Thinking About a Two Person Landscape Exhibition.

I’m just about to start a joint project with photographer, Aaron Yeandle. As it’s the first joint show I have done, I spoke to Aaron, and we agreed that it would be a really interesting to document the process, recording our discussions as we went, and seeing where the journey took us from now until the exhibition opens next Easter. This is the first discussion we had.

FR I suppose maybe we should start with why we thought showing our work together in a joint exhibition might be an interesting project. Maybe you’d like to start?

AY It was your idea, I'm sure.

FR Was it?

AY Yeah, I think so … so why do you feel like our work fits together well?

FR I just think there's a real affinity in that, although you're known for your portraiture work, your landscape work is also a really big part of your practice, as far as I can see. And because it's really haunting and it has that same sort of slightly uncanny feel and darkness to it that my painting often has: a sadness and a sense of place, or sense of loss or memorialising about it perhaps...

AY Oh, yeah, I mean, I have to say, at the moment, especially over the last couple of years, I've been preferring working on those landscapes, than doing the documentary stuff. I'm a bit bored, to be honest of doing portrait projects. It’s not boring in itself, but I feel like I've done as much as I can achieve in that type of project. I've still got a few things I would like to do, but I guess personally, as an artist, I feel like I'm getting a lot more from photographing those landscapes in the evenings.

I’ve just been out by myself, in the middle of nowhere, connecting to the environment wherever I am, on the rocks or in the woods. And even sometimes I'm waiting for the light to go down, getting there a bit early because I like to look around and stake things out for locations. I'm just sitting there waiting for it to get a bit darker, in that time that you are sat by yourself, it’s that mystery time, dusk time.

Yeah, it's cool. Quite magical. And also, because most people would be photographing in that period of time, they call it “the golden light”, that's what the photographers say. The golden light is that period before dusk and darkness where it's like a really beautiful light, even cold light or warm light, depending on the sun and the time of the year. And I'm waiting to get into that darkness, but it's that quiet little moment of time before I get up to start making work. I'm just thinking about the environment, all sorts of things, being an artist, and that's why I enjoyed finding that moment to myself.

When I’m doing those documentary projects, it's hard work. It's really hard work, in the sense that you have to work with so many different types of people. And don't get me wrong, it's fantastic. And I have the opportunity to just spend time with these people from all different walks of life. It’s quite special. But I think, through some parts of your own life, you need to, as an artist, make the work that makes you feel something as well. Definitely, yeah.

And I think in those landscapes, there is some connection for sure between our work and how we see. It’s as if we use two different media to make work of the same essence. And also, it's quite autobiographical to some extent, in that we put our own stamp on it.

FR It's definitely about our inner worlds as well as our surroundings isn't it? Distilled into the landscape.

AY Yeah, definitely.

FR And I think, just as you say, walking and sitting in the landscape on your own is such a powerful feeling. You feel very much more connected and grounded than in everyday life.

AY I think it would be good to use that list of local landmarks that Helen provided as a starting point. But then just freestyle it, you know.

With my MAP6 collective next trip, we're going to Knoydart, which is the last wilderness section of the whole United Kingdom.

FR Where's that?

AY It's right on the west coast - it's a tiny little peninsula. You have to get a boat to it from Scotland. It’s not far from Fort William. We go there at the end of October. And some of the group have spent ages doing weeks of research and stuff and they've already got a good idea of what they want to achieve. Others of us, including me, take the opposite approach. I just want to go to that environment and let that area talk to me somehow, and for me to interact just on that pure basis of feeling it, and, you know, that's quite a risky thing to do, but other people are feeling that they want to do the same. Even the documentary photographers from MAP6 are thinking that they’ve had enough of that approach and want most just to be in that environment, in that landscape.

FR So is it about moving away really from an academic approach to documentary photography in terms of that research element, to a much more intuitive way of working?

AY Intuitive, but then afterwards, you start writing a bit more academically once that work or that place has actually spoken to you and then you start bouncing off each other and they manage to put things together. Text as well, afterwards.

FR So, yes, you're part of a collective as well. Can you tell me a bit about that?

AY I got involved a while back, before COVID. So, what, five, six years?

