The Brooklyn Rail

Celia: Actually I  remember speaking about the idea directly before I started making them. Video chat websites like Chat Roulette were a place where I imagined the millions of men masturbating to porn online were visible, like a cloak had been lifted. Of course those people were individuals with their own lives and differences, but they represented something, and it was an opportunity to be a person looking back at them.  

Omar: But you are using this technology to have a conversation I suppose?

Celia: I was initially interested in reversing a straight male gaze as I saw it, if you want to speak about it in the most reductive fashion, and then it became much more than that because the more paintings I made, of course the more variety I experienced in terms of the people I met and how they acted or how they behaved, and what they wanted, and how they identified.  Sometimes I was looking at a video recording of someone else, behind which an anonymous person watched me watching 'not them'. There is a kind of scrambling of perception, where the murky light, compressed colors and fragmented communication across languages obfuscates and slows down the interaction, and then suddenly you might partake in a moment that seems like real clarity or connection.  One of the more atypical paintings in this series shows a close-up of a corner of a person's face and their eyelashes, having fallen asleep at their screen.  They woke up and closed their device just after I finished the painting. In this series I am painting  portraits of all kinds of people from around the world that I would not otherwise ever meet, and I find this variety exciting. Color in this context is also particularly beautiful to me—very subtle, muddy at times, and then suddenly there might be a bright neon pink or a very particular computer-blue light shining on a person's skin in a darkened room. I find that very compelling.

Omar: How big are these paintings?

Celia: They're usually around 35 by 40 centimeters.

Omar: The color often bears a sense of luminescence. And sometimes you're painting on canvas, sometimes on linen and sometimes on aluminum as well. There is a kind of glow or shimmer that that you see that looks like something you could only see on the screen, and it got me thinking about why I became interested in painting in the first place. And, why I became fascinated in this series. Here, I was seeing people in this series from Turkey, from Saudi Arabia, let's just say, India and Pakistan. Parts of the world where certain forms of sensuality and experience, forms of interaction were forbidden, or repressed. I was fascinated by that, being given space to be seen and aestheticized, right? 

My first encounter with painting was on a dial-up modem in the 90s in Saudi Arabia where there was no visual culture. The only image of a painting that I had in my mind was of Christ of St. John of the Cross by Salvador Dali, which I had seen at the Kelvin Grove Art Gallery and Museum which was the only painting that I remembered. I would draw it again and again in my mind. I suppose such paintings are why the crucifixion is for so many, a significant part of their life and work. I remember finding, being able to Google paintings and pictures and it was an accident. 

I remember wondering how those colors on the screen when we had our first computer, how those pixels made that color. And then when we were privileged enough to have a printer, how they didn't match what was on screen, interrogating how that light made that color. I wanted to smash the screen to extract what was inside. 

As you’ve developed this work, it’s become many things for you: routine, performance, digital light? 

Celia:  Yes there is a performative aspect where the paintings are the end product, and the painting-performance is like a key, a gateway to experiencing the extremes of life, even if the extreme is extremely mundane.   I would even say that there is a connection between this body of work, the chat room paintings, and making the volcano paintings, where I climbed for some hours to paint at the summit of the active Stromboli volcano, that bear semblance.  

Omar: I suppose the apparatus of the camera and the respectable of the screen are everyday ‘painting from life’ tools for you, which is quite unusual a concept for some.

Celia: I am quite faithful to the image on screen because the format is what I want to reflect in the painting. The way the image has been cropped, or 'composed' if you like, by whomever has set up the camera, whether a live security camera feed, or a video chat webcam. There are strict parameters which I employ when in working from a screen—for example, if the person I am painting decides to leave the chat then the painting ends, so I know I've only got a certain amount of time to record the interaction. Or if I'm making a painting from a security camera, then the lights in a restaurant or office I am painting may be turned off or on, and I have to be aware I am not in control of how long I have access to what I can see in any given moment. If I am looking at an outdoor setting that is being surveilled, it might start raining and the camera becomes blurred with raindrops. I make a choice to either stop the painting or change the painting entirely. I like working within these kinds of confines. There is an element of giving life to something that has just a tiny spark of an idea. Like I can see a tiny spark or a glow of something on the screen, which if I were to just print that off, or make a screen recording of it, it wouldn't really give me what I want. I am obviously slightly exaggerating what I'm seeing on the screen, so if there's a blue light, I'd probably make it slightly bluer. 

