Melanie Jackson
“I’m interested in testing or almost occupying, different aesthetic approaches and vernacular visual cultures to see what they add to an idea or subject.”
Interview by Jane Hayes Greenwood
Could you tell us a bit about yourself and your background?
I was born in the West Midlands, but spent my childhood (in the 70s and 80s), moving around the country following my mother’s relationships, (lack of) money, and dreams. We covered Birmingham, Wales, Devon, Shropshire, and London – from tiny lone cottages on the side of the Clee Hill to new-town estates and basement flats near Ladbroke Grove. We settled in London and I went to art school (Byam Shaw and RCA) which was free at that time and offered me the intellectual and creative freedom I hadn’t known was possible. I’ve lived and worked in London ever since, apart from periods spent in Cardiff and Dublin. I worked in community arts and bookshops and many other things for cash but never fully left art school as I moved over to teaching within a few years of graduating. Even in the current embattled form after years of attack by cuts and increased fees, something so important takes place in art schools that more people should have access to.
In your work, you make use of different media such as drawing, animation, sculpture, installation, writing, and performance. Your practice has been described as centering around, ‘non-fiction storytelling’ and often seems to grow out of a significant body of research in which you approach a subject like, ‘milk’ for example, from all possible angles. Is this approach typical for the work you make?
I definitely like (or maybe more accurately, cannot stop myself) from considering things from different angles; in the round and from different epistemological perspectives in order to see what new knowledge might be produced. Likewise, I’m interested in testing or almost occupying, different aesthetic approaches and vernacular visual cultures to see what they add to an idea or subject. I am always excited about new processes and transformations: not necessarily new in terms of technology or innovation, but new to me. I have delighted in what can be done (or what I can do with 3D modeling and code, in reference to what is and can be done to milk for example). I am equally enjoying the potential of ink and raw pigment at the moment as well as some really immediate casting from unfired clay to see what happens when medieval forms that have a sense of radical modernity about them are reimagined.
Canonfire
Spitroast
Voyeur Landlord
Street Scene
I am interested in your piece, Deeper In the Pyramid, 2018, a project made collaboratively with the academic Esther Leslie comprising video installation, sculpture, performance, and a published book. The project was presented in exhibition form at Banner Repeater (London), Grand Union (Birmingham), and Primary (Nottingham) in 2018. I am curious about the title. Can you say a little bit about where that comes from?
Deeper in the Pyramid is in fact a deeply cynical economic principle that was established in recent years. It recognises that profits gleaned from citizens at the top of the “economic pyramid” have no further potential growth in certain markets (including dairy) and that market saturation has been reached. Corporations must dig deeper into the economic pyramid towards its base, where the majority of the world’s citizens reside on less than $10 a day.
If very small returns can be made across the population of the world’s lowest earners, it is a profitable venture to “dig deeper”. It involves rebranding existing products and adapting marketing to a local vernacular, often “adjusting” the quality of the product and in the case of milk, reconstituting whey powders with palm oil and vegetable fats to make a milk “product”.
It is professed as a desire to spread clean, sterile, popular brands and supply these trusted and “safe” products to the masses. Obviously, this is devastating to local markets and ecologies. Tetra Pack adopted this as corporate policy teaming up with providers that include many European dairy brands. Esther and I liked that the term has an almost mystical air about it and hoped it may draw people to the richness of the project. It also chimed with the idea of “industrial metaphysics” that we pursue throughout the work.
The project is so ambitious and expansive both materially and conceptually in the way it explores its subject: milk; this ‘primary liquid’ as you describe it, ‘the first substance to enter the mouth, to touch the tongue, to fill the belly.’ What was it about milk that interested you?
We’d spent several years talking about plants, synthetic biology, screens, and liquid crystals and collaborated previously on zines and lectures. We’ve got a lot of shared interests in poetics and politics of chemicals. I started playing around with the idea of porcelain acting as an analogue of milk in the studio. This developed and I invited Esther to join me to collaborate, co-author a book, and to make full lecture-performances because we were sharing such generative conversations.
For me, material tests in the studio profoundly engage with themes we draw out in the book: ideas of geometry, abstraction, states of matter – of making and breaking form. These resonate with Esther in terms of language also.
Milk seemed so interesting because of its complex and conflicted status as a human bodily fluid; market derivative; for all its properties as a bio-adaptive, chemically complex fluid, and all its metaphorical associations. It is a subject that will never be closed. It’s always adapting.
Deeper in the Pyramid
Deeper in the Pyramid, Grand Union 2018
Deeper in the Pyramid, Grand Union 2018
Deeper in the Pyramid, Grand Union 2018
You have recently presented an animation, spekyng rybawdy (2020) as part of Matt’s Flix, the ongoing online presentation of video works begun by Matt’s Gallery during the first lockdown, and you’ve also produced a book of the drawings that formed part of this work, which was commissioned by Pro Create Projects. Could you tell us about the ‘bawdy badges’, which I believe were what sparked spekyng rybawdy?
Pilgrim badges are small cast tin or lead alloy brooches that were typically sold at sites of pilgrimage and the routes to them across the whole of Europe. Thousands survive from the high and late Middle Ages. They were affordable and mass-produced, part of a vast trade playing a major part in the circulation of images at that time. A group of them, of which little was written or acknowledged but many made and found, are known as the bawdy badges, secular badges, sexual badges, or the erotic pins. They often depict penis and vulva as independent beings, often motile being held up on horseback, stilts, wings, or each other.
There is a so-called erotic nature to the badges but, just as importantly, there is an absurd silliness that you reference directly in spekyng rybawdy. Can you talk a little bit about how the relationship to this ‘obscene’ material has shifted over time and how they are relevant now?
One of the things that fascinated me about them is how funny, how rude, how irreverent and how pleasing to the contemporary eye they seem to be. There are monkey apothecaries pissing into their mortars; sleazy landlords spying on their tenants having sex; vulva carried aloft on sedan chairs. What is deeply contested by academics from different disciplines is what they meant at the time and who wore them.
Were people, especially women forced to wear them as a punishment for sexual activity? Or were they semi-sacred and used to shock and ward off the evil eye, protecting the wearer from the plague? Was the humour a guise for dissenting behaviours? Or were they carnival nonsense like the joke tits and cocks you seen worn on hen nights? I’ve found arguments for all of these things - whole cultures of confluent uses and beliefs and significations but I wanted to bring them together as an assembly and see what they can do for us now by reimagining them, re-drawing them, and suffusing them with colour. Warding off the evil eye and blame culture is everywhere at the moment, we see people adopt extreme (irrational) beliefs and behaviours to diminish fear of the pandemic, of loss of control. I share a line from Judith Butler about how ‘being reduced to one’s organs can be the site of injury, but that name-calling may be the initiating moment of a counter-mobilization’ which seems as important as ever.
The figures are at once comical, self-mocking, judgemental, generous, cruel, rapturous, emancipatory, banal, profane, erotic, ridiculous, devout, secular and cut through with an erotic drive for the divine. The erotic in itself may not be transgressive, but in these images desire, gender, sex power, violence, and submission are contested, made tenuous and unstable.
We find ourselves having just come out of a second national lockdown. Can you tell us what you are working on at the moment?
I haven’t finished with these images yet! I want to test them at scale next. I’ve made some 3-metre drawings and sculptures and now want to bring colour to these. They are so full of energy which comes in part from the small hewn sculptural gestures that become so bold at a large scale. I also want to extend some of the animated narratives to play as a tableau with the sculptures and a matrix of architectural forms. It’s going to keep me busy for a while yet I think.
All images are courtesy of the artist
Date of publication: 21/01/21
