Jolene Liam, Chorus Arts Featured Artists 23/24, has recently won 3rd prize in RIBA Journal's Eye Line Drawing Competition. Emma Stones, Chorus Arts Producer, caught up with Jolene to talk more about her practice, her move from architecture to drawing and the question: what is drawing?

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[ES] You trained as an architect and recently made the move to be an artist. How does your background in architecture inform your artwork today?
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[JL] My practice has expanded a lot in the last 2 years but my background in architecture still influences my work in different ways and to different degrees.

Drawing on location (including walking maps) and trying to capture spaces from an experiential perspective – I think this is a response to depictions of architecture that represent spaces from singular points of view or ignore the mess of everyday life (something that has driven my practice since the very beginning).

Experimenting with different materials/using found objects – thinking about materials and how things come together.

Recently, with more abstract paintings (which are sort of imagined, subconscious landscapes) I do wonder where the architect has gone. I’m sure she’s still there somewhere – maybe in the way I respond to the space of the painting as an object, or the space within the picture plane? Sometimes it can be hard to let go of direct connections to your ‘past life,’ especially when that former self has been quite closely tied to your identity as an artist/painter and the narratives you construct around your work.

[ES] Your practice is at a period of change and experimentation, how has this manifested?
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[JL] Earlier work which depicted spaces and objects in great detail were very much about using a constructed image or object to convey an idea, trying to get to a known end point.

Now, I don’t really start with a clear result in mind, especially for the more abstract work. There are certain starting points and ‘rules of the game’ that I might set up for myself, especially working on found objects which sometimes need more preparation. Most of the time I try to switch off the ‘foreground’ of my brain and let the ‘background’ take over (I’m sure this is not scientifically accurate, but this is how it feels). Letting go of control and working with uncertainty is simultaneously freeing and stressful because I still want to end up with something that I like.

Thereare still some constants – drawing, collecting, testing things out, trying to do lots of things at once.

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[ES] You have recently won 3rd prize in the RIBA Journal’s Eye Line drawing competition. What were the parameters of this competition, can you talk about your submission?
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[JL] The RIBA Journal is a publication by the Royal Institute of British Architects. They organise a free drawing competition every year called the Eye Line which showcases images that convey architectural ideas. It has a practitioner and a student category – up to 3 drawings and accompanying text for each can be entered.

My entry this year consisted of the drawings ‘After Party,’ ‘Around the Studio’ and ‘Barbican High Walk,’ corresponding to 3 sets of spaces which are central to my practice: home, studio and the outside world. The main premise of these works are:

-             We experience space as millions of little images that enter our eyes, so why should we depict them with one single image?

-             How can we capture the entirety of a space at once?

I like using the term ‘graphic anthropology’ as a way of describing these drawings.

I’ve entered this competition every year since 2018 and have been featured 5 times. My entries in 2018 – ‘My Flat, As Built,’ ‘My Flat, As Lived’ and ‘My Flat, As Rearranged’ – were awarded a commendation and these were the drawings that restarted my art practice. These drawings were a response to the architectural floor plan, suggesting that a space can be described by the objects within as much as the architecture that contains it.

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[ES] Drawing is a broad and nuanced term, what does drawing mean to you?
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[JL] Broadly speaking, it is a way of capturing something – where I am or what I see. It helps me to be there and spend time with that something – I am a speed reader and otherwise I would ‘speed look’ my way through life.

It’s also a form of training – building up muscle memory of hand movements and creating a form of shorthand that makes its way into more intuitive work. Drawing from observation is still the starting point for this – creating a connection between a thing and series of hand gestures that creates marks that responds to the thing. I've avoided referrring to this as solely about being hand-eye coordination because it can also be about how a thing (or place) feels, both in terms of touch (sometimes I draw while touching an object with my eyes closed), or about emotion/atmosphere (I'm reading and really enjoying a book called 'Tender Maps' by Alice Maddicott about this).

Overtime, I'm starting to see that these gestures come into play even when the original thing is not there anymore. By that I mean that in the studio (which is sort of like a lab that is closed off from the outside world), I'm making all these movements and marks intuitively, and I don't think they've come from nowhere. I think they draw from a repository of muscle memory that has been built up by years of drawing practice. Again, this is me theorising about something that happens internally, I have no way of knowing if it's accurate or not but I'll keep drawing anyway because I enjoy it.

Maybe it's a bit like learning a language? At first you have to learn its grammatical structure, and you can only do that with a certain amount of vocabulary to describe something. And over time you get so familiar with it that you don't have to think about the grammatical structure to write or have a conversation. And you can start to talk about things that aren't there in front of you or area bit less tangible. But at the same time, you're the one creating the language so you can change the rules as you go.

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To go off on a slight tangent – I have been making parts of some new paintings with my left hand and enjoying the awkwardness of the marks that it makes. And the other day I was practicing drawing/writing with my left hand and I stopped myself, thinking: if I keep the 'skill level' between two hands as wide as possible, will there be a wider range of marks available to me? Or maybe I will eventually get so good at drawing with my left hand that I'll need to start drawing with my feet (it's a big maybe, I'm half joking but never say never). It's the same with drawing with my eyes closed – over time I get more used to the parameters of the exercise and the drawings get less awkward, and I have to find new ways to limit the amount of control I have over what I'm making. Trying to control control sounds like a bit of a paradox, but I don't think I'm always thinking about it that consciously when I'm actually making work. Sometimes it kind of just happens (back to internalising those gestures and marks so they can come out to play whenever) and sometimes it also takes a ton of deliberation to make the tiniest, faintest mark.

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[ES] Where do you get your inspiration from?
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[JL] Drawing outdoors – especially parks and gardens

Lifedrawing – for me it’s less about getting the proportions right and more about testing out different mediums and colours without having to worry about what the subject matter is.

Reading.

I look at a lot of art and images but don't usually refer to anything directly while I work. When I do, I enjoy making sketches of the negative space around sculptures or figures in paintings, then re-drawing the positive space, to avoid making a direct copy. Something feels better about creating a few levels of translation in between (there's probably a whole can of worms here about originality and the values we ascribe to it, I'm not going to unpick that right now).

Things on the periphery of art practice – palettes, brush-cleaning rags, trash - something in these always catches my eye and I wonder why it can't become the work itself. Sometimes a palette becomes part of the next painting, or I use an area of the painting to mix up colours. Sometimes I make drawings of the trash in my studio because why can't that be a subject matter too? I like the idea of the work and objects being part of a life cycle, not just connected by commonalities in subject matter or medium, but with the materials themselves.

Everyday spaces and objects/in-between spaces – the foundation of my art practice is built on exploring the contents of these spaces and ways of describing them. Mess and clutter – I don't know if I could make a drawing/painting of a very empty space? Or maybe I would find some sort of mess in the non-mess to draw?

[ES] Which artists are you currently liking?
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[JL] Off the top of my head: Cecily Brown, Chua Ek Kay, Wu Guanzhong, Lubaina Himid, Lee Krasner, Phoebe Unwin, Keita Shirayama

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Follow these links to delve deeper into Jolene's work and practice:
Website
Instagram