Gloam: Nick Fox / Amanda Holiday

Prospecting - a conversation

INTRO

Amanda:  Vivienne sees people, reads people —she saw something quite similar in us as people as well as in our artwork, she made some association —like an alchemist in her approach to curating 

Nick: There was a connection with the material, since we both use gold in our work, but on a deeper level, Vivienne saw links between our shared interest in storytelling, mythologies and the different kinds of meanings that drive the imagery – reference points…

Amanda:  Yes, I think that is part of it. Also, because it's not overt, you know. We're not in your face about the way we kind of involve our own stories, pictorially - maybe that's it?

NIck: There is something interesting there about the personal and what those components are. I also think that is something where we cross over?

Amanda: I have thought — you're somebody who puts a lot of yourself in your work, in the picture, through thoughts and feelings, and the kind of processes. That's true of me also. The particularity of character and approach to life is definitely deciphered through our art making and our techniques. It’s not always explicit. 

Nick: It's quite difficult to actually share yourself in a way. There's always something of us in our work. For me, mythology is a way of telling the story about my own history, or interests, or love life….

Amanda: We must come back to storytelling but first, let’s talk gold.

GOLD

Nick I was wondering if the gold material has a kind of purpose or function? I think  that is an interesting question, because it does seem to be very important for both our artworks, doesn't it?

Amanda: I was a convert to gold though - I haven’t always liked gold. I grew up liking silver, silver was my metal. For a long time, gold had quite negative connotations for me, historically. Alice Walker says ‘wherever there is gold, there is a chain, you know’. And then Gabriel Garcia Marquez equated gold with shit, called it pava – stuff with bad energy. It was more recently, I flipped my opinion about gold, through using it, I started to enjoy gold.

Nick: For me, gold has mythological, symbolic or practical purpose well as a decorative function – for example a marriage ring that you wear on your finger or a transmitter of electricity. It also has a poetic or abstract purpose, as a kind of meaning conductor, that can convey intimate or emotive experience. It is also incredibly beautiful — the lustre of gold can be absolutely exquisite. One of the other things I’m looking at a lot at the moment is traditional gilding and illuminated manuscripts — the beauty and power of the gold ornament…

Amanda: I went to see Keifer’s big, numinous gold pool paintings and was just mesmerized by all that goldness. Lush and it has a historic quality and an angelic quality— it really spoke to me; it was transcendent too. I bought this Liquitex acrylic paint - I think it was pale gold. I tried out different golds — gold offsets other colours, it speaks to other colours so well, it's very generous. I've totally revised my opinion of gold. I'm a total convert.

Nick: We love gold! I'm also curious about the origin of gold as a material which is found here on earth but has celestial origins. I heard that gold is produced through the collision of two neuron stars, there's something really intriguing about the sense of this gold drifting down from the stars and finding its way on earth.

Amanda:  This must be a cue to talk about Love’s Sigh since there you use gold dust on carbon paper. I've used gold leaf but never gold dust, but I want to now! I love that. You used the phrase ‘this kind of moonlight’ to describe its quality. Something I saw in in Keifer – a kind of luminosity - almost a religious thing we’ve both mentioned, yet we're not particularly religious. We aspire to create - a sense of otherworldliness.

Nick: The gold dust I had used to make the work had a very personal connection. It was a gift from my first ever boyfriend, who didn’t want to come out, so the relationship remained secret. This small jar of gold powder stayed unused in my studio for about 25 years, just sort of waiting for something to be done with it… 

When I was planning how to use it, I thought of a painting; The Sleep of Endymion by Girodet. Quite an involved narrative, but Selene is only able to consummate her desire for Endymion as a moonbeam. In the painting, the branches are depicted drawn back and her light is able to bathe his body, painted as a celestial powder almost. The image is so tender and beautiful and sort of erotic in the way that the moonlight drifts  across the sleeping Endymion’s body.  Working with gold dust, there's a similar sort of way that the material is applied - an almost symbolic dusting.

