The idea of dialogue is central to the entire project and for the concept of the book presented here...to start communication with and among artists, and whenever possible, to offer them a forum - whatever form that might take...

We were chiefly concerned with finding artists who were interested in further developing painting into the three-dimensionality of a picture object...and, thus, outwards into real space....

Personal Structures deals with artists coming together who have their own ideas, goals and working methods, but who yet have enough in common that they may be seen as related...visually similar works of art may arise from very different approaches and…very different cultural backgrounds.

(Lodermeyer (2003): 6-7)

 

 

PETER LODERMEYER

• When comparing the works of the 'Personal Structures' artists, it becomes evident that yours are among the most conceptual. Let us talk about this 'conceptualism'. In my opinion the aesthetic core of your artistic work lies in its concept rather than in the concrete objects you produce.

 

NICOLA RAE

• Seen in this group of artists my work might appear more conceptual - although it is probably not as far as many conceptual artists are concerned - there is too much concentration on making the object in my work and over too many years.

  I have worked with the idea of collecting only naturally occurring colour within the landscape, and pouring it into Perspex boxes, for nearly ten years. Every distinct colour from a particular beach or quarry is collected, if this is possible without causing erosion. Sands, clays or metal ores from the same location are sieved in the same way and poured into the same size boxes . All the variations that result are because of the differences in the composition of the minerals themselves. This part of my work does follow a conceptual idea.

  And yet there are personal choices made - which coloured earths to collect, which box size to make for a particular beach and what particle size to sieve the material to. Often the feel of the sand or clay suggests the best way to process the materials, to allow them to create their own structures when poured.

  Sometimes, looking at the end result, I find that something unforeseeable has happened, which is far more interesting than what I would have expected to happen - and this is why I am still drawn to try out different variations.

 

PETER LODERMEYER

• Concepts in art often function like work instructions. By means of certain precisely formulated explanations and data it should be possible for anyone to collect and box various earth materials in the particular 'Nicola Rae style'. Why do you do the work by hand yourself? In other words : What is the impact of your personality and sensibility on your art?

 

NICOLA RAE

• The idea that anyone could make one's art works best when this is one of the main concepts of the work. Also the amount of work needed to make the earth boxes is very time consuming, making it too costly for me to employ assistance. People think that because my work looks so simple it must be easy to make, but it is extremely hard work to make sure nothing goes wrong.

  When drying out the clays they have to be broken up very slowly by hand, allowing each size lump to dry out before breaking it down to the next stage, as it can all become impossibly sticky. I have tried breaking down the clays mechanically but all difference in particle size disappears and so they pour without any structure. Also I spend far too long picking out roots and leaves with tweezers - this is so that the pouring can flow uninterrupted and the colour will be as strong as possible.

  The Perspex box fabrication has been problematic over the years, although at last I have found a fabricator who bonds with near invisible glue lines. The wooden back structures, which allow me to take the box apart, clean and re-pour the earth if necessary, have to fit perfectly or the sand or clay will leak out. Also a special paste to de-static the Perspex is particularly difficult to use but without it no strata would be visible due to the dust sticking to the Perspex.

  So maybe it is an attention to detail, learned through years of making mistakes, which has the most impact on the fact that I make the boxes. As for my sensibility, I think that a fascination with nature and natural processes as well as being drawn to work fairly minimally must have some effect on how the work has arrived at this point.

 

PETER LODERMEYER

• Your art reminds me a little bit of the German artist Wolfgang Laib, who collected pollen and presented it either in glasses or scattered over the floor as a strange and unconventional sort of monochrome painting. Do you see your work also as a sort of painting in the widest sense of the word?

 

NICOLA RAE

• I was very interested when I first read about and saw photos of Wolfgang Laib's pollen installations, although I have never actually seen any of his work. It was about two years after I first started working with the sands and clays, although at that time I was pouring them into wooden boxes - the simplicity of his work seemed to work better than mine. The thing that really intrigued me was how wonderful the smell of the pollen must be. Also one thinks of the sheer length of time he must spend in the forests collecting pollen. This meditative practice must affect the nature of his presentations of the work, as well as how people see and think about the work.

 

PETER LODERMEYER

• The first thought I had when I came for the first time to your studio in London and saw your works, was that they have a surprisingly painterly quality. Do you see your work as a sort of painting in the broadest sense of the word?

