Shake it Baby

During my final year of art school in 1998 I had a yukka plant called JaJa. There was something about the exotic spikiness of her leaves that sparked my imagination and took me away from the grey oppressive skies of NE Scotland to far off Copacabana rooftops and saxophone solos in poolside bars. Jaja resided in my boudoir in an Aberdonian squat and somehow survived the endless mental parties, the fag ends and disembodied dreadlocks which often ended up in her pot.

She sat next to a record player which bossa-ed out Latin Jazz Dance Classics on repeat, giving cocktail lounge vibes in contrast to Alan Eyeballs’ nosebleed techno coming from the next bedroom. She was a botanical diva and resilient, living proof that glamour was just a state of mind. The fact that she was surrounded by so much shit somehow made her even more special.

My degree show, 1998, Gray’s School of Art with my realist paintings of monumental party people

I grew up in a household where discipline overshadowed everything else, and my escape to art school in a new city at 18 was in stark contrast to my childhood where I had to be small, quiet and compliant. In Aberdeen, I was out every weekend dancing, pilling, talking shit, forging friendships. Best of times.

But also….. the escapism was intense but so fleeting. Why did it have to end ? That’s what interested me in the studio at that time too. The pathos of that; the yearning, the ritual of dressing up every weekend, the spiritual dancefloor experiences and the inevitability of the deeply unglamorous endings of spilled bong water and filthy flats. The colliding of those two worlds. Transcendence and Reality. On repeat. Every weekend.

This was the stuff that I wanted to make work about right at the beginning in my student days. This was the stuff of my life and the figures then were melancholic. I would paint my models from life, they were my pals and were often deep in Tuesday / Wednesday comedowns with sad eyes, which is how I wanted them.

For me, extreme hedonism repeated regularly for a very long time, well into my late 30s. A lot of time passed and I kept chasing the same feelings. What started as a reaction against a controlled childhood began to take on its own kind of control. I stayed in that loop far longer than I needed to.

Although I continued a similar line of enquiry work-wise during my MA and for a year or two afterwards, once I started making a consistent, survivable living from my work, I mainly made drawings and paintings around themes that weren’t too personal and certainly less challenging. But the hedonistic lifestyle persisted during this time.

I picked up the subject matter again in 2022, nostalgic for my raving days. I set up nightclub simulations in my living room to get my reference shots and made a series of atmospheric, realist pastel drawings that were definitely more celebratory in feel and shied away from the darker side.

I remember the feeling I got making my early work in the 90s, telling the truth through images felt like nothing else and it’s a feeling that I’ve found again this year, to my delight. When I took reference images out of my process for the first time this year and started to make work from somewhere inside, I needed to think about the most intense experiences of my life in order to gain access to the emotion. When I thought about the decades of lost weekends, the work that emerged was hollow-eyed and a bit scary, but most importantly it felt powerful and true.

This week I made a piece that reminded me of JaJa. She emerged from the depths, a bit kitsch, unhinged, pouty, kind of skanky but spicing herself up with a feather headdress or are they yukka leaves? She looked like she might have been made from the fag butts in the pot, and I felt like trying her out with some maracas, bossa nova stylee. Not the melancholic realism of my student work, less literal but she still had an echo of lost weekends about her, a slightly devastating disconnectedness. A remix of the weight of experience, something weirder, more complex which holds both glamour and grief, almost three decades on.

Similarly to the plant, she is allowing me to dream of the new possibilities that lie ahead for me. A Copacabana of creativity I don’t know yet, a distant land which is appearing over the horizon. The thrilling realisation that without the weight of expectation I can make a cocktail with any ingredients I want.

Learning to play in the studio this week. Kitsch, crazy, untethered… Trying to get comfortable with not knowing.