Interview with Scottish Artist Charles Avery (2014)

 

In the manner of a novelist, you have spent a considerable part of your career inventing and refining a fictitious island society – ‘The Islanders’. Can you tell us the background to this project?

The Island emerged from a state of confusion, or disorder.  I had various pursuits: I loved drawing, but I needed a reason to do it; I was also writing; and I had an interest in mathematical philosophy in general. Although I knew intuitively that these different areas were connected I was having trouble making them coherent – I was already an exhibiting artist and I had become acutely aware of the standardising forces in the art world. I wanted to keep my practice as open as possible, to retain the freedom. This is when I hit on the strategy of creating a space to contain the ideas and formalise their relationship. The Island provides that freedom – although it demands a rigour and level of devotion which, when I am suffering, make me wish I’d never started. I feel as though I am simultaneously inventor and discoverer, author and reviewer. I just keep pressing on. One day follows another, and after ten years there is a lot of it. It is ironic that I have got involved with such a project because at heart I am a minimalist. The most identifiable art-ancestors of The Islanders would be the Seth Siegelaub-approved conceptual artists of the 1960s – Opalka; LeWitt; Barry etc.

 Viewing your most recent exhibition at Pilar Corrias Gallery I was reminded of Will Self’s novel, The Book of Dave (2006), in which he ‘reinvented’ life as we know it in order to reveal aspects of society. Are you conscious of similar directives within your own work? 

I don’t think my work is so deliberate. That is to say that I didn’t have such a direct aim in mind. I am more interested in taking a degree of control over meaning, so that no matter what arcane significances the individual emissions of my practice gained in the outside world, they would retain a degree of pure meaning within the system from which they emanate.
At its inception, the project was quite different to how I think about it now. At the outset I was intent on using it as a vehicle for the imagination. It still is that, but not so much my imagination as that of the viewer.
When people began to write about the project, interestingly, they saw things which I did not see, or had never even considered. Sometimes people began to use The Islanders as a platform for their own thesis. I came to see that this could be its value, and that what I was doing was creating a structure, providing a map and a guide to this territory of the imagination. But the viewer must choose their own route through it. I dispute any suggestion that it depicts a Utopia, Dystopia, or any other hypothetical states. I simply describe it as another place.  

Given your unhappy experience at Central St Martin’s, what is your opinion of art schools, generally?

At that particular time the course was crap. Prior to this, I had been rejected from Edinburgh Art College, so I probably already had a negative attitude to art college. The only redeeming feature about my brief art studies was one happy year on a foundation course at Chelsea School of Art, where I had a very sympathetic course leader – Hugh Davies – and a good peer group, some of whom remain good friends.
I think the courses are perhaps better nowadays and more serious, with less of an afternoon drinking culture.

Why is Drawing so important?

I think that its importance is self-evident – because everyone does it, or is required to do it on occasions. Pencil or pen is egalitarian and as accessible a medium as writing or singing. It irks me a little when drawing is dismissed as ‘traditional’, or even that it is understood as a medium at all. Drawing precedes the medium it is rendered in.  For me, drawing is diagrammatic, by which I mean that it is an indicator or descriptor of something which is not present, or is remote. When I create a drawing it is not with the view to making a thing in itself but as a trace of something other.

What is some of the drawing that you admire?

I admire a good deal of single-panel cartoon drawing, for the economy and for the line: I have an album of New Yorker cartoonists which is one of my favourite books. I am also fascinated by poster-design and fontology.

Are the inhabitants of the Island subject to the same frailties and psychological flaws and anguishes of the real world? Are there both heroes and villains who reside there?

There are no villains or heroes, but there are frauds and paradigms of beauty. There are archetypes amongst the Hoi-Polloi – the inhabitants of the Island - such as Hunter, who is called Only McFew, although we never learn his ‘real’ name. He is a slightly hapless individual, rather reminiscent of P.G.Wodehouse’s Bertie Wooster. The Island, as I have stated, is simply another place, so we should assume similar characteristics and emotions.

This is a project that could conceivably occupy you over your entire career, with more, ever deepening mysteries being ‘discovered’ about these Islanders. 

There is a thing beneath the Islanders, which is the lsland itself – and that is what I am discovering. It is composed of ideas rather that earth and rock. The people, who are colonists who live on its surface, are perhaps incidental and temporary. At its inception, maybe I did think that I would simply draw a map and fill it in. But the Island has now come to represent a centre for the ideas that emanate from it and it gives order to them, rather than being such a defined space.

It is instructive that the capital city of your Island is called Onomatopoeia – so that your artistic creation and the written word are linked at a base level.

For me, words are simply another component in the work. When using language as an element it never expresses the meaning. I might use a tract of text to discuss what the Islanders believe to be the case about such and such, but I never say what it ‘means’. The choice of Onomatopoeia as the name of the city came very easily and instinctively. I think because it has the same cadence as Constantinople. And as Constantinople stood on the frontier of two belief systems, two continents, so it is with Onomatopoeia – it is the gateway between the subjective and the objective, the real and fictional, inside and outside. 

Who have been your artistic heroes and influences over the years?

To name a fraction: Robert Louis Stevenson; Woody Allen; Mark Manders; G. B. Shaw; Borghes; Ed Ruscha; Italo Calvino; Herman Melville; Beatrix Potter; Charles Dickens; Daumier; The 1960s conceptual art movement; Bob Dylan.

What are you reading at the moment?

Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina. ­