Interview with Mhairi Rankin
Interview with Mhairi Rankin
By Joshua Y'Barbo
Nov 2022
The artist discusses the connections between relationships with people, missing her grandfather due to Alzheimer's, and painting commissioned portraitures.
Mhairi Rankin (MR): I'm Mhairi Rankin, and my course was BA Fine Art at Chelsea. The work I create is mainly portraiture, and just say, what it's based around, or
Joshua Y'Barbo (JY): Could you tell me about your practice? What do you make work about? How do you go about making your work? And what do you think about when making your work? And do you still make work?
MR: I make work based on connections and relationships we have with people. If I was going down the street, and I saw an old couple having lunch or something like that, something very simple, very mundane. Maybe someone's shopping or something that shouts life in its simplest form. That's what I create art around. I am still making art at the moment. I recently started doing commissions and boosting my Instagram to get quite a few followers and build a website. I mainly do work around relationships and connections. I think where that's come from is my granddaddy went missing in 2015 from Alzheimer's. Four months later, we found him, and since that point, I have felt drawn to memories and connections and old pictures and things like that.
JY: Well, that's a very personal, fascinating, yet traumatic story. Is your grandfather in the painting we're showing? Or is there a connection?
MR: Yes, but it is actually my granddad's brother. They're very alike, and they look very similar as well. The painting is a photo from when we went to a Chelsea Flower Show. There's something about the photo. I saw it and just thought, "wow!" I really connected with the image and made it into a painting.
JY: Can you tell me a little bit about the work you're doing now?
MR: Yeah, I've mostly done commissions over the last maybe three or four months. The commissions balance me between working and trying to make artwork. I'm trying to find my feet a little bit, so I am doing commission now. But I want to stop that at one point. I plan to put myself forward this year for more things, like the Royal Academy summer show. I want to get my name out and put myself forward to have more opportunities.
JY: Can you tell me just a little bit about your commissions?
MR: I am mainly commissioned to paint portraitures. I recently did one for Christmas where someone wanted a picture of their two sets of four grandparents together but didn't have a picture. So, they wanted me to construct a picture with them all together. They loved it, which made me feel so, so amazing. Also, I'm drawn to elderly people because of their character and the life they have that you can see on their faces. So, it was even more special to me that I was painting an elderly set of grandparents.
JY: You are of a generation of students who, halfway through your studies, experienced a global pandemic of the likes we haven't seen in 100 years. So, could you tell me a little about how you studied and finished your degree during the pandemic? What kind of impact did it have on your studies and the work you made?
MR: Throughout my degree, I felt like I really struggled to find my feet and find what I was interested in. I feel like I was trying too hard to find a path to go down or discover something really gripping. I just really struggled. So, at the end of year two, my second year, one of my tutors said to me just paint something that you enjoy: just do what you are drawn to and what you enjoy. So, I returned to portraiture, relationship connections, and stuff like that. By the third year, I'd found my feet, and I was really excited to make work and be in the studios. Obviously, because of the pandemic, we couldn't go into the studios, and I struggled not naturally interacting with other students. But I also feel like, because of the Zooms and the online lectures and stuff, I found that I was more productive with my studies. Before the pandemic, I couldn't find time to go to all the lectures. But being online, I felt like I was going to every single one. I was really interacting. So, it was kind of up and down. It was strange.
JY: Well, yeah, It was strange all the way up and down. But with a studio practice, like painting, obviously, you would be limited in the space you have to work and the size of work you could make based on working from home, meaning your painting would be smaller. At the same time, painting is quite a solitary practice. I could see carrying on painting in your bedroom or whatever space you've got available. You could probably be working on your paintings while listening to a lecture because they are remote, which you obviously can't do in the lecture theatre. However, one of the most important things about studying in art school is the social connections with your peer groups, getting feedback and ideas and mixing in that way. Plus, now that you're no longer studying, you've been prepared to work independently.
MR: Yeah, that's definitely true.
