Join artist Claudette Johnson and some of her close collaborators Lubaina Himid, Beverley Bennett, Ingrid Pollard and Marlene Smith as they discuss her work and artistic process.
The galleries, shop and café will be open from 6pm, the event will start promptly at 6.30pm
Beverley Bennett, Dissonance Installation view, 2016. With work by collaborating artists; Antonio Abatangelo, Chiara Dellerba, Rob Flint, Jess Murray, David Stickman Higgins, Honey Williams. Various materials; size variable. Courtesy the artist.
Artist Beverley Bennett talks with Traction Magazine about archives, processes, systems and future plans following her show ‘Dissonance: Beverley Bennett in collaboration with Nottingham Collective’, New Art Exchange, Nottingham.
Your work can currently be seen in ‘Dissonance: Beverley Bennett in collaboration with Nottingham Collective’, on at New Art Exchange, Nottingham. What are you working on next?
The new work could be seen as a follow on from another piece I made called ‘The Hook’, which is a sound project. For that particular project I ask people to tell me about a piece of music that resonates with them, that nests and buries itself within them, where words are often really difficult to describe how that actually makes you feel. I interview them telling me about that. They’re only allowed to choose one song. They can’t talk about multiple songs, just the one. It’s been quite taxing for the people that I’ve collaborated with.
Whenever I talk about this work, I always bring up what’s happening in the U.S. at the minute with the Black Lives Matter movement and individuals basically being massacred over there. There was a sound recording I heard, of a guy having a conversation with his girlfriend, and in the background you can hear a succession of shots. As I remember it, he continued his conversation, as if it was just background noise. I’m looking at that, which to me is disturbing, but to him it’s the norm.
It’s terrifying for that to be normative for him.
I know. It shouldn’t be that way. I’ve only ever heard gunshots twice. I’m from the Midlands and I heard a gunshot once there and then again here in London. Just to hear them on those instances is horrific. It’s bizarre and it really shouldn’t be the norm but it is for certain individuals, in certain locations and among certain demographics and that is ridiculous.
Beverley Bennett, Graphic Score, 2016. Raked Chinese Ink on paper; 39 x 30 cm. Courtesy the artist.
I can imagine that’s a difficult discussion to approach. Has this political aspect always been something that’s been an undercurrent in your work or has it come into your practice more recently?
In talking with friends and fellow artists I’m aware it’s always been there. I don’t know whether it’s explicit in my work but yeah, I’d agree with you that it’s present and that there is a certain political undercurrent to the things that I have become involved in or that I try to create. I don’t necessarily like to give the full details of what drives it, but yeah, it’s definitely a concern.
This leads me to think of the collaboration with other artists’ that is a prevalent part of your practice. What pushes you to work with other bodies and how you engage with the physicality of another in your work?
I think that when I’ve spoken about this before, I’ve said it’s because, and it’s true, that in large it came from finding that, for me, being in the studio is a bit like being in solitary confinement. You’re just bouncing off the wall, literally.
I used to work a lot within my sketchbook so I was always to some extent creating work at my desk. I’d be working away whilst everything else was going on around me. I then decided I had to go back to working full-time, which pushed me out of the studio. Hence moving towards those projects like ‘The Hook’ where I’m literally going to other people’s houses with my Dictaphone, it’s like taking the studio outside.
That’s what pushed it, but so did wanting to interact with different practitioners in a new way. I’m quite nosy and I’ve always found it fascinating going into artists’ studios. By working with a dancer or an opera singer, that was a way of going into someone’s studio outside of the visual arts. I’ve found that it engages me with a different mindset, which then helps to create a trajectory I may not have taken and effects how I view my own discipline aiding me to push it further.
Beverley Bennett, Cacophany- Record Distortion, 2016. Still from Video. Courtesy the artist.
What is it about the engagement with different arts that interests you? Is it the rubbing up against another person’s practice and seeing where the differences are or is it the harmonious instances that you find the most engaging?
I think it’s probably a bit of both. Obviously, I love the harmonious bits.
