Paul Coldwell in conversation with
Kathy Prendergast
8/5/08
Chelsea College of Art & Design
Paul Coldwell In terms of your general art practice, how would you describe yourself.
Kathy Prendergast I use a huge amount of different media, but the one thing that goes through them all is drawing. Sometimes I don’t draw on things, but more often than not, whether sculpture, works on paper or digital, there is always some aspect of drawing made onto the image. I don’t approach things with a sense of drawing in mind, for example when I’m making a wax for a bronze cast, but it generally doesn’t start to make sense for me until its drawn on. I keep thinking it will change and I’ll become a proper artist, but more and more I realise that it’s the surface and what I do to the surface that makes the work communicate. It needs to communicate to me. My most successful works have a strong sense of drawing
PC Much of your work refers to processes like sewing, knitting, activities where little actions can grow into something larger.
KP They are a bit like that. My whole background and upbringing was with crafts. The way I draw for example is not about observation. I’m not a good draftsman if you think in terms of life drawing or observation, but the way I draw is slightly repetitive, obsessive, like the way people knit or sew… so a drawing gets built up, not so much about what I’m drawing as the meditative process which takes over. Having said that, the imagery I use has a lot to do with landscape, between inside and outside, between the domestic and a kind of abstract, map-making, for example. So my approach to drawing is one step removed. Drawing maps of cities so they are like organic things or alternatively, drawing a human figure as if it was a map.
PC Your Map drawings had a quality of skin.
KP That’s right. The skin covers a surface, like a membrane. Drawing on my sculptures is like that. I know in my head I shouldn’t be doing it but I’m not really interested in volumes, it’s the skin of the thing that counts for me. And the skin can obliterate the form and becomes all about surface. It’s like talking about what’s underneath, through the surface
PC There is also in your work, a contradiction in scale, an oscillation between small things becoming really large and visa versa.
KP I find getting my scale right extremely difficult, and as an object maker… well, I think some people can understand scale and some just can’t. And I can remember at college being shown how to measure but for me I’m not interested in the reality of scale, I’m interested in scale in an unreal way.
PC For example in your City drawings, there was a sense of looking down at a city like London, but also on a micro level…
KP Well they were drawn as if they were portraits. Each of those drawings was drawn to be like the size of a head. It was very conscious. I had made some huge city drawings before, so I knew what the larger scale did and what it didn’t do. To make something huge become intimate inspired that work. They worked because there were many of them, so there was a sense of confronting them all together in a room.
PC So here’s another contradiction, in making a large work out of intentionally small sections
KP It also makes it domestic, the idea of bringing something from the outside, inside.
PC To return to drawing. Is drawing a way for you to process ideas?
It feels to me as if you deliberately work out ways of staying in your work. They are immensely time consuming, almost perversely so.
KP I would love it if they weren’t, but I have to keep going until it works. But I do feel it’s a wondrous act of destruction to scratch or scrape a surface and make it into something else, its fantastic! Its not anger, but there is something nice about destroying the surface, turning it into something else.
PC You mentioned before that there was a kind of meditative practice involved. Is it too much to say its like praying with all the repletion that that entails, and through that process, of going deeper?
KP I’m not sure if it’s deeper, perhaps more about escapism. It’s also about focusing, focusing on something very small; it frees my mind up to solve other issues. Its like when you are sleeping, you are filtering things out. So although you are preoccupied with what’s in front of you, there is this massive amount of filtering of daily life or big world issues. It like coming to terms with things, when you are not consciously thinking about the big issues, subconsciously they seem to come through.
PC It could seem from what you have said so far, that there could be a contradiction for you in using digital technology. You don’t have the direct correlation between your hand and the mark.
KP Well I agree. It’s a completely alien process for me, there’s a distance there. The first project I did with this technology was Lost map and it could only be done through the technology. I looked up emotional place names and tried to hand draw the maps but it didn’t work, so when you invited me to work with the project it was an opportunity to use this technology and I realised how important it could be for artists.
PC In that project you digitally unravelling the surface of the map.
KP It was deleting, not drawing, an act of destruction removing all the other place names. It was the opposite of drawing. And I came to this project, Mt Fuji, with that in mind
PC In between you were in a project at Royal Holloway
KP I developed the map project but using more place names, a complete emotional map of North America and in theory I could now make an emotional atlas of the world. It was fantastic working with geographers, with their knowledge of research.
PC It’s easy to think of cartographers as dealing with dry facts.
KP The map is an expression of the landscape but over and above that, it is an expression of us on the landscape. People have named all those places and what it’s really about is the human condition. It’s about our place in the world.
PC To return to the technology, the logical thing for you would be to draw with the mouse or the tablet, but instead you used the technology to trawl and filter data.
KP Once you start drawing on a map, you are bringing in another technique. My reservation about using digital imagery is what you do with it, so if I use the data, I use what is already there. Its already digital, you can produce something that looks the same but is incredibly different.
PC A practice, which seems to run through your work, is the setting up of strict
rules. You are able to fix on a strategy and see it through without deviation.
KP Maybe too rigid. I need to draw limits to avoid getting confused.
PC Going back to the surface, how do you deal with it?
KP Well with the Lost map it wasn’t an issue, the surface didn’t really change from the original and it was important it didn’t. This new work Mt Fuji has turned completely. I was drawing on the actual map, the contour map. I had to draw each contour in order for the computer to read it. So I came to the project with a map, drawn on and it changed everything.
PC So as Jonathan (Kearney) remarked, you are going from a printed image, drawing on it, scanning it and then reworking it again.
KP That’s right. once it was scanned I felt I had to get rid of the drawn map.
It’s a contour map of Mt Fuji. It’s very regular and seems quite anatomical. Then because of the whole tradition of Mt Fuji, through artists like Hokusai, I had the idea of the fore ground and cherry blossom, so I wondered what the cherry blossom would look like in front of my map. But I also realised that the ink quality of my map made it read anatomically as well as landscape, which is why I choose it in the first place. So through working on the surface something has happened. There’s now a mix between digital and drawing. I wanted to refer to that whole tradition of Japanese prints. We found an image of cherry blossom on the web. Its an illustration which when its blown up becomes very pixelated. So I want to redraw that image so I almost have a memory of it. But it’s all about surface and layers, the digital surface of the map, the ink over it.
PC How will the scale work? Will it be the same size as your original map?
KP Well, hopefully it will.
PC That’s interesting because you are dealing with this metamorphosis of the image while the scale stays the same.
KP The contour map, or section of it, is about A2 size and you can feel the undulations of the landscape. I’ve order nine surrounding maps since I would love to see a huge image at some point but as you can tell, already this project is leading onto other things.
© Paul Coldwell & Kathy Prendergast