FR And do you find that having that collaborative group approach is a helpful, lovely thing alongside your individual work?

AY Yeah, I think it's really important because, I think with the particular art that we make, I'd find myself making the artwork alone in the landscape. And I think to be able to have a trusted group of individuals that you feel you can be yourself with, with no egos, no self-centredness, and really work as a group, but share the skills, attributes and knowledge that we have openly to help each other. I think is is fantastic. And you really start to grow as an individual artist, but learning to work with other people I think is key. Like us, just being ourselves, we can sit here and talk about anything. And through that, then our work really blossoms. In the collective, none of us are feeling ‘I don't know if want to do this project, because that person's a complete dick.’ It could be a good thing to be working on. Yeah. But ultimately, that's never going to work out well.

FR No, you have to feel an affinity and trust, don't you, with the people your are collaborating with? That's important.

AY And look, we've both worked for organisations and groups, over the years, where that hasn’t been the case. And that's why in the end, all those things were good learning experiences. Yeah. I learned a lot from those experiences, actually. Yeah.

FR Definitely. I’ve learned too from working with difficult characters over the years. And how important it is to trust your gut instincts about people as well.

AY Definitely. Yeah.

FR So what, I mean, in terms of the collective, what was the connection between your work. What pulled you together as a group, what would you say is the most important element? Because I mean, I guess you're both documentary and fine art photographers…

AY I guess it all started when maybe five or six of them had just finished their masters down in Brighton, and to keep that momentum going, they made this collective. And then over the decade it's kind of just grown into its own identity really. Ultimately, it's about people and place. If you want to do documentary work, you can do place, landscape, cities history, whatever, but it's that interest in our everyday environment really.

FR Yeah, because in some ways I suppose place and people are always interconnected, you can't separate them easily can you really? Place is shaped by people and people are shaped by place and community, along with other factors.

AY And I think a mission statement and set of values that underpin the collective were important too. It’s about sharing. Sharing the skills or knowledge, and being really open to that. And you know, that's quite a hard thing to do, because you get used to working by yourself. Yeah. But ultimately, it's so important. It's refreshing to be not owning that, just letting it be free, because you get so much back in return actually.

FR Yeah, so I suppose in terms of some areas there's an element of compromise, but with other things, you kind of have more of a say.

AY Yes, it’s always compromise, because you can have 10 people involved in making a photo book, and there's going to be 10 different opinions. But it's about thinking of the greater good of what the outcome is going to be. Yeah, so I think it’s important just to let go of that control sometimes.

FR Yes, definitely, I think that's something that we're both quite good at, working collaboratively. Having sort of worked with you before on group exhibitions, you've got so many skills that I don't have in terms of practical know-how, and a brilliant eye that is needed for the curation and hanging of work, which I've got absolutely no recent involvement with.

AY No, but your painting over the last few years, your technical skills, your eye and your instinct, is fantastic. And you've also been working with your collective of painters and sculptors.

FR Yeah, over the last year. Yeah, that’s been amazing.

AY You would have learned a lot from those people.

FR Oh, I have, yeah, and continue to. It’s been brilliant.

AY You know, however long you've been doing it, you get to see how different people exhibit work and their thought process behind that.

FR Yes, they've found very different ways of hanging with Split Collective. In terms of the first show, which I didn't sadly get to, it was in a huge empty supermarket in Wrexham. It was massive and had lots of really rough walls with extra boarding put up. They had a lot of space to hang, so it was curated very sparely in clusters of work that really worked well together, and a lot of variety in size and genre due to the broad nature of the group. And then we've I've done other shows where it's been much more of a salon hang where every element of the wall was covered because we didn't have so much space.

But I think it would be amazing to work using some of your photography blown up on the walls and to treat it as an installation with some of our work interacting. As you suggested, with some of my paintings or drawings overlapping your prints, and perhaps even some of your prints encompassed within my painting. Screen printed perhaps?

AY It would be great to make some outdoors work too, to put around the grounds, rather than just thinking of the exhibition as being the three rooms of the gallery. It might be interesting to show your paintings outside. It could be so cool.

FR Yeah, it would be interesting to do work as you do with your outside work, on aluminium, maybe photographed and printed, but then also apply some paint to it. So that it’s a reproduction of a painting, but made into a new work through direct application of paint.

