This week, we spoke to award-winning artist Juliette Losq about Cambridge, surviving art school, and the importance of being true to your voice. Interview by Prerona Prasad.
I was introduced to your work by Laura Dennis, Curator of the Newnham College Art Collection. We were borrowing a work by Christiana Herringham, a watercolourist and tempera painter. Do you remember seeing her work while you were at Newnham?
When I was there, there were very few works on show in the corridors. Works were on show in the Dining Hall and in meeting rooms and offices. Since I left in 2000, the art collection has become much more prominent, and is managed in a different way. When I was there, it was all nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century portraits of figures from the College. Now it seems, with work like the one by Cathy de Monchaux, that it has changed and is unrecognisable from how it was.
That brings me to a question that I can ask you that I haven’t been able to ask anyone else. You’ve actually been a student at Cambridge University. What brought you to Cambridge? Did you actually want to be here?
I always had two interests academically, Art History and English Literature. I wanted to study English Literature and History of Art and Fine Art, but it wasn’t such a broad education system where you could study more than one thing at once. I did love studying English Literature, which I studied for two years. And then I studied History of Art for one year and went to the Courtauld Institute for an MA in History of Art.
I ended up working in the City for a few years because I really wanted to go back and study Fine Art. I saved up to do a degree and was lucky enough to get into Wimbledon College of Arts without having to do a Foundation and then on to the Royal Academy Schools. I got my own way at the end – studying everything I wanted to study – but via having to work at a job as an insurance agent for Lloyds of London which I didn’t like. It paved the way for me doing what I wanted to do, so I can’t complain.
Having had the opportunity to study all three subjects, I’m really happy to have been able to study art. Now, it fills my days. I have a studio, which is like an addiction. If you’re deprived of it for any period of time, you really do notice that. I was already winning prizes from my first year of study, and it all seemed to fit into place.
You mentioned that at College, it was all ‘standard-issue’ College Art – portraits arranged in a predictable sort of way. Did you feel that you had any avenues for fine art while you were at Cambridge?
It was very limited. Obviously, you could work in your own room, but were very conscious of making a mess because you were surrounded by antique furniture. There was another student who was a couple of years above me at Newnham, and we did manage to put on an exhibition. It was very much making use of an available space to get some of our art out. There was an annual student exhibition at the University, which you could submit work for, and I did do that. There wasn’t a community associated with art. I don’t know if it is different now. I got involved in set design at the ADC. I don’t think there is any replacement for being thrown into a studio setting with lots of other people who are studying art, because that is where you battle and find your voice. Being at art school, with so many different styles and opinions around, and struggling through that – there isn’t really any replacement for that.
It’s interest you mentioned set design. You do these fantastic installations that you can walk through and walk around – something that no one expects to see with watercolour and paper. Do you think that it had anything to do with those early experiences of set design?
They just wanted painted backdrops and the odd prop. I am very interested in Victorian and early-twentieth-century set design and optical devises like toy theatres. I’m doing a PhD on an optical device known as a teleorama.
Is that the thing that is concertinaed and you lift it up and can look in?
You can get a concertina one, or you can get ones that are static tunnels. I went to the Musee d’Orsay last year and saw the opera and ballet sets. All made out of paper and miniaturised. The PhD is looking at the structure of the teleorama and trying to figure out new ways of making and exhibiting drawings of contemporary ruin sites, but using that structure.
The idea of going from a miniaturised world to creating an immersive world is really interesting. Your immersive pieces are very different from the teleoramas of the Great Exhibition and things like that. They tell a very different story and memorialise very different things.
My subject matter is modern ruins. They are places that I found on walks or places around my studios that were semi-derelict. It’s that idea that they are never the same again. You can more-or-less guarantee that they won’t be there within a few months. That is the nature of contemporary ruins. It’s that idea that you are preserving them at a particular moment in their decay or collapse. Not in a nostalgic way. I’m using them as imaginative structures. I’m imagining them in a more ruinous state than they are in. For me, the modern ruin is a springboard for my imagination. These little toy theatre structures, these teleoramas, are a really good way of developing that and getting it across.
When you look at the Romantic ruin, works by Hubert Robert and others, they tend to be quiet, uninhabited spaces. But, in fact, people have always lived around ruins as part of their everyday life. Do you think that idea also translates to our urban settings – that we just take it as given that modern buildings and installations should be allowed to fall apart and we don’t even notice them until they are gone?