 

NICOLA RAE

• I do not really see my work as a sort of painting, although I did study as a painter. However I am definitely more interested in seeing my work on white walls, as the light is often so much better and this is necessary to see the detail in the work. Making the boxes involves working with a lot of tools more usually associated with making objects, as well as working with various kitchen equipment to process the earth. I think that like many artists today, I enjoy working in an in-between area.

 

PETER LODERMEYER

• I think that there is much more to the painterly aspect than just colour and the way of hanging. The front side of the box can easily be seen as a 'pictorial plane' ( I believe it is almost unavoidable to see it this way ). The slight shadings of colour and the strata which form lines on a surface, create something like a 'composition'. However, it is not possible to view the work without the awareness of its process of creation. One 'sees' the results of the pouring and knows that the upper strata are formed after the lower ones in temporal succession. In my opinion, the main aesthetic effect of your work results from that contrast between the 'diachrony' of the process and the 'synchrony' of the pictorial front plane as a well ordered, picture like whole. I see in it the intersection of two temporal orders or, in other words, the complex interaction of what is process and what is pictorial.

 

NICOLA RAE

• Discussing the aesthetic effect of my work is slightly different and your opinion of this is as valid as mine – perhaps more so, as you are not very involved with its making and so can look at it more dispassionately. The fact that the earth boxes have a life after I have made them and are open to other aesthetic interpretations, is something that I welcome.

 

PETER LODERMEYER

• How did your early painterly work look? When and why did you give up traditional painting?

 

NICOLA RAE

• I have always worked with landscape but my work went through many changes before I started making the earth boxes. In the early years I worked with paint and sand on layers of muslin and calico, collaged onto stretched canvases.

  Increasingly the works contained more and more real or found elements within box frames. During the early nineties I did a series of work which probably did question traditional painting, as far as my own work was concerned. These contained linen canvases turned around, old paint brushes and blocks of pinkish plaster (like that used on walls) with pigment or drawn lines on them. But even these works were not pushed far enough in terms of scale and colour. Maybe I was too 'tasteful' to be a good painter and found it difficult to find anything new in this area to explore.

  When I made the first earth boxes, the use of found coloured earth in the landscape removed the decision of what colours to choose - their validity was that they existed in nature, in certain combinations of outcropping.

 

PETER LODERMEYER

• I am surprised. What does it mean to be ' too tasteful to be a good painter '?

 

NICOLA RAE

• I studied painting in the early 80's when colour, form and figuration were being pushed to extremes. Any work which tended towards symmetry of composition and harmony of colour was looked on as problematic. As my work often tended towards both of these areas, it was only through collage that I could find a way forward – somehow texture and then objects did bring more strength to the work.

  All of this changed with the pouring of the first sand boxes - I could see that here was something that should be experimented with more fully and the 90's was the right time to do it. Exploring the surprisingly wide range of naturally occurring colour in Britain also changed my approach – stronger colour suddenly became more interesting. The monochrome pourings of earth into boxes seemed to focus more clearly on the process of strata formation and so my work became minimalist – which immediately felt completely right.

 

PETER LODERMEYER

• You said that doing your earth works removed the decision of what colours to choose, but nevertheless, you still have to decide what colours to collect ! What are your criteria for choosing? Are there sands and clays you would never take? Are some of these naturally occurring colours too ' tasteful ' to be appropriate for your work?

 

NICOLA RAE

• Yes, there are some colours which are too tasteful to collect, especially those verging on the pastel ! Some pinks and pale oranges I quite often choose not to collect. However I do collect pale blues and recently a pale green that I was initially doubtful about, which have poured with strongly defined strata. Given the choice of recently subsided earth, I nearly always choose to collect the strongest possible colours. These seem to form much more satisfying and interesting box works. Some of my favourites have been the colours which are so strong that they appear unreal. These include an extraordinarily vibrant red iron oxide ore, which took a long time to extract from a disused quarry at Parys Mountain and then grind, but formed strong, quite rugged strata when poured. Also the blackest black I have ever found was another favourite - a very oily clay which had fallen from high up on the cliffs of Compton Bay. When it eventually dried out over many months and was ground, it poured with velvet smooth strata.