Omar: Is it impulsive?

Celia: It is impulsive or intuitive in that within the conceptual framework that I have created, I allow for total freedom when painting, because there is such joy in that.  Paint has its own materiality: grotesque and beautiful and sensual. It can be the marriage between the hard truth of what you're looking at and this very pliable and slippery and willing substance that wants to understand and articulate the image.  Each pigment reflects light in ways that other materials cannot. Oil paint really is its own thing I think. Like a sculptural thing. 

Omar: The environment seems to play a role in your choice, somehow. 

Celia:  I am quite obsessed with color. Growing up in the UK, where the light is very flat and grey, I probably learnt to notice subtle differences in colors, because actually colors here can be so restrained. I grew up in a place where there are lots of trees, and in the winter, in a very dark grey light, you might see a rust colored branch against a smokey blue forest, for example.  You can pick out the color where it exists, and then find pleasure in exaggerating it in your mind. When I lived in Italy, my painting became more colourful and contrasted, with perhaps a pink glow, but the light was so bright that I wanted to both compete with and reflect that light.   I made some paintings of nudes after that that I thought had an ice cream palette, like a Californian evening sky.    I used to collect and paint forest mushrooms as a kid and I was fascinated by the idea of finding a poisonous one. 

Omar: I always refer to you as one of great British painters for that reason. That awareness of the high contrast; of the gear shift, even in your dreamiest paintings. But I still always know that it is yours. This brings to the point where I want to talk about what is it in you that—that stirring pot inside—that you expunge and purge that you bring that makes them you? The loner, country, child? I’d like to know. 

Celia:  I actually find I am not so interested in where I am in my work. I think the concept is too mercurial—a work can be one thing one day and a different thing another day to an artist and a viewer.  I think that to allow for magic and spontaneity and weirdness, I would actually prefer to escape any fixed identity or history and feel totally free.  Each series of mine and each work within each series probably has a different feel. I think the surveillance paintings are quite lonely, there's something to do with being alone, looking through a screen through a lens knowing someone else may or may not be surveilling, but certainly no one is returning my gaze, and there may be no one looking through that camera, more likely it is blindly operating, creating data that will be deleted.  Or to go back to surfaces, there are a couple of surveillance paintings that I have made of the shiny surface of a car bonnet reflecting the light in an underground car park, a location where I might be quite uncomfortable making a painting in situ and where in that case it would be painted in a more aggressive and fast way.  I think when you speak about ‘where am I in the work’ you could find a whole spectrum of me in the work that unfolds at different points. 

Omar: Both of your parents were artists. You have been painting since you were a child. Do you ever feel frustrated by people's limits of understanding and literacy when it comes to painting? 

Celia: This is quite embarrassing to admit but perhaps a lot of artists do this. When I am finishing the work, I think, is this as good as my favorite works in the history of painting? Because if it's not there's no point doing it. I usually paint over things if I don't think they've done that. Everyone constructs their own terms, their own literacy I suppose. The most important thing for me is to avoid any sense of hesitancy; I really dislike nervous or hesitant painting. The painting has to be confident in gesture, and free. 

Omar: And that freedom is what I feel here, because something happened in the last five years, which is that you had a child, a beautiful child, and you also had a lot of tumult in your life, which is not my place to speak about. And I learned that your parents were artists, which I knew, but I didn't know that they were ever full-time artists. In the time that has lapsed something incredible has happened in your work. Here, I am standing in your studio. I don't even know what I'm looking at, but in a sense the work has become both something else altogether. We are standing and looking at something that could be a world that is constructed by Matisse or Paul Klee. It could be Philip Guston, but it also is innately yours, even though the vocabulary has completely shifted for me. We are looking at paintings that are of building sites that I didn't know were of interest to you. I have felt naive that I did not  that this was an obsession. Perhaps you can start there? 

