Situated on the Grand Union Canal, flanked by the railway and the Harrow Road, and crowned by the odd concrete elegance of the Westway, Felicity Powell’s studio is surrounded by a strange confluence of the city’s historic transport and trade routes. As an artist whose work often explores this confluence of the contemporary and historical – through use of materials, modes of production, or common concerns – it seems an appropriate place for her to be situated. The constant animation of the world immediately above and beyond her studio is appropriate, too: recent years have seen her develop a skill in capturing and manipulating movement in her hypnotic animations and short films.
The studio looks out on to the canal through a low, wide window. On the ledge is an assortment of small glass objects. Many of them look inviting to hold. Some of them are small, almost palm sized; others are larger, with the appearance of medical instruments or inflated organs – glass stomachs, livers, or bladders. On the walls of the studio are drawings that can also be found on her circular wax bas-reliefs; heads in profile with fish swimming from their mouths; heads resting in water with small, vaporous clouds above them; heads with medusa locks and snakes’ tongues: images that manage to be both peaceful and unsettling. On the floor is a box of her father’s tools. Behind it is her animation stand. Two hours go by as we talk.
She tells me about living in Rome after graduating from the Royal Academy. Her time there, she says, has had a profound influence on her work. She loved the galleries and museums, but most of all, loved seeing the history of the city in its streets and architecture. She recalls some seemingly innocuous patches of ‘chewing gum’ on the floor of the Forum in Rome, and explains her delight in discovering that these patches were in fact the material traces of a single, hurried, moment. A great fire had once consumed the building, and, in the hurry to escape, money had been scattered, which the heat from the fire had then melted onto the marble floor. Time had given them a curious bright green patina. She continues:
Across the way there was the courthouse, and on the steps of the courthouse you can see markings where people were marking out a game to play – I can’t remember what the game is called, but it’s a sort of marble game. The waiting. The sense of someone sitting on the steps – waiting. Playing this game, or fleeing in a moment. Those traces, of the way time is played out, is something that I’ve attempted to capture in my work.
Later, she describes for me a favourite sculpture: Bernini’s Daphne and Apollo. The sculpture depicts the moment of Daphne’s transformation into a tree. Powell explained that what she loved about the sculpture was the way operated in space. The story would unfold for the viewer as they walked around it:
As you enter the room you see Apollo’s back and just a few leaves on this side, as she’s turning away. As you walk around, you see her fully fleshy, and then, as you move around her a little more, her toes begin to grow into roots, and as you move round a little more she’s more enveloped in bark. I thought it was an incredibly dynamic idea for a supposedly static piece of work. Also, just the phenomenal skill in making those leaves appear so very leafy…
As she describes the sculpture I am reminded of the miniscule, precisely rendered leaves that appear frequently in her wax bas-reliefs and medals. Each one is articulated separately from the rest, and each one is utterly leafy. Her’s, like Bernini’s, is an art of precision and attention. Trees, as well as leaves, appear frequently in the strange dreamlike imagery of her wax bas-reliefs. Sometimes they sprout from figures’ heads, at other times they grow downwards from necks that act as trunks. On the medal that she made to commemorate the V&A’s new Medieval and Renaissance galleries a tree is depicted on one side, and, on the other, lightning. Above the tree is the word ‘Knowledge’, above the lightening, ‘Inspiration’.
Despite the precision and control that seems to characterise some elements of her work, throughout our conversation Powell makes frequent references to fruitful mistakes and serendipitous discoveries that have led her in new directions in her work and life. She recalls one such experience:
When I came back from Rome I was invited to Falmouth to give a talk about the scholarship, and from that I was given a job teaching in Falmouth part-time. Around that time I also had a couple of exhibitions. One was at ‘Scolar Fine Art’, a small gallery in the West End that’s now a very shi-shi furniture store. That was the exhibition that really got me interested in glass as a medium. It’s an incredibly skilled thing, blowing glass. The idea is to try and get symmetry. But I kept having trouble. Every time I got the thing on the end of the rod it would sort of flop off [laughs]. And then I thought, actually that’s quite interesting: the fact that it’s this tear shape [picks up one of the glass shapes from the window]. So I made these – lots and lots, hundreds of these – tears. The person that I was working with was saying that these shapes are the antithesis of what you’re trained to do. As a glass blower you’re trained to aim for this perfect symmetry.
