Carolyn Trant interview

When and where you at art college?

I went to the Slade straight from school in 1969. I had a brilliant art education at school (NLCS in north London) under the aegis of Peggy Angus, but being bright at other things as well, my decision to apply to art school went down like a lead balloon. Meanwhile Slade tutors were unimpressed by my A levels… why wasn’t I going to Uni? Well-educated artists in the sixties were suspect and ideologically unsound it seemed. Thus continued my life continually falling between stools.

Cross disciplining was not encouraged even with art at the Slade at that time. I was supposed be a ‘painter’ – even sneaking into the printmaking department was frowned upon, likewise into sculpture to use the bandsaw to cut my odd shaped painting surfaces. AND I wasn’t using ‘proper’ paint! Egg yolk and pure pigment, used from time immemorial, was considered shocking and retrograde.

I regarded myself as an artist, not a painter… I liked using a variety of mostly organic materials – wood, gypsum, eggs, rabbit skin glue, leaves, bones… whatever came to hand…. I went to the Tadek Beutlich exhibition at Ditchling Museum recently and was delighted to find the labelling said for example not ‘woodcut print’ but just ‘wood ink and paper’. I didn’t fit in with either the traditional crowd squinting through grids at nudes with Euan Uglow, the silk screen devotees in printmaking, or – although definitely not averse to innovation – those being sick off scaffolding with Stuart Brisley. I wanted to make woodcuts and objects as well as painting in my ‘funny paint’.

Did any of the tutors stand out and what was art education like then?

My lifesavers were Stanley Jones, master lithographer – who believed in enabling you to do what you wanted to do and was a modest and wonderful person; and a regular visiting lecturer from the AA (Architectural Association) Keith Critchlow who delivered incredibly inspiring lectures with quick-fire visuals from around the world to a devoted coterie. I suppose we were the hippy set, constructing and meditating in Buckminster Fuller geodesic domes and pursuing esoteric interests… a couple of my friends ended up in saffron robes and we all worked in a variety of media.

Peggy Angus’s art curriculum was based around a global ‘art history’ across time from cave painting to cake decorating – encompassing what she called art for love, not ‘folk art’ (with its potentially post Nazi Germany fascist overtones) cutting through art speak definitions beyond a pendulum of classicism and romanticism and explaining the social and economic forces behind movements and terminologies. She had been to Russia in 1933 and seen the banner across the Hermitage ‘Art is the Propaganda of the Ruling Class’. It was a very refreshing take on Art compared with the very academic lectures Slade students attended with Courtauld students as a gesture towards more formal teaching.

I had been working a lot for Peggy printing her wallpapers since I finished school, often sleeping over in Camden Studios, and staying at Furlongs with her on the South Downs since I was 15, which is why I ended up living in Lewes. The printing wages subsidised my years at the Slade and the exciting life I had with her and her friends probably somewhat overshadowed my Slade life. But Jeffery Camp was a sympathetic tutor and his own work quite quirky, and students back then (we were an intake of nine!) were lucky enough to have day-long personal tutorials wandering round London galleries and exhibitions in playful discussion with our mentor. We didn’t take exams and we didn’t get a degree, though our ‘Professor’ – William Coldstream was working on his report which eventually necessitated both, in the interests of artists being taken more seriously… a dubious pact in my opinion… I pity subsequent students with their crowded classes and pressure towards instant fame and fortune.

John Berger was attracting (mostly male) followers as a visiting tutor but I knew, and agreed with, much that he was saying through Peggy’s less explicitly Marxist approach. I think Joseph Beuys was probably giving lectures in London around this time but I failed to find them, but if I have to name an artistic hero it is probably (his almost disciple) Anselm Kiefer. I love Kiefer’s woodcuts of course, his huge artworks full of ‘stuff’, the dismissal of boundaries, the extraordinary ideas made visual beyond art speak, the relevance, historic context, the bravery, the teamwork, collaborations on a grand scale – beyond a Renaissance Studio such as Rubens.

I had visited Germany a lot, yearly as a child of travelling musicians involved with trying to repair cultural relations after the second world war….and had had access to museums and galleries across Germany. At the Slade I was aware how much the London artworld was still dominated by France and classical traditions… it was soon to change, but I had always felt much more affinity to Northern roots.

Were you committed then to spending your life as an artist?

I can’t remember ever not knowing I would be an artist though my ‘art’ as a child also included a great love of poetry and writing as well. I was soon told that of course I would have to choose between writing and ‘painting’. Why? What about William Blake? And David Jones? What a strange country we were. I have come to realise I have always seen words and thoughts in images, but I see no difference in using metaphor, and indeed metaphysics, in both art forms though, of course, any whiff of ‘narrative’ painting was very out of fashion in my formative years so I had to keep my head down to a certain extent.

