The following interview is taken from an in conversation between Grainne Sweeney and
Nick Fox, in accompaniment to his solo exhibition, Nightsong.
Recorded at Vane, Newcastle, December 2012.
Grainne Sweeney: I wanted to begin by drawing attention to a quote taken from an essay by Oscar Wilde. It both really brought to mind some of the recent paintings in this exhibition, but also, I remember you once told me that as a literary figure you
found him inspirational:
Yes: I am a dreamer. For a dreamer is one who can only find his way by moonlight, and his punishment is that he sees the dawn
before the rest of the world.
The Critic as Artist (1891)
Nick Fox: I am really interested in Wilde, particularly the way his short stories touch on the complexities of love and desire, but this quote pinpoints something else important to me: I am a dreamer. In terms of this show, underlying much of the work is the idea of moonlight as a spiritual panacea, a fix all. As you say, the paintings represent or are representative of moonlight, but within all the work is this idea of the transitory moment – transitions and different moments in time. I like the idea of moonlight being neither one thing nor another, somewhere in between these binaries: not night, not day; not dawn, not dusk; not conscious, not unconscious, but something between the two, where fleeting desires can emerge.
Before you start to talk in detail about particular works. I want to take you back to what interested you in art in the first place. You grew up in South Africa. Is this where
it started for you?
I don’t talk about being from South Africa a great deal, but it has a lot to do with the kind of references I am interested in, and certainly primary elements like colour and floral codes. My grandmother’s husband was an amateur orchid grower and as a child I spent a great deal of time alone in his greenhouse, fixated by the plants. Its not that these were particularly beautiful plants; I was interested more in the artifice of how one plant could physically be grafted onto another to produce something new, something curious and wholly artificial. South Africa was itself a country of other countries, made by other countries, mirroring the different European cultures that colonized it and shaped (the white part of) it. But in terms of art, growing up in the 80s there was a limited influence of contemporary practice. A key moment for me was seeing the
Michaelis Collection of Dutch painting in the Old Town House, Cape Town which included works by Dutch still life painters such as Van Aelst and Vermeer. Seeing these extraordinary vanitas paintings, I was definitely attracted to the skill and the beauty of that kind of painting, but also the sentiment, the symbolism in this capturing of a transitory moment in life.

You left South Africa in 1987, age fifteen, at a point where South Africa was in a state of flux, or at least things were verging on change. When you left South Africa and
moved to London did you sense that was a permanent leaving?
Yes, it was a very clear, permanent leaving. The idea was never to move back. It was quite difficult leaving people behind, family and friends. But it was a necessary thing. In
1986 the President, P.W. Botha, gave a speech about the future of South Africa in which he warned other countries, particularly the UK, to stay out of South African affairs; his point being that apartheid would never end. After that speech we made covert plans to leave. It was a curious and unusual feeling to not belong, to separate oneself from country and family. My dad still lives there so although it was leaving, it’s not forgotten.
I am trying to get a sense of this because, leaving, longing, wandering, journeying, has
now become part of your thinking and the way you work.
Yes. I think leaving South Africa was a seminal moment because this idea of not belonging became more and more important, culturally and personally: feeling halfway between one thing and another. Longing oscillates between different cultural identities and personal histories. This sometimes reflects on the sentimental, a longing for home, and other times the romantic, a longing to be away. It was totally necessary that we went, both politically speaking and also for my development as an artist. I remember saying to my mum, who is also an artist, “Do you know, you’ve never given me any issues, how am I going to be an interesting artist?” But actually all these things are in our subconscious: in our childhood, in the journeys that we take, or choose, and these experiences accumulate.
So you went first to John Moores University before going the Royal Academy Schools and you described yourself, at that early point, as being a painter’s painter, going out
into the landscape, what, with your easel?
I did actually take an easel. When I was studying at Liverpool, I would go out and make these rather grand, intense, large-scale, landscape paintings. It was important to me at the time that it was this unfettered, sublime thing, which wasn’t thought about, or was only thought about afterwards. I think when I was making these paintings they were about feeling, about emotion, a response to a particular thing or place. It was a very painting orientated art school and lots of the staff were painters, good painters. So I learnt a lot about painting and colour, and I learnt about other things too, like love. It was also the place where I met my first boyfriend – and a taste of the secrecy of courtship. This was a secret liaison, a secret boyfriend who I was with for about two years, but because he didn’t really want anyone to know about it, I had to hide it away.
When I attended the RA, I felt a necessity to re-evaluate the kinds of painting I was making; kind of like growing up, I felt the need to take responsibility for the imagery and language I was using.