JY: I studied PG Dip in Fine Art in 2008 and completed my MA in Fine Art in 2010, 12 years ago, both at Chelsea College of Arts. At the beginning of my time there, relational aesthetics was the massively popular thing Nicolas Bourriaud had written a few years before. Bourriaud also curated the Tate Triannual, Altermodern, during my second year at Chelsea in 2009, which never really took off, you know, because we never hear about another triannual. But that was happening in Tate Britain, which was popular in the curriculum. Relational Aesthetics was part of this whole post-studio practice that the university was teaching at the time. However, there was much debate over whether or not post-studio practices were just a way of dealing with the economic recession at the time and not having to invest in studio spaces for students. So, you could take more students on if they weren't using studio spaces. So there was this kind of teaching where we're going to do things relationally, it's going to be socially based, and you had to find your own resources or community to engage with. But it was also a bit of a cop-out at the time. It seemed like a way for universities to not provide specific resources because they were teaching different kinds of public-facing practices. Of course, tutorials are so subjective, depending on your tutor. For example, you mentioned a tutor telling you to paint what you like. I conducted an interview with another artist showing in this year's exhibition who switched from Fine Art to Graphics because a FA tutor told them they didn't think like an artist. Well, I thought, how does that tutor know? What does an artist think like? Surely, there are different ways to think as an artist!
Anyway, based on your experiences studying and dealing with the challenges of a pandemic and finishing a degree, could you tell me a little bit about finishing up, preparing, and finishing your degree? For example, instead of an end-of-year exhibition assessed to determine your final degree outcome, the UAL held non-assessed open studios with displays of students' work.
MR: I thought of my final piece and the Open Studios as two completely different things, not connected, and, I don't know, worked in my favour or not. Because the piece that you have [pictured above] was part of the open studio but wasn't part of my final piece. I did something different from my last work. I was overthinking about the final collections of paintings. I thought I'd just use something I love for the open studio. I didn't put too much pressure on the open studio by thinking I needed to say this or that. The open studio was quite strange. It was pretty disappointing not having that final exhibition or even calling it a final show. Because it made me think a bit differently, it maybe did work in my favour because I put something forward that I really loved. I noticed many people connected to it and enjoyed the piece. However, it was a bit disappointing not having that end-of-year show.
JY: So, based on your experiences, both dealing with the pandemic and leading up to the end of your exhibition, do you have any problem-solving advice for other artists, designers, or cultural practitioners?
MR: quite a tricky question, isn't it?
JY: Reflecting on your student and alumnus experiences, do any particular challenges stand out? And if so, how have you addressed them?
MR: I feel I'm quite an anxious person. For example, when I'm painting something that I'm struggling with, I recognise that I'm overthinking it and just need to sit back or step back and take another look at something: start simple and don't overcomplicate it because you feel the pressure a pressure on you to be this something unique. So, at university, I found a lot of pressure because you're at Chelsea, you're around a select amount of students, and there's a lot of pressure to stand out and prove your place. So when that tutor said to me, "just paint what you enjoy" and "go back to the basics", I felt I could remove that pressure and that I learned something I could use when I left university.
JY: Thanks, that's a great piece of advice. You've identified some of the challenges of adopting the role of an art student when you enter into an art school culture, start speaking the language ( all those particular languages) and ways of acting and behaving or whatever, and the need to be unique or distinct, or these various other things. That is a lot of pressure. The conception of what an artist is or constantly does changes, so learning about that and simultaneously trying to fit into and break away from something, is a very anxious and uncomfortable place to be in. You can get wrapped up in that kind of performance of being an art student instead of pursuing something meaningful to yourself. And that happens all the time. I know I experienced that and still do, working within and around academia. So, it's very practical advice to say, "I'm overthinking things", and choose to step back, do what you enjoy and go back to basics. The basics, however, will be entirely subjective to each individual based on what you're interested in and the things that are important to you. If you can step back and let those things guide you, hopefully, the process will produce something more meaningful to you.
MR: If you're passionate about something and enjoy something, it shines through in what you're making. So, you should just sit back and think, "am I enjoying this? Is this what I want? Is it something I'd want to see?"