When did you make the move to artists books as opposed to painting?

By the 1990’s circumstances made it evident I was very ready for change, at last my three children were all at school, I had been very ill, I was single again with more head space to think…. walking through the Festival Hall on the South Bank I found a small event with 6 or 8 tables and people displaying ‘Artists Books’. It was the initial event of what was soon to become the London Artists Book Fair run by Marcus Campbell. I stopped electrified with a sense of coming home. This was what I had always said I wanted to do as a child! It was a structure within which you could possibly do whatever you wanted to do, working between gaps in very loose definitions.

I had just finished a two-year commission as Artist in Residence on the South Downs (by good fortune Keith Critchlow was on the selection panel for the project) which involved coming up with my own plan of action. I walked the hills making pastel and charcoal drawings of marks on the landscape from time immemorial – chalk landscape with using coloured earths and burnt twig. Marks without hierarchies – foot and animal tracks, excavations archaeological or industrial, ritual sites and burials and biker scars. I also drew objects removed from the ground or abandoned there…  from museum objects to rotting cars and returning them to the landscape in my artworks. During the touring exhibition’s travel around England and as work was sold off, I realised that I really wanted to keep such sequences of work together. Hence the appeal of ‘ bookworks’ work not to be split up.

I also liked disrupting the idea of works of art being displayed on a wall, but rather as a more private participatory affair… even though once bought by institutions such as the British Library that private experience could be shared over and over again with unlimited numbers of people – and for free!

What has been your favourite project to work on?

Following on much later, and probably my favourite project, was what came to be an installation The Falcon Bride… held first in a Lewes Gallery that I rented, which was then expanded for several months in the Barn Gallery, West Dean (home of Surrealist Edward James), before it became a college of art. There was nothing to sell but it consisted of a simulation of a Polish Cafe with tables and chairs, pictures on the blood red walls, sculptural objects, sets of pictorial cards and handmade books. It was based on a favourite cafe I frequented on a trip to Krakow and the whole choreographed event was more like a visit to the theatre. It needed time and participation in looking at everything… all you took away was the experience. I was there to talk to people but there no written explanations or artist statements. It was partly about not believing everything you see, something which seems important in a time of AI and deep fakes and exploitation of places and people.

I would love to do more such projects but when self-generated the logistics are quite tricky! I already push the flexible boundaries of the Fine Press Book Association and Artist Book Fairs to extremes. I have made cardboard theatres for Pollocks Museum too.

I have always been interested in the power of nonverbal images as communication, and this has led to my current project which developed out of my ‘cartoneras‘. These use a Latin American form of protest art which uses cheap recycled materials to make very simple books with packaging cardboard, (hence the title). Mine are all about climate crisis, – Vanishing Species (Map of Lost Cuckoos) Flooding (Ship of Fools), Covid (Fool gets Sick), Fire, Waste and Consumerism (Bonfire of Vanities). My woodcut images are printed over current newspaper articles on relevant topics. These form palimpsests and each book in a set is therefore unique.

This is now progressing into a scrapbook format, leading to more fluidity as to how and when each book is finished. I am really enjoying not knowing exactly what I am doing as I go along; there is no set finishing time or format. I have been encouraged to justify this process having discovered Aby Warburg’s Mnemosyne Atlas Project, (and Walter Benjamin’s Arcades project… and his text using only quotations). Called Entre Chien et Loup – Orbis Pictus, mine is a visual encyclopaedia for Twilight Times. My woodcuts of (to me – seminal) visual art from across time are my visual alphabet, to be manipulated with paint, print and collage in various ways.

How did collaborations with James Simpson happen?

Alongside these projects I also make hand-made and printed books with poet James Simpson, their materiality part of their radical stance in opposition to the consumerism of the mass market  We met at Schumacher College at a poetry and bookbinding week over twenty years ago and realised our work both came from the same place (or as he puts it in his thesis about our collaboration – the collision of the radical with the imagination) and could easily understand what each other was trying to do. We extrude words and images and books together very happily and passionately and our collaboration is a joyous thing.

Do you do any writing of your own?

I have also written a couple of books for publishers: British Women Artists from Suffrage to the Sixties for Thames and Hudson – because I felt many were still being ignored – I wanted to give an Artist’s account rather than an art historical and critical one and one written by a woman without specific feminist jargon, accepting that all women are different and have different reasons for making what they do. A biography of Peggy Angus – Art for Love with Incline Press – was more like an exhibition in a box, with a CD of her singing, printed ephemera and facsimile sketchbooks. I have contributed to Theoretical Archaeology conferences and a book about the cultural life of images and given talks to various institutions including symposia for Women in Print. Occasionally I write my own texts for my Artist Books.