There is this division between acceptable ruins and unacceptable ruins. You can have ruins of the walls of London amongst the new and shiny structures of the City. If you have a concrete bunker decaying somewhere, it’s not going to last long according to the vision of what a Modern, Western city is supposed to be. It’s those ruins I’m interested in, the ones that are doomed. They carry certain associations that are specific to modern ruins. We often see them in science fiction films, horror films, and crime dramas. They’ve got a latent menace about them. Also, they can be rather beautiful if they are allowed just to be. You get nature creeping in. That’s the point I’m interested in. In my versions of modern ruins, I overdo nature, and nature becomes the main character. Hopefully it creates this world where you are questioning how long these ruins have been there, whether there are people in this world anymore. I find I’m creating this peaceful, tranquil environment, which, at the same time, makes you question how it got to be like that. It’s a benign vision of what could be an apocalyptic future.
I didn’t think about it that way. You’ve talked before about being influenced by Romantic painting, and you won the John Ruskin Prize. At first glance, it would seem that these structures in your work are romanticised as something worth preserving. What you are saying is completely the opposite.
You can’t preserve them in any real way. Such is the nature of capitalist society that space on the edge of a city now is prime. These places cannot persist in the same way as a Ruskinian ruin. But, you can see value in them. They are places where you can escape progress and go off grid. In that way, for me, they are refuges – not only spatially, but also in terms of your imagination. They can be quite scary if you are exploring them on your own, but this is mainly because of the things that our imaginations associate with them. Almost every time you visit these sites, they are completely empty. They are marginal zones in all senses of the word. For me, they are both, places that I want to preserve in my imagination and also places that are always changeable. They are never the same again and you don’t know what to expect when you go back there.
You deal with subject matter that is three-dimensional and overpowered by nature, but your medium is one that has always been associated with the delicate and impressionistic – paper and watercolour. That is a really remarkable juxtaposition. You build these powerful, arresting images in a medium that is considered quite transient.
Historically, on the hierarchy of media, watercolour is near the bottom. I like the idea that you can make something on the scale of an Old Master Painting and use watercolour for it. These installations are never put up the same way twice. They are only shown once, or they may be reconfigured. Exposed paper in itself is constantly decaying, much like the sites themselves. That the sites are very throwaway chimes with the idea that I am going into a gallery and putting something up for a limited period of time and then rolling it up and taking it away again. I’ve spent all of that time and labour making it. It’s madness in a way.
I do work in other media, but I find it interesting to challenge people’s notion of what a watercolour should like, what size it should be, how detailed it should be, and how that detail manifests itself. I don’t use watercolour in a traditional way. I tend to use the paints and resists in the opposite way to how they are usually used. I might use more resist to build up the paint itself. A lot of the time, I’m actually drawing with paint.
So, you are using influences from printmaking, using resists, exposing areas that can take colour, and masking others? Have you ever been interested in printmaking?
The technique that I developed is directly inspired by an etching course I did while at Wimbledon. I like the look and tonal detail of etching. I had to work out how to translate that into another medium without having to spend all that time building up an etching plate. Can I do something a bit more instantaneous?
Masking off the paper and then removing all the mask at the end and working on the image again is labour intensive. And it is not a process that can be used to create multiples. It is achieving the effects that I like about etchings. I can also work on a very large scale, which is often not possible with printmaking.
When you are masking and revealing, you are putting so much strain on your paper. Do you now think that you have got the technique down pat, and you are not risking damaging the work?
My most successful works are where the paper and how light interacts with it are active parts of the composition. You build up this language of marks, but the paper is also responding in its own way. The risk is when you overwork it and haven’t really planned it out. I’ve developed this technique for fifteen years and I know now what to look out for and how to avoid pitfalls. I’ve had pieces tear off the wall because of the weight of the paper. There’s always a risk involved.
The work we have in the Gallery is a smaller piece. What drives you to abandon the limitations of the traditional scale of works on paper? Is it ambition?
I think it comes back to the desire to create an immersive environment. I also enjoy pushing the boundaries of the materials I am working with and the boundaries of figurative painting and drawing. I’m making installations, but they are still drawings. They are three-dimensional and sculptural but are still paintings that go into the space inhabited by the viewer. It is about questioning what they are. I like working at all different scales, but I like the idea of feeling like you are falling into a painting.
A sense of transportation is quite difficult to achieve with wall-based art. You are doing this by taking the works off the wall and allowing people to enter into them. You’ve mentioned the word ‘figurative’ and so many of your influences are from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Did you find resistance to some of the work you were doing at art school?
Definitely. Wimbledon was so lucky for me. I got a studio space to myself and they allowed me to develop in the way I wanted to develop. I hadn’t been working in the way I work before I went there. I was responding to what I was learning there and the environment. When I went on the MA at the Royal Academy Schools, it was three years of almost nobody really liking my work. Figurative work wasn’t fashionable at all, and if it was figurative, it was in the style of somebody like Luc Tuymans. Nobody was working in watercolour, which was super untrendy. There were negative views of the medium itself, even before we got to the subject matter. It seemed to really anger people.