Celia: The first paintings I ever made at art school depicted building sites. And then over the last ten, fifteen years, I've been doing things other than that. And then I kept thinking about them again, thinking about the work I made on my MA and wondering if I had unfinished business there, thinking a lot about the machinery, the gendered space of the building site, traditionally speaking, and the objects that lie around, impotent as they are when they're not being used. And I wanted to go back to those. Recently, the paintings that I made on demolition sites seemed to speak to my psychic state, in that moment, quite well. I made some large paintings of demolished buildings and concurrently I made paintings of kidney transplants, both from drawings of a kidney transplant that I witnessed, with the generous help of a surgeon and a researcher in London. Those two things together became a body of work that I recently exhibited. 

Omar: A show called: Transplant. You were transplanted, I would say, from being looked at in a very particular way. Ironically you were trying to subvert the male gaze and what happened was in a certain small crevice of the world, I would say, maybe it was conceived that you were only interested in painting male nudes. I imagine that must have frustrated you.

Celia: Yes. It is complicated, but certainly yes.

Omar: I have seen women be hemmed into certain compartments often throughout art and its history, so it was liberating to herald in this new body of work. In <em>Transplant: Kidneys and Demolition Sites </em> lead us to one psychic state, one mind that emerge from an experience. Can you say a little bit about what led you to the kidney paintings particularly, if you feel able to?

Celia: Yes. I became pregnant and I had a daughter who was very unwell from the outset and required a kidney transplant within the first few years of her life. She had dialysis for over a year and then for the entirety of the last five years spent much of her life in back-to-back surgeries, so as a family we spend a significant amount of time in hospital. She eventually had a kidney transplant donated by her father. I made my first image of a kidney transplant when I was waiting in her hospital room during this surgery to hear when it was finished and I could visit her.   I was alone wondering what was happening and with no one to talk to really, so I thought, I'll do some drawing.  There are so many things I think are interesting about the process of a transplant or any operation for that matter.  Fundamentally, the very idea of a dark airless interior being opened up to the elements, to cut through flesh and enter a private space, violently trespassing into one's interior with the hope of healing, the air being allowed to circulate amongst the blood and around the internal organs as if the order of the organic structure is being unravelled, all the atoms are mixing and there is complete disorder in a process that's obviously highly choreographed and scientific.  The only long term solution for someone who's going to die from kidney disease is to do a transplant.  And yet it seems so blunt and basic to just put an organ from one body into another. And of course, with a baby or child, they seem so perfect, even if there is a genetic mutation. Isn’t there a beauty in that mutation? In how deformities can be beautiful, smooth and strange.  So, I guess I was thinking about this, the duality between the imperfect, perfect or complete organic form and then this kind of human disruption to that?

Omar: The imperfect, perfect. The idea of the passages of air and airlessness, the idea of tightness, I see that in many of the kidney paintings, whether it's in the formation of the spaces around, the operating table that you construct, the deep blues, the square blues. This kind of airlessness or weightlessness. I'm going to go back to something that you told me once. It was a tough interview, we did it on email. I asked you what was it that made you interested in sex and sexuality, and then you mentioned a series of murders of women. Do you remember what I'm talking about?

Celia: Yes. They were probably some of the most famous serial killers in the UK and their crimes were discovered in the 90s in the area in which I grew up.

Omar: Could you rewind to, could you say what that was?

Celia: I was probably about thirteen when a story came out about a local married couple who had been abducting young women and children for decades, often from bus stops, and also tortured and murdered their own children. I knew several people whose lives had been affected by them.  So transitioning out of childhood, the darkness of the country road at night, I suddenly became aware that a still and empty and quiet space could also be a place of threat, and that my body could be a site of violence.  

Omar: But there is also something specific to the idea of proximity and landscape.

Celia: I also think that when a person is performing such unimaginable acts at the very shocking extremes of human nature, it is part of the natural world. like the potential wildness of nature and the indifference of nature, because as I understand it, a psychopath is completely indifferent and feels no empathetic emotion. 

Omar: Which is the opposite of you, which is feeling atremendous amount of feeling towards the environment, correct? 

Celia: I think painting and paying attention is love. And so, even if you're paying attention to the darkest thing, you're trying to love it out of its darkness by painting it, by looking at it. That doesn’t mean I can’t make an angry painting or a critical painting. But I can only truly do any of these things through painting because it takes a much longer time to paint something than it does to just look at it.  I wouldn't be able to look at something in the same detail as I would if I were articulating every part by painting it.

Omar: Painting us out of the dark.