You clearly respond visually to things. You once told me a story about the film Papillon
(1973), how there was a visual element from within that film which had a real impact.
I remember this very key scene. The film is set in a 1930s penal colony and it is dusk. It is a scene that takes place between a rather minor character, Andre Maturette – played by
Robert Deman – who is a prisoner on Devil’s Island and one of the prison guards. In this very intense moment within the film, the guard quietly walks away from a terrified
Maturette, having placed an exotic flower in his mouth. Nothing was said, nothing stated, nothing seen, only the close-up of both men’s faces and the placing of the flower in Maturette’s mouth. It suddenly impacted on me, the kind of power of the symbolic.
Maurette is a gay man, and the prison guard has been increasingly subjecting him to acts of sexual assault, but in this scene, that flower both comes to represent a sexual deed, and also at the same time, the silencing of this taboo act. It was a really visually powerful moment. It’s interesting for me now to be able to attach this memory to my attraction to the symbolic value of botanical imagery, and its association with sexuality, unspeakability and forbidden pleasures.
Technique in your painting is obviously very important. The work in this exhibition spans a variety of media, do you still consider yourself a painter or is it more about
finding the media to express an idea?
Well, although not all the works are painted, they refer to painting. They come from painting vocabularies and histories. They also look back to painting: paintings past, historical paintings, painting tropes. Reference points might include neoclassical painting, Victorian visual culture, but also literature, craft, pornography and subcultural codes. The other part is that, though some of the works are painted, some of the paintings also look like other things. They operate between different mediums and different values. So a painting might look like a mirror, or it might look like a tablecloth; or something might look like a sculpture, but it’s actually a painting. I started thinking about what painting is, and what it means and how to extend it. Some of the works in this series reject the traditional painting support, meaning that they are able to exist outside of painting or sculptural territories. The works become an embodiment of their various parts, of paint skin, decorative glass or light, rather than a purely pictorial illusion. So I do in a sense play with the expectations of painting and with the contradictions between one medium and another.
There are always these questions being posed. Is painting dead. Is it?
No, but this show is about also those questions. Not whether it’s dead culturally speaking, but, for me, was it enough. I like the idea that painting can reveal itself slowly, extending the duration of looking and experience. My paintings nod to particular cultural and social moments and political histories. The Victorian home for example, was riddled with hidden meanings, desires and identities. Sexualised ideas and taboo images were either alluded to or quite explicitly voiced through high art imagery, design and

domestic objects, while sexual urges and messages were both hidden and made visible through languages like floriography. Some of the cut works, Come Undone for example, have this appearance of looking like craft objects – doilies or decorative lace work – but they reference this hidden politic of Victorian culture, as well the ongoing questioning of painting. So, things don’t die so much as find alternative ways to exist.
You seem to be discussing painting as a craft…
Well it is. The process of making the paintings, as in all the work, is incredibly important because it takes such a long time. As such, time and labour become a readable element of the work. In the beginning I have a vague sense of how elements might evolve into a painting. The studio if full of box files containing groupings of erotic images, porn, botanical drawings and historical painting references. These selections form the beginnings, and the images are laid over one another. The paintings are made in a kind of reverse process onto sheets of glass, with incredibly thin layers of drawn image, ink and paint slowly being built up to into a skin, which is then peeled off the glass to be formed into either the large tondos, or cut works. The editing that takes place over that period of time is extensive, so a simple drawing changes over that first year to such a degree as to be unrecognisable from where it started. I work on thirty different pieces at the same time, and some take over two years to complete, so works often begin to overlap and connect together.
So you might start something and leave it for a few months, or a few weeks?
Yes, or a year. There is a series of work in the exhibition called Love’s Sigh made with gold dust on carbon paper. That work has been waiting to be made for almost twenty years. I mentioned Liverpool and my secret lover: the gold was given by him. I kept the gold all this time in a jar in my studio. I always wondered what to do with it, but it’s probably been waiting for this particular series of works to be made. So it’s not about the appropriateness of the medium necessarily – it’s more that nothing else could be used for a particular work. The gold is breathed onto the paper, and forms those images, brings them to life. It can’t be applied in any other way: the title Love’s Sigh is both a representation of the process, and the material of the sentiment.
Well that’s a good point to talk about National Glass Centre. We met in 2009 when in my then role as Creative Director at NGC, I invited you to take up a residency. So whilst you were at the glass centre you made Echo – a piece made of glass discs –
which I suppose is an installation really, and a sound piece.
Yes, It consists of thirty pieces of glass that contain and trap images of my own body.
Echo mediates the idea of being in a relationship and breaking up from a relationship and what happens in terms of longing and unrequited love. It was a really clear way of looking at myself and recording a particular moment in my life. The work began firstly as these discs, then in a different configuration it became something that incorporated