It was three years of defending yourself in ‘crits’ and it is harsh. People came from very different art schools, many of which would not have accepted somebody who was a figurative painter at that time. Things do go in cycles. Perhaps now you get more figurative painters on MA courses. Many people adapt their style or work to the institution they are working at, or to the galleries they want to show with. Some are successful, but many are not. I had to ask myself if I was going to maintain my own voice or try and blend in. If you can’t take the criticism, which feels very personal at times, you can’t survive.
What did you draw on in your defence?
A common criticism was ‘Why don’t you go and take a photograph, instead?’ For me, that’s missing the whole point. I want you to see that this is a paper-based drawing, and if you get close to it, you can see that it dissolves into mark-making. If you don’t bother to look at it, or look from afar, it can look photographic. I still frequently get asked if I have painted over a photograph or if it is a print. These are the sorts of questions I want people to ask. That’s my defence. If you’re questioning what you are looking at, then you are at least looking at it.
It’s not fair to photographers either!
Would I be saying to somebody, who had created an installation that looked like a room ‘Why don’t you take me to the room?’ It is all about that hierarchy of genres as well. It’s meaningless now when we have so many more media. We have virtual reality. Why paint again?
A lot of that criticism is quite old fashioned. It’s that same ‘What is the purpose of art?’ question, which is quite a reductive and outdated way of looking at art.
When you are at Art School, you are outnumbered by people who are not willing to engage with the process, the subject matter, the materials. You can either change what you are doing entirely, or you can just relish the bad ‘crit’ and carry on!
You’ve been able to do it. The first ten years are often so critical in an artist’s career. How were you able to negotiate that, especially doing work that didn’t seem to fit in with current tastes?
I have been lucky. I have had collectors, some with an interest in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century work. Others like Kit Kemp, who runs an international chain of art hotels, have put my work out for people to see. I’ve also worked with galleries quite consistently. I’ve also tried to show with artist-led collectives and galleries. Roaming Room would go out and find disused buildings, and I have done a couple of shows with them where you just colonise a part of a building. I have also won prizes ever since I’ve graduated. The John Ruskin Prize is particularly significant because it was for an installation. It means that that area of my practice is being recognised by industry professionals, some of whom are artists that I really like and have studied. I am now working on an Arts Council commission for a walk-through installation at Sewerby Hall. Rather than just making small-scale work that can be framed, and that a gallery might want to sell, I have this other strand of my practice that is developing.
I’ve made it work. You make sacrifices as you go. It’s expensive to rent a studio and a flat. I don’t live in Central London anymore. I live in Twickenham and I have found a great studio on Eel Pie Island. It’s partly luck and partly really committing to it, applying for things, submitting work, and making sure the work is exposed.
If you expect that art trends are cyclical, you have to expect that what was popular when you went to art school will not be popular now. Or, that a whole raft of new people will be working in the same way. If you haven’t got your own voice, you could just get swept along.
Do you think being at strident place like Newnham helped you in any way. I’m really interested in the experience of women at Oxbridge. On the one hand, everybody is expected to perform great intellectual calisthenics, but on the other, these spaces can be deeply traditional and suspicious of change.
There’s got to be something in the fact that we had weekly group classes where you would debate with everybody over your reading of a book. You have to develop the ability to back everything up with an argument. In a sense, it’s about not making flippant judgements. When I was in groups of people critiquing my art, I was always aware of flippant judgements. I remember being in a ‘crit’ where the only contribution was someone saying, ‘If I saw this in a gallery, I would just walk past it.’ That is not engaging with the work in any way. People do get very heated in discussions about literature and history of art, I guess I learned to not take it personally. I fear some art students do just lose all motivation because of criticism. I think there is a statistic that only 5% of BA Fine Art students end up working in the field. That’s quite depressing. I wonder if a lot of that is because people get convinced out of it by the harshness of the environment. Studying it when I was a bit older, those years of working a very boring job helped. I really appreciated being there and I was not going to give up because people didn’t like figurative painting.
You’d seen the other side?
Having saved up to go, I really valued being there. I remember, as an undergraduate, going in and seeing that fifty percent of the studios were always empty. I just really wanted to work and I work quite obsessively.
Finally, what has been going on over the last two months, for you?
The arrival of the virus has coincided with all the shows I had for the year. They are all going on online. I have been lucky with my work as my studio is self-contained, and I can walk to it. I foresee problems in being able to install things later in the year. My partner is a cabinet maker and helps with the wooden frames for my installations. He is shielding, so I don’t know how he could come out with me to install.
As an artist, you always have to deal with uncertainty. Do you think it has equipped you in any way for the current moment?
Definitely. You never know what’s going to happen year to year as an artist. Often, opportunities come up when you are not expecting them. With this enforced isolation, I suppose I’m always in self-imposed isolation with the work, anyway. You can cope with isolation, as an artist, but you want the work to be seen.
THE HEONG GALLERY 