These tears became a motif in Powell’s work that she would next use in her 2003 commission from the V&A sculpture department. She was to create their first contemporary art work to commemorate the nineteenth-century collector Sir Charles Robinson. In ‘Drawn from the Well’, Powell created a series of elusive mirror drawings, set in to the Italian wellheads in the Sculpture Gallery; the wellheads being just a few of the remarkable pieces of medieval and renaissance sculpture that Robinson acquired for the gallery. Powell describes the way that the drawings in the wells are activated, like the sculpture of Daphne and Apollo, through movement. She picks up two of the large, circular pieces of mirror sitting behind her in the studio, to illustrate how it works. Etched onto the glass is a sketch of ripples on water:
There are two pieces of glass. There’s glass that was etched from underneath, like this, then another piece of glass underneath that, so that at certain points the drawing disappears. If you lean over it, it isn’t there, and then if you take another angle on it you get the dark line from the drawing showing. It’s got a really interesting quality, for me, that sense of the ephemeral in something permanent.
Interestingly, considering the felicitous mistakes that seem to characterise her working processes and shape her outcomes, Powell tells me that in this instance, the concept of creating a disappearing drawing by etching into glass, and layering it over a plain one, was something that she dreamt up only to discover, on application, that it didn’t work as well as she’d hoped: because of the depth of the glass, the drawing never truly disappeared – it only became more or less distinct.
In situ in the Sculpture Gallery at the V&A the mirrors picked up aspects of the collection, and inverted them, presenting the viewer with a new way of seeing the objects. Odd juxtapositions and images appeared as you walked around the space:
Interesting poetic images would emerge. There was an angel, really high up in the gallery, and I noticed that as you walked around she’d appear in every well: she’d sort of follow you around. I realised that the only way to document that effect was to make a film. The whole process of filmmaking, I discovered, was very much like making sculpture. I got really interested in the editing. It felt to me a bit like carving things up and putting them together again. Very much like construction.
Film seems to be a natural medium for Powell. The medium, or at least her use of it, requires the same patience, precision, and exactitude necessary in her drawings and bas-reliefs, as well as a willingness to delight in mistakes and inconsistencies. She describes making an early version of the film ‘Sleight of Hand’:
I had the overhead camera set up to take short clips of the work in progress, but I was out of sync, and each time I thought I was turning the camera on, it was off. I was absolutely devastated. What I ended up with was large quantities of film of me just fiddling around, making it. But then I thought, maybe this isn’t such a terrible mistake. I liked the effect of seeing the hands in motion. I thought it showed, quite innocently, the process, and that in itself was interesting. So I speeded things up and fiddled about with it. It wasn’t very sophisticated, but it had a kind of quality, being black and white and jiggly, of early German impressionistic film. Which I liked.
The films Powell made to accompany the amulets of Edward Lovett in the ‘Charmed Life’ exhibition at the Wellcome Collection (2011) are her longest and most ambitious films to date. In the exhibition they were screened in an adjoining room to the collection of amulets, projected in circles on to a curved wall. The circular shape of the projections echoed the shape of the coins, amulets, and mirrors in the previous room. Two circular windows in the partition wall cast a further two circles, of light, on the gallery floor. These repetitious shapes did more than just provide continuity between the rooms. Like coincidences or patterns experienced in life, they helped create a sense of superstition and wonder – reminiscent of the feelings experienced by some of the anonymous owners of Lovett’s collection. One of the two films Powell made for the show, ‘Scanning’, made use of images from MRI and CT PET scans she had during treatment for Cancer. She talks about the decision to animate these intimate images:
When I first saw it, it was hard. Even though I don’t have the expertise that a radiologist has to interpret them, I could still see the lack of symmetry. They were hard to look at, but incredibly compelling. The way you get the MRI images is a bit like stop motion animation. They take lots and lots of images, one after the other, of different depths of your body. When I was looking at them with the doctors you could sort of zoom through the body with a mouse, and I just thought that the movement was so arresting, it made the organs look almost like they were breathing, these strange black and white images. So even then the idea for an animation was germinating.
The scans look very much like drawn images; their greyness occasionally reminiscent of pencil lines, their white of chalk or wax. Despite knowing that they depict the body, it is hard, throughout the film, to understand exactly what you’re looking at. The shapes morph and change. Sometimes you glimpse a fleetingly familiar piece of anatomy, but its gone before you can be sure. The soundtrack, provided by the composer William Basinski, is also strange and otherworldly; he creates a feeling of being deep underwater, where sounds are warped and the depth plays havoc with your senses. The instruments he uses, too, are hard to place. It sounds like a great church organ might, if it were played at the depths of the ocean, fish swimming between the flutes.