sound, using microphones, which would capture the acoustic of the space, and literally reflect back the sound. The idea of the work was to try and capture these hidden desires, these hidden thoughts that we were thinking about, but not speaking.
You’ve previously acknowledged that at this time that you “had a kind of epiphany” and that much of the work you’ve made subsequently grew out of that time.
Well a kind of epiphany. The residency actually coincided with a significant break up of my relationship at the time. I began the residency with a clear plan for the production of a series of works, mainly a number of glass pieces that resembled domestic furniture.
Elements of my previous practice had involved laying floppy skins of paint over furniture. When we were first talking about the residency, I was considering trying to remake this work in glass. Although I did make those objects and they are in the exhibition here as part of a series of work called Murmuring, there was another set of surprising work that developed. While previous works, paintings and drawings had been about concealing this emotional register, what emerged from this break up was me beginning to think about how to mediate this sense of loss.
If any of you have been to the Glass Centre in Sunderland you will know it is on the river.
During the residency the river became this kind of mirror – a reflector in this search in which I was grappling for answers. The Glass Centre is also next to St. Peter’s Church, part of the remains of a seventh century monastic site, a site of ancient learning. I was curious about this relationship with glass and how glass can transmit meaning and power and wisdom. I started to look to these symbols of wisdom: the church was one; stained glass windows were another, but there was also moonlight. I was looking at this site, overlooking the water, and the reflections and connections with different rituals and moon myths, particularly the Story of (the moon goddess) Selene and her mortal lover Endymion. The tragedy of this story is that Selene could only appear to a sleeping
Endymion at night in the useless form of a moonbeam, her desire unfulfilled, I felt a real connection to this story, to its tragedy, to its humanity but I also felt a curious connection to Selene in our shared disappointment, and a sense that the moon might represent a symbol of truth somehow, a giver of wisdom.
From that association with the Venerable Bede and National Glass Centre you also made a connection with the Holy Island of Lindisfarne, and the fact that Bede was a key figure in drawing together the moon, the time of Easter and the Christian
calendar.
Yes, he recognised a connection with what we now understand as lunar tide cycles. I went to Holy Island because it was a place of pilgrimage, knowledge and sanctuary. It was also a place of intense conflict between Christian and pagan beliefs. In order to seek wisdom, I needed to look to sites that were more likely to give me wisdom than others. I made a number of night visits to this site, a failed quest if you like to seek answers and truths about this broken relationship. On one trip, I intentionally got myself stranded on

Holy Island when the causeway closed during a torrential storm. It was a fantastically raw experience for me; recording every moment of that forced isolation. There was definitely a sense that I was trying to search for something. The search, this kind of yearning, for something is really important. We all long for something with someone whether it’s a cultural longing or a personal longing and that collective longing connects humanity. Without this kind of meditation on longing, I don’t think lots of the work in this show would have emerged.
In one of the new video works you capture a ferry at sea. This work seems to be about making a journey and that longing for a place, or the longing of leaving a place.
Like so much of the work, this refers to history painting, specifically Isle of the Dead by
Arnold Böcklin and its depiction of the journey and death. It is this idea of transitions and departures: of life and death, the waning of love, and the idea of sanctuary. Boat was made when I was in Norway, preparing the first site visit in preparation for my solo show, Phantasieblume Nachtlied at Hå gamle prestegard. I was thinking about love, life, moving from one thing to another. I made a series of night walks and this work was recorded while standing on top of an ancient burial ground during which time a ferry past by in the distance.
What you seem to be describing is a connection with landscape, and the history of the landscape of a place. I have seen the photographs of the place where you stayed: this lighthouse which has this wonderful remoteness about it, surrounded by water. This comes back to that notion of reflection, and self-reflection always being really
important to you.
I had this sense that it was to the moon that one had to go to, to find answers. I suppose it’s a bit like scrying as in the pagan term: scrying for wisdom in the bowl of water, or a scrying mirror, which is a piece of polished obsidian. The idea is that it focuses and reflects your questions, offering visions, a certain clarity to the questions posed, or truths in the moons reflection. As part of the quest for wisdom I started to look for these very everyday approximations or tropes. These moon tropes are mundane reflections on water: a harbour lamp, the blinking of a lighthouse, a feeble light in the distance, all of them flashes of sanctuary in an otherwise world of darkness. It was in these everyday moments that I sought understand the world, and connect it together.
One thing we haven’t touched on is the drawings in the back room. They are obviously influenced by the same very stylised pornographic images, but they are very different
to the paintings.
Yes, the imagery is very similar, though treated in very different ways. Actually, there are a number of different sets of drawings, far more than exhibited here, but these were chosen as opposed to another more explicit group. My imagery is often harvested from porn magazines, but I’m more interested in transforming these taboo images and their

