Two and a Half Questions for Lotte Gertz and Charlie Hammond (2022)
Cornelius: You are both painters with a broad approach to materials and techniques being employed. There’s also a verbal quality to the images you create. Lotte, you accompany your artwork with written texts, Charlie, you speak of the importance of humour in your work. Would you say that there is a narrative as a starting point for what then becomes a visual?
Lotte: Not really. Although literature does have a relation to the work through for instance structure, themes, titles. I’ve been interested in objects, fragments, detritus and the discarded for a while; hierarchies in image making. That led me to thinking about the container - which meant I became interested in Ursula K Le Guin’s essay ‘The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction’ - turning history and hierarchies on its head.
So I’ve been using that as a way to see objects around me and as a reason for mining imagery; ie breasts, t-shirts, horns etc. I quite often make a simple pencil drawing as a sketch to have something to go by when making the images. And then the process, the making itself and thinking through making leads on to the image. Placed together the objects, sometimes recognisable, in the image might look like a narrative of sorts- but it is never really the starting point.
Although it’s funny, I was just thinking before I got your question if I should try that for a change, using text as a starting point.
Charlie: I’m not sure I would use the word narrative to describe my starting point. My starting point is more normally an idea, a thought or something close at hand.
When I say I employ humour I lead myself into a difficult place as humour is so subjective. In a sense, when making paintings I often think of them as characters and when I’m in a space I like to think of the painting as having an attitude or personality. From this position there is an opportunity for conversation and play to happen between the work, the title , the viewer, the maker and the space, which can be fun. Some years ago I was lucky enough to select works from the Glasgow Museum collection for an exhibition and came across a painting by Florence Abba Derbyshire, a true outsider, the notes accompanying her painting spoke about how she would send poems to the owners of her work and for them to read the poem directly to their painting, I really liked this idea the painting as a fixed point and everything else moving around it. Narrative is closer to a description of the process of making a work. I’m open to studio experimentation to guide the content of a work, chance, failure, disassembly, reassembly, constantly stumbling and tripping over meanings. When all is said and done I suppose tripping over can be pretty funny.
Cornelius: Maybe it is fair to say that being a contemporary artist is more or less based on a narrative whereas what the actual making of art is much more based on an individual process?
Lotte: Maybe existing as a human being in the world is a narrative?
Charlie: I’m not sure I think of these things as separate. There is a journey my ideas and thinking go on and I suppose this could be explained as narratives or stories when communicated to an audience, but I’m not sure a kind of analogue approach is how I would describe it .
I’m quite a disorganised person, you might describe my approach as a sort of professional unprofessionalism, the places I gather imagery and ideas from always have a certain reason and logic built into them, but losing control of this through process is part of the fun. For example I have been interested in some victorian ‘putti’ in Glasgow, these are on an old bank and represent the franking and printing of new money, fat white babies printing money. At the same time I’ve been using James Cadle’s (a farmer in the U.S) 1970’s earth flag, in the studio bringing these things together seems quite natural to me and at some point more about colour, form, and image. I wonder always how much of this information to give to the audience, even while I’m writing this down these questions are raised. I love these problems. I have never really felt and even naturally resisted the linear nature of making and feel perhaps my approach is closer to a spider diagram rather than beginning, middle, and end.
Cornelius: You both studied at Glasgow School of Art (and Charlie has been teaching there too) and in the art scene in Glasgow you see a lot of people using a wide range of materials for the art, basic things, wood, paper, everyday materials. Then there’s also rich history of Arts and Crafts in Glasgow and the idea of independent publishing of poetry and fiction and part of which manifested itself in the Glasgow Print Studio. How does this influence the way you work, the formal decisions you make?
Lotte: I guess it’s hard to define exactly where you yourself end and where the world and the
environment around you begins in terms of influences. I do have a sense of growing out of a community, of being part of a fabric of artists, colleagues, friends - I would say friendship is a strong factor for living in Glasgow. It might be partly down to the lack of a commercial art scene in the city that makes for a supportive work environment, but it can’t be the only reason.
Putting work out there in the public means to offer something to a dialogue, a contribution
of (visual) thought. Glasgow School of Art, Transmission Gallery where we both served as committee members in the early 2000s, Mary Mary Gallery, Art in Hospital, Glasgow Print Studios and Good Press have all had significant roles at different stages for me in the last 20 years.
The artist-run, DIY, self-organised has probably had more importance for me here than the
historic aspects of Arts and Crafts in Glasgow. Maybe that has to do with what you mention in terms of a narrative of being an artist somewhere. As for the making, yes, for my part this is mostly an individual process; I use painting, collage and printmaking.
Lately I have primarily been working on Japanese paper, using gouache and woodcut
print. Some images are preplanned quite precisely while others have a much larger element of chance and surprise in the making. Going between the planned and the looser, more intuitive process I find rather rewarding, a circular movement starts to happen and you can be energised by the work. Personally I seem to have a need to go on journeys from time to time, residencies where new developments happen. I have recently returned from a residency at the Danish Art Workshops in Copenhagen where I developed new large scale works.
Laurence Figgis writes about this in his essay „Paintings with Legs“: She has done this a few times, collapsed her studio down and taken it away and set up again in a new place. I think of an artist in transit - carrying their tools and materials and the work they are making. I think of these works as a kind of language.
So perhaps taking the tools from Glasgow on a journey - in order to make new discoveries - and then returning to re-integrate them is part of my process.'
Charlie: When I graduated at the beginning of the 2000’s I don’t suppose I had truly explored any material approaches with a great deal of expertise, I was making video, performance, drawing and installation. The environment I entered was very open, there was very little commercial activity in Glasgow and this hasn’t changed. Being surrounded by many artists and relatively little money, the exchange of skills is always generous. If I need to learn something, someone will show me. This goes for teaching as well, I learn a lot from talking to an ever wider circle of artists. I’m not sure this is typical of all art communities, I hope it is? if it isn’t, it should be.
Printing that you mention is a great example, we are lucky to have several affordable open access print studios across Scotland.
My friend the artist Ciara Phillips taught me and Michael Bauer to screen-print when we collaborated for our two person show ‘Euro Savage’ at Linn Lühn gallery in Düsseldorf in 2010. From this Starting point I’ve just carried on screen-printing often directly with other artists, in some cases becoming the teacher or at least the one who knows how it works. Material confidence and learning through doing, has been important to both my teaching and making.
Cornelius: Thank you :-)
(An Interview based on an email conversation with Lotte Gertz and Charlie Hammond, April 2022.)
