reference sex exactly, but there’s a sensuous aspect to the subject matter and so it’s unavoidable. On a structural level, bodily appendages are easy to isolate and do a good job of functioning as singular objects or symbols. I’m interested in how the body is truncated and dissected in pursuit of knowledge, beauty, communication. I think the clinical, symmetrical articulation of the figures looks shameless or confrontational, though I hope that’s offset by the playfulness. I don’t aim to be brash for the sake of it, but I like unsentimental things. My paternal grandfather was a doctor, an oil painter and, in youth, a successful athlete. He died last year and I have reflected on how he – his traditional embodiment of masculinity, of art, of academia, of being a Jew, of patriarchy and status – influenced me in both what I have aspired to and against. I never had much to rebel against but I have come to reject many of these traditional tropes of identity, in my beliefs, my sexuality etc., while resigning myself to the knowledge that I have been shaped by them. I think there lies a tension that might be reflected in the work, but I don’t pointedly set out to address it. Some artists use their work to assert a sense of self and some use it to figure those things out. I talk a lot and I’m told I project conviction. But I’m chronically ambivalent about things and I see talking and making as thinking processes, clumsily fumbling me towards understanding how I feel and what I actually think. Recently, it’s this ambivalence I focus on when naming the work, rather than the physicality or subject matter of the piece itself.
There is an overarching visual theme of a flattened representation of human anatomy and a “mirroring effect” in the work. Can you talk about what draws you to this type of depiction and potential conceptual relationships between that and human consciousness? Did you have psychoanalysis in mind or are you more interested in the immediate, less intellectual and more bodily experience?
I have always enjoyed diagrams and anatomical drawings, looking at the body in its 2D planes. In childhood, we partly come to understand our physicality from external sources, in pop-up books and textbooks, as somewhere between two and three dimensions. It’s hard to remember what the intuitive experience of our own objecthood might have been before these influences - maybe a return to intuition in the making of my work contributes to the childishness of it. The mirroring is a preoccupation I have had recently with our bilateral symmetry. We’re these weird, unlikely life-forms with a line of symmetry, splitting us down the middle. I like when the work is almost flat-packable. Partly, just because sculpture is very space-greedy and I have limited studio space, but also I like the way it almost cheapens the work, as if it could be an Ikea product. Doing this with materials like concrete, which is so macho and permanent plays with the status of materials in a way I find enjoyable. At art school, I stopped making work. Partly due to the pressure to intellectualise too soon in the conception of it; to justify the rigour of a piece of work before it exists. This totally crippled my ability to make stuff. Eventually, I allowed myself to just play around with materials again and keep making without judgment, until I had stuff to look back on. Then, the cerebral side catches up and I find out what ideas I’ve been toying with, in how the work functions. I’m not particularly angst-ridden about it, but better to tear yourself to pieces over work that actually exists, I say! I don’t think much about psychoanalysis, but ego and neuroses are interesting.
Bilateral Symmetry, Slice 1.0 and 1.1, 2018
Blue Legs (Squatting), 2019
Pink Legs (Akimbo), 2019
Open Arms, 2019
Could you talk about your interest in irony and its relationship to authenticity within your work and more generally our perception of ourselves?
I have always been interested in humour in art, but it’s only now that I don’t specifically set out to make anything humorous or ironic that people seem to use words like ‘fun’ and ‘playful’ in response. I’m fine with that. I don’t see humour to be the opposite of seriousness. But I don’t like solemnity, and I suspect that might play into my struggle with sincerity. Not that I can’t be serious or genuine, but I find it hard to be po-faced, which is a different thing. This results in always observing your experiences in real time, rather than just experiencing them ‘authentically’, whatever that means. I reckon this is a really common irony, when crying, dancing, having sex or anything that’s supposed to engross you, but you catch yourself from an outward view and see your own ridiculousness. More than self-consciousness, it’s the ultimate ‘meta’ moment where you look into the camera and wave at the audience. It’s funny but also kind of naff. It also appears with looking at your own body with fresh eyes and seeing how weird and creepy the idea of teeth or fingers are. It’s like saying a word so many times that it just becomes an alien jumble of sounds. It’s quite an adolescent revelation and not very profound to talk about, but it might be an interesting perspective from which to make things.
Tell us a bit about how you spend your day / studio routine? What is your studio like?
I’m really lucky to have found a setup that allows me to have the lifestyle that I want. My studio is a live-work unit in a converted paint factory in High Barnet. High ceilings and lots of natural light, but too hot in the summer and too cold in the winter. I live there with my dog (a whippet called Sid). We wake up, go for a walk, then he sleeps while I faff about in the studio like a retired old man. Then, together, we go off to do some evening tutoring in London. Having my studio where I live is an incredible luxury, as I often work more fluently at night and can dip in and out until quite late. It’s taken a few years to build to a point where the balance is starting to work; where I’m able to find some momentum in my own daily practice. I spent three years only making sporadic commissions under fictional artists’ names, which is what gradually enabled me to move to a bigger space. Now that I’m only working on my own stuff, it’s harder to maintain the setup, but I’m figuring it out.
Is there anything new and exciting in the pipeline you would like to tell us about?
At the time of this interview, I’m in isolation due to the COVID-19 pandemic. There are supposed to be a few shows coming up in the early summer, but it’s looking like they won’t happen. Again, I’m very lucky that being stuck inside isn’t something that seriously impedes my ability to develop work (I’m a bit of a hermit anyway), and I’m early enough in my work, that there’s nothing too career-defining that’s been scuppered. I really feel for artists and galleries and anyone else whose work is going to be properly compromised for an indefinite amount of time. Looking beyond this uncertainty, I’m working towards building a body of work for a first solo show. In terms of the work, I’d like to develop things to be more site-specific and compositional. I like the idea of applying this visual language to larger-scale, more immersive uses of a space.
All images are courtesy of the artist
Date of publication: 29/04/20