pornographic context into highly intimate and emotive experiences. In the paintings, this imagery is carefully chosen and edited to appear to look like poses or groupings from familiar historical paintings. For example, Nightgarden is a reference to
Hieronymus Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delights, while the figure in Renaissance refers to the classical orgiastic pose in Bernini’s, Ecstasy of Saint Teresa. The drawings are less veiled and more honest in terms of the representation of the imagery. Because they are so incredibly delicate, with the pencil applied almost like smoke onto the surface of the paper, you have to really look to reveal the intimacy of the image. I guess this is part of the duality of the thing that I am dealing with in these complexities of imagery; there’s romance and there’s sex and they are not necessarily the same thing.
This show is about love, as much as longing for that one thing, and those drawings begin to represent, symbolically, these intangible things. Rather than focusing on the phallus or something explicit, there is a gentleness and an invisibility about these drawings which is really part of this erotic and sensual register of Nightsong.
Is there a project that maybe you haven’t realised, a work that’s in your mind that you
have not made yet?
There is one project that is still emerging – it’s not that it hasn’t been made – but it is incomplete, as in it is still growing. I started The Longing Archive during the residency at the National Glass Centre out of an interest in the social and subcultural codes of contemporary romantic desire. Longing, whether collective or individual, represents many things: an inconsolable ache, disappointment, fear, distance, but it also represents the possibility of fulfilment, of hope, of love. Members of the public were invited to donate unwanted artifacts, love tokens, love letters, or letters of rejection. The archive is about this grasping at this emotional spectrum. I am interested in what a written love letter means. It’s a bodily thing. It’s been written: it’s inscribed on the piece of paper, so it is a representation of the body as well as a transmitter of sentiment.
It’s also something that covers distance that you send from…
Distance yes, and emotional distance. We only tend to write these things when we are away from each other. So it amplifies our feelings. I am interested in how we approached that now, how we communicate our feelings in the contemporary world: through text messages, through e-mail – digital forms, as well as through physical letters. The archive collects these, as well as the ephemeral relics of courtship and romance. I would like to develop it further, but there was one submission to the archive that I have used, or mediated as part of this exhibition, a piece of sheet music, Bernard
Jansen and Walter Dana’s Longing for you. I recorded three amateur singers performing this. Because it is unrehearsed, in each of the three consecutive rounds their voices become more confident in the song, more nuanced, until the vocals trail off. Though melancholic, there are really positive messages about finding emotional strength in each other – but also a sense of tragedy in the transience of that strength. For the show here at Vane, I’ve had a vinyl pressing made of the recording. Refrain (Longing for you), plays

discreetly on repeat for two months, slowly wearing away. The sound is quite gentle, softly permeating through the different exhibition spaces, connecting one work to another – one kind of emotional register to another.
Well I am going to finish off with a very abstract question, which is – what is your
dream?
My dream? I know you were going to ask that question, so I did prepare something…
To return to where we started, Oscar Wilde, in another text, The Artist, he wrote:
…of the image of The Sorrow that Endureth Forever he fashioned an image of The Pleasure that Abideth for a Moment.
I have had many dreams, but I think now it’s about possibilities, of trying to grasp the impossible. This idea that a moment or glimpse of something beautiful could be crafted out of something that is so tragic, in the emotional realm, is key to my quest. That in the search for these answers there is something… there is hope. This is the thing that I still dream about.