I’ve done another version of ‘Dissonance’ prior to the show at New Art Exchange called ‘Cacophony’, which also works on those kind of dualities of meaning and double layers. Whilst the moments of discordance are present, so are harmonies, both are equally important.
One of my favourite sounds is when you’re listening to an orchestra and they’re tuning up. Sometimes you can hear beautiful harmonies within it but also jarring sounds. Those jarring sounds, there’s beauty within it.
The way that you navigate your materials and your engagement with them suggests parallels with how we use materials to display identity and navigate our place within systems. How do you feel about that, is that something that rings true for you?
Just as you were talking about materials I was thinking back to one piece, which is called ‘Unpick’ where I literally use material as a jump off point. I’d started to record everything and I was recording a conversation between my Mum, who is Jamaican, and myself, discussing why she came here to the UK. I basically wanted to know her story. It sounds really bleak but, you know, once she’s gone I won’t be able to get that, so it’s building an archive really.
Beverley Bennett, Unpick, 2016. Still from Video. Courtesy the artist.
I’m really glad you said archive, as an observer of your practice it seems as if that’s very much a core part of what is created through your body of work. Would you agree?
Yeah. I guess it’s been central to my work for a long time. When I was studying Photography and Visual Communications for my undergraduate degree, I used to go around my family’s houses and take portraits of them. I’d literally just bug them and from that I made a book. One of my sisters is notorious for keeping all of the family photographs so I was like, ‘you know what? I’m going to make an archive for myself.’
‘Unpick’ is definitely linked to that. It’s the telling of my Mum’s own story and also the story of trying to coax it out of her. In the video I use the fabric of what people traditionally consider Jamaican, you know, the string vest, which I can be seen unpicking as I tried to find out more about my family history. It acts as a visual metaphor for both the immediately accessed content of the piece and also for the broader critical discussion presented.
That piece then went off to Kingston, Jamaica, which was really important. I remember writing within the proposal about it being a piece post-Windrush. In respect of that, I felt it was important to be really honest with my Mother’s story. It wasn’t a bed of roses and it’s still not.
I did do a small edit of ‘Unpick’ but not much because, like I said, I didn’t want to make it sound like it was a bed of roses. Towards the end of the video, I say to my Mum ‘oh, do you not want to talk about it anymore’ and she just says ‘no’ and that’s where it cuts and it finishes like that.
Beverley Bennett, Black Bile Series, 2016. Raked Chinese Ink on Paper; dimensions variable. Courtesy the artist.
Is the material quality of sound something that appeals to you? The fact that it’s not physically embedded in something, so it’s that idea of being…
Immersed in it?
I was thinking more rootless. The use of it feels like quite a decisive choice when put into the context of you being a child of the Diaspora and also when thinking of the idea we discussed prior to this interview of sound being a thing that locates you, rather than something physical.
Maybe it is, yeah, unconsciously me thinking of it as a medium, as a tool.
As you were saying about the archive, your voice is a thing that people cannot remove from you, so it seems like quite a decisive, radical message to then base your practice in that medium.
I’ve never thought about it that way, thanks for bringing it up. I don’t know. I have to think more about that but I do like what you’re saying.
I guess the movement into sound wasn’t entirely unexpected although I didn’t see it coming.
I’ve always been interested in music and wanting to visually represent music in a way. When I was doing photography I tried to but that didn’t really work, so it became a constant aspiration of mine. Music and sound, however, are a bit different. I was talking to a friend about it and I said ‘it feels like a bit of a leap from one to the other and from drawing’ and he said ‘no, that trajectory made sense in terms of what your work is about’ but I didn’t see it.
People have said that the ‘Scratch Black’ drawings look like little shouts and saw audio qualities within my drawings so maybe it’s just been oblivious to me.
Beverley Bennett, Scratch Black, 2016. Raked Chinese Ink on Paper; 47 x 67 cm. Courtesy the artist.
May we quickly go back to the new work that you’re going to be making in Nottinghamshire on the residency?