The MRI and CT/PET images are overlaid, at points, with Powell’s hand drawn illustrations of Lovett’s amulets. These are simple line drawings in white pen, drawn, she tells me, on acetate and physically laid over the scans during the animation process. She describes what, for her, is the most successful part of the animation:
One of the amulets, a tiny piece of paper, had the Lord’s Prayer written on it in ink. It was an amazing thing: this miniscule writing by an 88 year old. I wanted to animate this object, so I enlarged the text so that I could actually see it, and then began to write over his handwriting word by word. While I was writing it, I would repeatedly make mistakes, but I got to know his handwriting intimately. I knew where he put pressure on, where he flicked the pen quite quickly, and even where he’d re-dip. I came to really value the repetitive nature of it, just like with those glass tears. There was something very meditative about it. In the animation the prayer unfolds over a CT PET image of the whole body revolving in space. The body, in this image, becomes like a glass vessel, with the heart at the centre. The Lord’s Prayer wraps itself around this turning body and ends up encircling the heart. I never expected any of these amulets to become very meaningful, and particularly not one with a prayer on it, but it became fundamental to me. Often, when I go in a scanner these days, I conjure up that image.
Felicity searches for her original ‘drawing’ of this text, and brings it over to show me. Afterwards, she brings out two of her own ‘amulets’. One is a penny. On it, Victoria’s regal profile is still partly recognisable, but it has been turned on its side. Powell has etched directly into the space around it to create the impression that the profile is floating in water, suspended, looking up to the sky above where small clouds are gathered. The other is more personal still: a coin belonging to her father during his time in the Lancaster Bombers. She explains that when she was little he’d shown her this coin, and told her the story behind it:
He was out one night in the plane, and they got shot at. He thought he’d been mortally wounded because he could feel some warm stuff trickling down his face. He’d also picked up some metal. This coin had been in a wallet and … pieces of metal had gone through the wallet and right through this coin. It must have just stopped before it got to him.
She tells me that what she finds interesting about the coin is that on one side you can see what looks like a kind of burr – where something has partly gone through the metal. ‘It would once have been a raised surface but it has been completely worn down. He must have carried it with him for the rest of the war’. Her father wasn’t a superstitious man, and would be offended by anything irrational: ‘I find it moving because he never spoke about it, that experience of facing your mortality every night. I think that, since I’ve been in that situation myself, I’ve thought a lot more about him as a young man’.
She returns to this a little later:
I had a strange experience when I went to Weimar recently for a conference. I suddenly realised that it’s so very far away. I mean it’s obvious, one knows that, but it’s a bit like the experience of making something: its not until you physically travel through a landscape that you really understand it. It’s the experience that makes you understand it. I thought, how extraordinary it was that all those years later, here I was, travelling quite innocently to a conference. But he would have been trying to get back, and it was a long, long way. And it was just so obvious but I hadn’t connected. So when I came back (he was still alive then) we had this conversation, and we spoke about it in a way that we’d never been able to do before. Because sometimes the simplest things are unsaid, and he said, yes, trying to get back was the hardest thing.
We end our conversation by discussing scale. She is a sculptor who has moved from large-scale work, to the tiny, restricted, scale of medals and the delicate wax bas-reliefs into the more flexible medium of film:
I think the way scale operates is interesting. There can be different types of engagement, either with a very intimate small-scale, or a large scale, which can be an intimate experience in a different way. I like to think that that whole room in the V&A was an installation, because it engages everything, and invites the viewer to occupy, experience, and walk around the space in a different way. But the engagement is still an intimate one. It becomes quite embodied, in the way that, if you pick up a small piece of sculpture, and are handling it, it is embodied in a different way.
I suppose that the two scales have a relationship in my mind and in my work because of what I’m looking for. I’m looking for metaphor, or a kind of poetic way of revealing something about the subject that I’m interested in. I don’t think those definitions of monumental and intimate can be necessarily literally applied to scale. I think that it can shift. You can see the monumental in a really small piece of work and likewise something monumental might not have those qualities. I think I’m like a terrapin: I’ll grow to fit the environment, but often, my way in to a piece of work now is through that intimate experience of making medals, through the small scale.
As I leave we discuss California, where Powell has spent some time. There are giant Redwood and Sequoia forests in California, with trees as wide as houses, thousands of years old. It’s easy to see why they resonate with Powell. And curious, but appropriate, that these magnificent Redwoods are the arboreal ancestors of the tiny, precise, and leafy trees that grace her circular medals and waxes, often no more than 6cm across.