 

PETER LODERMEYER

• There is a remarkable aesthetic contrast in your works between the natural earth materials and the artificial, clean and formal-looking Perspex boxes. Is the box an intrinsic part of the work itself or do you see it rather as a 'parergon', an inevitable vehicle for the presentation of the coloured sands and clays?

 

NICOLA RAE

• I do see the Perspex boxes as the best solution of displaying the poured sands and clays and certainly an intrinsic part of the work itself. The strata would not form in the way that they do if they did not meet a resisting surface. The Perspex allows the clearest view of a cross-section through these strata, formed during the pouring process.

  The glossiness and contemporary quality of the Perspex is something I quite enjoy against the timelessness of the sands and clays – this gives an indication of a point in time when the works were made, as Perspex production is much better now than even 20 years ago. The lack of a colour tint makes it much better than glass, as the greenish tinge of this would counteract the ochre earths. Also perspex is less heavy and much more flexible.

  I have in the past thought of trying to pump airbourne glue through the earth structures, from the back of a poured box, and then break the Perspex structure away. Even if this were possible to a stable enough degree, I think that the glue would probably change the colour of the earths, as well as partly destroy their poured formations.

 

PETER LODERMEYER

• Wolfgang Laib once said something like he did not produce the beauty of his pollen work but only organise it. Do you produce beauty or do you only lay the foundations that allow the material to show its inherent aesthetic qualities?

 

NICOLA RAE

• Trying to produce beautiful work does not really interest me – I do not think that this is actually possible. Maybe the very intention of trying is the problem. However sometimes this does happen and I prefer to step back and observe this happening during the pouring process. I definitely prefer to create the conditions that allow the material to show its own inherent aesthetic qualities. Clays always pour differently to sands and it is possible to exaggerate this by sieving the clays with a larger sieve size. When clays are poured, much more pronounced strata are formed. The clays and stones which are the hardest to break down always form the strongest strata when poured, perhaps because there is a greater proportion of larger particles to fine.

  I like to use different box sizes to see how they will affect the pouring – for example I chose a particularly hard, sticky clay, which took eight months to dry, grind and sieve, to pour into the widest box I have ever used, which was 140cm. One funnel-full of clay, when poured and then the box tilted, allowed the strata created to stretch right to the end of the box.

  Sometimes people ask me whether the idea of displaying naturally occurring colour is more important, or the fact that it forms strata when poured. I think that it is impossible to separate these two things, as the strata formations add more depth and range to the colour and are an intrinsic part of its mineral composition.

 

PETER LODERMEYER

• When viewing the photos of you kneeling amidst uninhabited landscapes, and collecting earth materials, I remember the art of Richard Long. Was Long's work of importance for the development of your special kind of 'Earth Art'?

 

NICOLA RAE

• I like and respect Richard Long's art but I would not say that an awareness of his art had a great deal to do with the development of my work – apart from the idea that working with landscape could be more conceptually based. Many of the Land artists interest me but I hope that I am working in a slightly different way to them– in my own area of obsession.

  I first picked up some green earth on a beach in Dorset in 1993 and seeing it back in the studio realised that it was a much stronger colour than I at first thought. When I went back to the beach a few months later, I could see that there were different coloured earths there which I had simply not noticed before - some of these had recently subsided onto the beach, and so I collected a couple of the most strongly coloured.

  The earth pouring which created the strata was the result of an accident. I intended a quite different result but became more interested in experimenting with what actually happened.

 

PETER LODERMEYER

• What is the subject of your art? Is it about nature or our relationship to nature, respectively?

 

NICOLA RAE

• My subject is about nature, or at least naturally occurring colour and the natural formation of strata. Watching the effect of particle separation, as the earth falls within each box, seems more like working with the processes of nature.

  Although a relationship to nature cannot be separated from my work with nature. Contributing to coastal erosion is not something which I want to add to just for the sake of the work. Collecting the sands and clays carefully is essential - and only when they have recently slumped onto the beach after storms, or from natural subsidence due to water constantly passing through the cliffs. Picking up some of the sands and clays before they are washed away by the sea, records a moment in time, as the cliffs are constantly changing.

  Obviously I am aware that if I did not pick up these materials they would be washed away by the sea and deposited elsewhere as sand banks, or blown away by the wind and mixed with the beach sand. In many ways this would be a better place for them to be, and yet maybe preserving very small amounts of them in their more concentrated form has its own value too.