Amanda: Yes, almost how forensics work - when they brush over a fingerprint, or whatever - that's the magical quality of gold, isn't it? When I'm working with gold, I don't quite know what it's going to do. In fact, you reminded me why I started using gold. I was working with historical material and ideas inspired by mummies, and from that I was trying to create a glow-in -the-dark effect and I bought some glow-in-the-dark paint which was dreadful. It didn't do anything, you know. I was spreading it on the picture everywhere and kept switching my light on and off to see the glow.  Then I tried gold paint, and at last found the luminous quality I craved - there were layers to it. So yes, then I used it again and again.

 STORY

Nick: Your work has real clarity in the way you use gold, in the expansive areas as well as in more precise  areas where you use gold for a kind of  illuminating purpose in the context of storytelling and I think that's something we have in common. The fact that we're deriving some kind of mythological meaning from it. You know, we're kind of using it almost in its historical sense. That seems important.

Amanda:  Yes, as my practice moves between artmaking and poetry, I am interested in how both disciplines aid the telling of history. Using gold implicates ideas about power, value, trade and religion.  There are a lot of repeated images in my drawings. The face jugs come from a photograph I mentioned in my last show at VRP. I’m now working on a large vase and painting it gold has transformed it into a completely different object. I revisit and re-use certain objects such as the face jugs  – maybe until all the stories are told. The artworks this time are more offbeat.  Mummy Whirl is one which my daughter loves. It is puzzling and reminds me of looking into a plane engine – the whirr of mummies, which complicates the layering of narrative and becomes my way of finding out — delving into and researching pictorially while making. You don’t know what the answers are. Pyramid of Geezers just came to me in a flash – not the title, just the idea of a simple pyramid shape made out of face jugs. In 2022, I went to Egypt over new year and was in Giza on New Years Day, in front of the pyramids – absolutely magical. This has stayed with me.

Nick: What I like about this. What 's that work called?

Amanda: Mess of Pottage.

Nick: Mess of Pottage.  What does pottage mean? 

Amanda: It’s a soup - it's a Biblical reference – it was a bowl of lentil stew in a parable. The idea of selling your soul for a mess of pottage is a story about  giving up something of value for something that's worthless. It ties in with the whole gold thing.

Nick: I love that. I mean, it's also quite a macabre image. Lots of your work is about dreams, mythologies.  I mean, these are the things that connect us to and from different perspectives. But this particular work, I think, because it has fingers. And for artists these are the most precious things that we have apart from our eyes! Whenever I've kind of thought about bowls and dreams - it's often about the process of scrying for wisdom – in pagan rituals. You have water in the bowl, and you're searching in that bowl for a kind of wisdom about something. You're asking the moonlight for something. I'm really curious about this bowl full of fingers. When I see these fingers in the bowl, they become part of this association. It seems like it's part of a search for something. I'm attracted to that image, because it's less about the figure and more about the dream itself – and that searching seems to be the subject. It's a really dark and mysterious image. 

Amanda: You also do dark and mysterious

Nick: Yes, for the INFERNO series, I was  inspired by the  Botticelli’s Divine Comedy series of drawings made for Dante’s epic poem. The poem and drawings describe an imagined journey to paradise, through Purgatory and hell.  They are incredibly beautiful . I enjoy how the illustrations deal with ideas  about the type of transformation or revelation that comes from longing  or self-examination. The imagery comes from a research trip I made to different sanctuary spaces, caves and meeting spaces, inspired by eros mythologies.  The images have illuminated & embossed gold shapes applied to the surfaces using traditional water gold size.  Flowers and botanical shapes, and symbols of ropes, for example, speak to subcultural meaning inspired by floriography. Then others have personal symbolic meaning, from different timeframes, drawn from the emotional spectrum of my own life . 

Amanda: I think the conversation between our works will make for an intriguing show. We don’t even have gold in the title anymore – that slipped away into the darkness..

Nick: Gloam

Amanda: Go see it.