JY: There used to be this debate about modernism and authenticity. Is the work that I'm looking at or making authentic? We don't talk about that in those terms anymore for many reasons. Postmodernism has told us that there's no such thing as authenticity. But you're talking about something authentic to you that's meaningful for you. The MA Fine Art course director, Brian Chalkley, whom I studied under, used to say, "look outside of your practice to see what you're interested in and then make work about that". His assumption was that when people came to art school, as you just said, they were performing the way they thought they were meant to be and, therefore, weren't necessarily making work that was meaningful to them as a result. The art school, in that sense, was a very conservative place that stifled creativity in that way, which brings me to my last question. What are your immediate concerns or interests, both professionally and personally?
MR: Wow. I remember at university, they would ask us things like that to get us to look past our work and what we are interested in. They'd ask, "what are you reading? What are you looking into?" I always struggled with that. I'm trying to think of things I am interested in, which goes back to my art and connections with others. I've always been into photography; my dad's a keen photographer. So that's where the photos and memories I use in my paintings come from. As for concerns, I remember in my second year, I was very interested in making political work because I am very interested in the news. I was very interested in #MeToo and Black Lives Matter at that point in the campaign. I was trying to find a way to bring that into my art.
JY: You've given us great examples of the pressure and anxiety of attending an art school and taking on specific behaviours. You've also discussed the representation of individuals and people, their stories, and their narratives. These are all types of concerns of yours that have come out. I was just wondering if there was something in particular?
MR: One of my concerns comes from when my granddad went missing. I've always had a connection to memories and the scariness of how life's so precious and that we don't have a tremendous amount of time. I mean, we do have a lot of time, but not, you know, we're not here forever. So, from that, I've become a carer, which is what I'm doing now for work. I work around quite a lot of elderly people. It is always on my mind how precious little my minutes are and how special we are. I feel like that plays a lot on my mind: the pressure of what you can do or feel your life worthwhile. What are you going to do? I think there's a lot of tension and anxiety around that. I'm faced with that every day at my job.
JY: an existential crisis, in a sense. I can completely relate to and understand that as a concern. The temporality of life is also something that I'm very much interested in as well. What comes to mind with what you've described is Legacy Projects, when we develop something that's going to live beyond us as a way of tapping into some degree of immortality, which releases our death anxiety by doing things to bring significance to your life, whatever that means. The work you're doing is meaningful, and that can't be overlooked. So I think that's a perfect place. Where that's the, that's the end of my questions. Do you have any questions for me?
MR: I have a general question: what was your experience at Chelsea College of Art?
JY: I've just recently gotten over the post-traumatic stress of studying at and graduating from Chelsea, which took over a decade to overcome. The first two years after graduation, I was just in complete denial about my experience, to be honest. Then I spent a long time researching the teaching concepts that we just talked about, where you look outside of your practice or outside the art school to learn how to be an artist as a concept. I came to Chelsea as a painter, printmaker, and the tutors I was paired with were not a good fit and did more harm than good. By mid-way through the MAFA course, I got to the point where I just couldn't even make work in the studio. Up to that point, when I showed my work to the tutors, I'd received negative, unconstructive feedback about the death of technical skill and the importance of conceptualism, which never got me where I wanted to be. I moved to London from America and brought a different sensibility, history, and approach to artmaking than what was taught at Chelsea at the time. My theoretical underpinning for making work that was very much craft based. I wanted to make paintings and prints based on my experiences in America that people didn't understand. I also didn't understand the problem-posing approach to teaching, where tutors expected me to have a problem with my practice. Since I wasn't sure what they meant, they looked for problems for me that didn't fit with what I was making and wanted to be as an artist. It took an exceedingly long time to overcome and required artist friends to give me feedback during and after the course. Over the years, as I continued to build a practice, I kept my studio work under the radar. Instead, I focused on researching the London art school, its pedagogy, and social value and teaching across MA and BA courses to understand how to survive art school and learn to teach others.
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