AY I would have thought you could paint on aluminium really well.

FR Yes, lots of painters use aluminium as the substrate for painting, but it's just whether it would degrade in the outdoor environment. I’d have to do some research.

AY What about acrylic? I mean in the sense that it's perhaps better in the elements?

FR I don't really like working in acrylic, I’ve always got on better with oil paint. But I think there are some acrylic paints that you can virtually paint on anything with. I suppose I've always been against using it as essentially it’s a form of plastic, and at the end of the day many sources of oil paint are much more natural and less polluting.

I think. It's interesting to have works though that are shown in really odd, unexpected places as well. I’ve always loved Phyllida Barlow’s early work where she would suspend everyday things like a supermarket trolley from a street sign or something similar in a suburban street. But obviously we can't do that in the College grounds… and as I don't really work with supermarket trolleys on the whole… but it would definitely be good to display work around the school grounds.

AY And, you know, we would only need a few, two each, maybe.

FR Yeah, and different sizes as well would be interesting wouldn't it? Like a really intimate tiny work somewhere quite hidden.

AY Yeah. And then play to the landscape, look at what that landscape is about in their grounds and, well, think about what would work. … And we can do some workshops.

FR Some talks maybe?

AY Yeah, and I’m happy to go into schools because I've got the time to do that. So we could go to sixth form and maybe some other schools. A bit like we did when we did the Photography Now exhibition with Adam. We went in to do some to talks for 40 minutes about being an artist. Just about what you've done and what it’s like to be an artist. Those things are really eye-opening for students.

FR Yes, definitely. And it's good to be led by their questions in a way as well.

AY I've got to do a talk next week, next couple of weeks, I'm going to do a talk to the six form students about my practice. Also, it's good for us to talk about our work. It can be a bit uncomfortable at first, but it’s important learning. You learn so much actually, from it, it’s an important part of our practice.

FR Yes, I agree, and I think, if you kind of ask people what they see or enjoy, or find unsettling in your work as well, that can often be really interesting because it throws new perspectives on the work. I think that the artwork is not really the object, it's that moment of communication between you, the work when it becomes separate from you - a thing-in-itself, and the viewer. So, what they make of it is as important as what you make of it. And you're having to justify your work in a way to an audience which is also challenging but important.

AY And that's what's nice about how I feel about my work now. I don't have to justify anything to anybody. I make the work that I want to do, that I feel I need to do as a practitioner at that moment in time. And I made that connection with that process a long time ago. Yeah. Because otherwise you just cannot move forward and make work that’s really from the gut – that’s purely from you.

FR And I think it's not about self-confidence so much is it? I’m definitely not self-confident. It's about self belief and belief in your work.

AY It's self belief, yeah. We all have bad days. Sometimes, look at my stuff right, and I still think it looks shit. And you know, when I'm editing, I listen to weird action hero music. Yeah. From the 80s, like about being the best, like …Rocky. It's actually, sub-consciously, I still need that, to motivate me to crack on with it. Yeah, editing all those photos for the African exhibition, or all those native language-speakers. It's massive. And little things like getting all the names right, it's just endless this sort of stuff. People don't understand how much work is involved to put on these big solo exhibitions.

It's easy to doubt yourself because you're purely working by yourself. And then sometimes when you work with other people, it can be a bit of a hindrance, or at other times it can be really amazingly helpful and you couldn't achieve it without them.

FR Yeah, it's like a synergy, isn't it, in a way you sort of… you kind of get more from it than you would as two individuals. It takes you to new places that you would never have found on your own. You kind of work alone so much, don't you, as an artist? I also think it's important to have that, you know, critical thinking amongst people who are really serious about their practice, which is perhaps lacking overall here at the moment.

AY Yeah, I’d be keen on being involved in more of that. And I don’t think it is important what medium you work in, it is just getting a group of people together that gel and are happy to work collaboratively, where it’s not just about ego.

FR I think what you bring from other aspects of your life into your art practice is really important too. In terms that we've both had to do a variety of jobs in life, not often glamorous, to support our practice, haven't we? Or in my case, a long period of not painting at all to get by.

