Interview with Ann-Marie James

 

WHAT DOES YOUR SCREEN SMELL LIKE?

INTERVIEW WITH ARTIST ANN-MARIE JAMES

Ann-Marie found time to reply to a few questions on a rare sunny day in fitzrovia

Can you tell me the starting point for your work?

I am interested in taking imagery that already has an established cultural reading that I can wrestle with, adapt, exploit, examine and transform. Purloined pictorial elements from art history are veiled, conjoined, contorted, revealed, emphasized, interpreted, translated, explored, repeated, omitted and manipulated, imbuing them with a new spirit to my own ends. The hybrids that I have constructed have so far taken the form of small paintings on found book plates, pencil drawings, large scale paintings and photographic documentation of interventions made (with permission) at the Museum of Classical Archaeology at Cambridge University.

There is an intimacy to your work whereby the viewer is invited to get up close. It feels almost secretive, is this close relationship between the work and the viewer important to you?

I’d like the paintings to function both from afar and up close. There is a level of detail that invites close inspection. Whether this proximity affords a sense of “secrecy” or a “close relationship” is a question of the individual’s response to the work – something that can be encouraged but not controlled.

Do you meticulously plan your pictures from the outset or do the marks you make influence how the pictures progress?

Yes, both.

Your work has layers upon layers of references. How important is it to you that people can access all these sources buried within your work?

I’d like them to continue, over time, to reveal themselves slowly.

Within your practice you use a lot of found old books, does it feel like a sacrilege to deface them and paint on top, or is that partly the point?

Yes it does, and yes it is.

To what extent do you use the computer within your work?

“Sending emails, receiving emails, left-clicking, right-clicking – I could go on…”

Would you ever consider having an exhibition solely online?

Sure.

What does your screen smell like?

Like a sky ‘’the colour of a television screen, tuned to a dead channel.’’