Selma Parlour: Artist Q&A
Could you talk a bit about your background, and what inspired you to become an artist?
I didn’t really become one, I always had a tool in my hand. I was born in Johannesburg in the ’70s, I’ve much older siblings who crafted with multi-coloured telephone wire, and I wonder if such experiences guide my choices somehow. I’m told I was a very advanced scribbler. ;) I grew-up in the UK. In the ’80s, my mum took me to the Tate. It didn’t occur to us to go again or seek out other institutions. In the ‘90s I found galleries like Sadie Coles and Timothy Taylor. In the ’00s I had some ideas for research and my work started to become interesting.
Could you describe the development of your vision as an artist?
Representation and illusion were big invented problems tackled by modernism in its various guises. Today we can thrash about within this dialogue without getting bogged down with one-size-fits-all. I make oil paintings that look as though they’re drawn, dyed, or printed. My truncated concept of space can’t contain volumes. I use illusion for the sake of it and two-dimensionality to represent two-dimensionality.
What are the main influences for your work right now? What do you do, or where do you go to find creative inspiration?
The work of other artists; be it cave art, Matisse, Robert Mangold… My favourite place is Giotto’s Chapel in Padua, Italy. Then there’s the modernist grid, photography’s installation shot of abstract painting… Really I work from conventions and their implications, the flat and contained rectangular field being the primary example.
What does the word ‘perfectionism’ mean to you?
‘Perfectionism’ I took as a provocation. Once I was chuffed with my expressive mark. Over time I doubted it and reined it in. Now there’s no gesture and my work is perfect. Or, immaculate surfaces invite scrutiny, which reminds us of our observing. I say I’m the latter. Maybe lots of time will add romance to this epoch and I’ll be catalogued as part of an ism! Agnes Martin destroyed the majority of her works. As I understand it this was down to imperfections that others may well have embraced. It seems incongruous that she saw herself as an Abstract Expressionist. We wish she hadn’t been so exacting and that rejects survived, but also we get it.
What has your experience been like working on an online exhibition as opposed to a physical exhibition?
We’re excellent at suspending disbelief so to a point we’re quite content with virtual exhibition spaces. Paintings have to be seen in real life - scale, surface, warmth, opacity, depth... are relational. In front of paintings as objects, I stand where Vincent once stood when he turned mud into poetry. A reproduction mediates my experience. However this online exhibition provides a connectedness that we all value right now. Any anxiety over screen time has fallen away. We recognise how fortunate we are to have such structures in place.
What has been your most exciting or interesting lockdown discovery?
During lockdown I’ve been half listening to free lectures while I work. Random stuff: Wittgenstein, Turing, Sagan, Grayling, Rauschenberg allegedly in the ‘90s but it feels like the ’70s. Frege hurt my brain but was happily punctuated by cries from the baby next door. ‘Sense Whaa’ could become a painting title.