AY I mean that is very true, and very important. I think its a very different experience for people who do not need to earn a living who are artists.

FR But working alongside an art practice is not always a bad thing. The work I do in social policy, it's completely changed my life and made me rethink a lot of things. Yeah, it's changed the way I think about the world, and also my art practice. The work I make now is very different, and differently motivated to the work I was making in my twenties.

AY It’s certainly different to sitting on a beach in Thailand, getting stoned or drinking. You would have less need to make work, because you’re totally chilled out and don’t have any need to express stuff. With living in Guernsey, I's a different kettle of fish… it makes makes me angry at times.

FR Yeah, I do find Guernsey a struggle at times - it's a love-hate relationship. I love it because it's where I grew up and have memories, and its beautiful still on the whole, but it's frustrating politically. It's this small state obsession, pandering to the wealthy. And the active seeking out of tax-avoiding individuals to come to live here that really pisses me off.

AY Yeah, it's also that sense of entitlement that some people have. It's about power. Yeah. We can address that in some ways in the exhibition, maybe.

And even those images I took that on my phone, I like to put them in the show somehow. Yeah. I don't know if you remember seeing them? They look like weird spirits coming up out of the darkness.

FR Well, it's nice to have a quirky element to an exhibition, isn't it? And I like the fact that you use, like in your shows about the native language speakers, lots of personal objects and ephemera as well. It added a very different dimension to the installation of that exhibition. I've always wanted as well, in a show, to bring in other elements that impact on the senses, you know, things like certain scents or sounds. I know it sounds a bit weird.

AY Smells of places are quite potent in terms of it's a memory spark, aren’t they?

FR Definitely. I mean, sense of smell is such a trigger. I don't know how you would do it, maybe something like gorse flowers. Things that bring in the scent of the outside, and specific places in the islands into the gallery space would be good. And maybe see if Keith would lend us some of his sound equipment.

AY That's very true. I'm really open for us to exhibit whatever we think would add something. I want us to just let go and find this beautiful organic process. Definitely. Soil or earth or rocks in the gallery, one end. Yeah, definitely. I'm totally open … I don't want it to be... conventional.

FR I want to show you the Salt Pans as well at some point, which is the site round the corner. Historically it was used for panning salt when Guernsey was two islands. It was when the land there was the estuary between the two islands. The salt industry goes way back. I mean, there are implements in the museum that show that panning salt has been here since Neolithic times. But it's amazing now because it's this vast area of rough ground covered in pampas grass. It just takes over an environment, but it's also really interesting meadow marshland still, with amazing birdsong at dusk, the thrushes are incredible. And so many wild plants! And they're going to build social housing on it soon, which is much needed. But I'm kind of mourning that land in a way before its been lost, because there's such biodiversity there…

I was talking to Theo online a while back about the Guernsey language and the work with the arts that he and Matt are involved in, in trying to keep it alive. And there's a young guy who they worked with on their films in the past – Yannick - who's fluent Guernsey French speaker. I know his mum and he's very interested in botany and is compiling the Guernsey French names of all the wild plants in Guernsey. So I thought it would be good to do a field study of all the plants in this place, other than the pampas grass which is SO not indigenous, before it's turned into concrete. I thought it'd be so interesting to get the Guernsey French names of all these plants as well. Yannick is compiling them so that they don’t get lost.

AY Strangely, I had started a project on indigenous plants with another artist, but it never really worked out in the end. I was really hard that. We had the main expert in the island that took it to all the different locations to photograph all the rare plants. I think we got turned down for some funding and instead of just saying, oh, well, let's crack on with it, it sort of petered out. It was such a complex thing, photographing these flowers. I thought, long and hard about how I was going to take them. Some of these plants are minuscule, so I took these black backdrops and lit it like it was in the studio, out on location.

FR Well, I thought it might be quite good for me to do some flower paintings as well for a change ... so maybe we could have a small section on botany?

AY Yes, these works were starting to look really beautiful and very different and interesting compared to how they are conventionally photographed. And some of them are no longer around in the island unfortunately.

FR Oh, no, really?

AY Yes, they built that golf course.

FR Right, before we both get too depressed, let’s have lunch and I’ll show you the Saltpans.