The residency is at a place called Quarry Lab, which is literally in the middle of the countryside. I’m a city person so my first night there I couldn’t sleep at all, I kept waking every hour. I live in Queen’s Park and my flat literally backs onto the tube line, which settles me going to sleep so there, in the middle of nowhere, in utter silence, was horrific.
In the morning I was speaking to Roy and Veronica, who run the space, about how difficult I found it to settle and another guest came over and said to me, ‘everything’s alright in the world when you hear certain sounds, you sort of know where you are and can ground yourself’. That really engaged and resonated with me. That’s what the new project is about, the psychology of sound and its relationship with our concept of spaces and spaces in motion, its affective effect on us, and how our brain is able to adapt to that.
During the residency I’m going to talk to local residents and interview them and expand upon that, do some field recordings, which will be the start. I’ll also record sounds here in London, in Queen’s Park, when I’m settling off to sleep and compare it to the sounds there. I hope to then talk with scientists and psychologists about sound psychology and the effects on the brain. This is all just as a starting point. I have no idea what it will be like.
Beverley Bennett, Scratch Black, 2016. Raked Chinese Ink; 47 x 67 cm. Courtesy the artist.
It’s interesting to hear you reference the psychology of sound, what does that mean for you? It’s not something that I am really aware of, other than on a base level.
Well, I would say that I only really know it on a base level, hence the need to talk to psychiatrists and psychologists. I suppose, I’m interested about it in terms of things that really affect you, a little like with ‘The Hook’ and looking at the way that music effects you emotionally. I’m looking at the same thing in a certain respect but based on an environment. When you’re listening to a piece of music you have a choice, but when you’re in a certain location, environmentally there will be different sounds that filter in and out and you can’t control that unless you move to a different location. I like looking at and interrogating that kind of stuff if that makes any sense?
Are you talking about control?
Yeah, maybe control. Maybe it is control.
Do you feel like there is any of that in your drawing?
Oh yeah, I try and tackle it! Yes, definitely. It’s in my drawings very much, trying to attack that first page. I constantly go back and forth, forwards and backwards. It then forms a sort of system, a process, which emerges that I then take on and use to create these geometric, abstract, puzzling to me at times, drawings.
Beverley Bennett, Graphic Score, 2016. Raked Chinese Ink on Paper; 30 x 39 cm. Courtesy the artist.
So is there something about wonder or awe as well that engages and interests you? Like with ‘The Hook’ it’s that moment that you can’t quite describe and you’re talking about these puzzling geometric forms that you can’t quite comprehend. So is it like this experience of almost childish wonder?
Yeah, when I go to the studio I tell myself that I have to play. I have to play, otherwise I just get really bored and frustrated and yes, wonder is definitely a part of it, and awe, something slowly revealing itself. Whenever I’m doing a drawing I think that it’s like an equation; that’s not working, that balance isn’t working there. I’ll flip it over and then I’ll do the same drawing again, but then I’ll change it and I’ll go back to the other drawing. It’s almost like constantly doing a kind of mathematical equation, or trying to anyway.
It sounds quite existential. It feels as though this process is almost a format for trying to figure out our place in this chaos or for the moments of order in this chaos. Is that something that you feel is present?
Yeah, maybe it is. Order is definitely. Order is a very good word to use. Order and disorder, it’s always a juxtapositional balance.
Is that where these moments of wonder come in, where everything sort of just sits right and then it expands again?
Yeah, because I’ve just looked at that drawing again and I’m going to change a bit!
Interview by Charlotte Barnard.
‘Dissonance’ can be seen at the New Art Exchange, Nottingham until 11th September, 2016. Find out more at http://www.nae.org.uk/exhibition/dissonance-beverley-bennett-in/106.
You can find information regarding Beverley’s residency at Quarry Lab and follow her progress at http://quarrylab.org/portfolio/beverley-bennett.
For further information about Beverley’s work, please follow the link to her website: http://www.beverleybennett.com.
By working with a dancer or an opera singer, that was a way of going into someone’s studio outside of the visual arts. I’ve found that it engages me with a different mindset, which then helps to create a trajectory I may not have taken
