Interviews
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Monica von Schmalensee – interview: ‘Architecture is an instrument for creating a better quality of life’
Von Schmalensee, former CEO and now partner of White Arkitekter, has advised the Swedish government and London’s mayor. She talks here about her passion for sustainability in cities and the effect the pandemic may have
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Susie MacMurray – interview: ‘A feather is never just a feather, and a fishhook is never just a fishhook’
Susie MacMurray talks about how she uses art to raise questions rather than make statements, and about her love of magic, alchemy and fairytales
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Emily Jacir – interview: ‘I wanted the locals to show me what was important for them, what they thought I should see, what they wanted to talk about’
The artist talks about her stone sculpture, Pietrapertosa, created as part of the Gardentopia project for Matera 2019, and currently on show at the Fondazione Merz in Turin
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Eleanor Bartlett – interview: ‘When you see a great lump of tar, it’s like looking at a fundamental building block of the universe’
Eleanor Bartlett talks about why she favours working with bitumen, metal paint and wax and why colour is dangerous
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Ali Kazim – interview: ‘When I picked up a pottery shard and it had some imprint of the potter, it was a sort of time travelling key for me’
The artist talks about looking to ancient civilisations for inspiration, why he doesn’t like working with a sitter in his studio, and how his practice changed during lockdown
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Arik Levy and Zoé Ouvrier – interview: ‘We definitely influence each other in many ways – some we know about and many we don’t’
Ahead of their first joint exhibition, Beyond Nature, the artists talk about their relationship to nature, materiality, process and one another
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Ann Veronica Janssens — interview: ‘I try to make visible the invisible, to work with the limits’
The Belgian artist discusses her perception-bending work, currently on display at the South London Gallery
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Tim Clark – interview: ‘This set of Hokusai’s drawings is a really important piece of the jigsaw’
The British Museum has just bought 103 newly rediscovered drawings by Hokusai. Tim Clark, the museum’s leading expert on the Japanese artist, talks about studying the pictures and their connections during lockdown, making them available online and preparing for a…
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Billie Zangewa – interview: ‘I realised that I had chosen to embody the most disempowered human form’
Johannesburg-based Billie Zangewa, whose work is currently on show at Lehmann Maupin in New York, talks about her collages of domestic life, which advocate for self-preservation and the demystification of black women
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Huma Bhabha – interview: ‘The more complicated and layered the work is, the better for me’
The artist explains how working for a taxidermist helped her with sculpture, why she is fond of materials that are basically refuse, and the nerdy humour that she hides in her work
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Alexandre da Cunha – interview: ‘All my work is about combining things and making them have a conversation, or sometimes an argument’
The artist discusses his use of found objects, the place of autobiography in his work, his fascination with concrete and the challenges he faced while developing his installation for the Northern line extension in Battersea, south London
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Pamela Phatsimo Sunstrum – interview: ‘I needed to put my own body on the line if I was going to be asking a figure to carry a story or particular politics’
Through multilayered works that merge vibrant female figures with fantastical landscapes, the South African artist, who currently has a solo show at Goodman Gallery, London, is forging more complex and nuanced portrayals of black women
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Craig Gough – interview: ‘Improvisation in painting is a lot like jazz’
Now in his 80s, Gough continues to paint his vast abstract canvases. He talks about his long career and, in particular, the influence John Walker had on him
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Jacqueline Poncelet – interview: ‘Uncertainty is all right; it gives us an opportunity to look again and think again’
A major UK survey exhibition of her work reveals the restless creativity and curiosity of this talented, multimedia artist. She talks about her love of landscape and her revolutionary approach to pattern
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Emma Critchley – interview: ‘Being underwater where everything completely shifts interested me’
She has worked with dancers in the world’s deepest swimming pool, with scientists investigating glacial retreats and others investigating the effect of noise pollution on the oceans’ inhabitants. She explains how her work responds to environmental crises
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Alberta Whittle – interview: ‘No one can find Barbados on a map, whereas everyone can find the UK. That level of inattention galvanises so much of my work ’
The artist talks about the erasure of black people in everyday society, and how this informs and motivates her to challenge herself, and her audience, with her filmic and performative installations
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Heather Phillipson – interview: ‘I wanted to respond to the loaded political position of Trafalgar Square’
With her sculpture THE END finally installed in Trafalgar Square, after a delay due to Covid-19, and the first full monograph of her work now out, Phillipson talks about the pandemic, subversion, her multimedia practice and endings and beginnings
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Kate Mieczkowska – interview: ‘I have always loved being in front of a big painting. It’s like a duvet, it wraps around you, and you’re lost in it’
The artist talks about the development of her art practice and her curatorial debut, Goddess Now
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Natacha Nisic – interview: ‘We needed a place for free expression, a visibility, a female presence’
The French artist and film-maker Natacha Nisic talks about The Crown Letter, the international participatory art project she launched in April, which offers a digital space for female artists from around the world
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Pat Steir – interview: ‘I want the paint to make the painting, to make a picture of itself – it’s process, gravity and chance’
She discusses a new, candid documentary of her life, and talks about her art practice and the influence of John Cage, Sol LeWitt and Agnes Martin, and about feminism, politics and civil rights
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Aliza Nisenbaum – interview: ‘I’ve found Zoom surprisingly intimate. It’s not the same as face-to-face but you can get very close to a person’
Nisenbaum is preparing for two exhibitions this year, one at Anton Kern Gallery in New York and one at Tate Liverpool. She was meant to be in the UK now, painting for the Liverpool show. She explains how she has…
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Sam Lucas – interview: ‘I do not make pretty things: they are conversation pieces exploring uncertainty and vulnerability’
The artist talks about clay’s therapeutic and expressive qualities, and how her work helps her to explore and articulate feelings of social awkwardness and displacement
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Nalini Malani – interview: ‘The future is female. There is no other way’
Malani won the Joan Miró Prize last year and the resulting exhibition, You Don’t Hear Me, is now on in Barcelona. She has also just been awarded the first National Gallery Contemporary Fellowship. She explains why telling and retelling stories,…
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