Artist Story: Jock Mooney

Please give a brief introduction to yourself and your artistic practice

As the child of two artists, it was fairly obvious that I was going to become an artist. In fact, it was basically a given. I probably knew at the age of four that I would almost certainly be going to Edinburgh College of Art, and indeed when I was 18, I did. When I look back on this now, I see that as both a good and a bad thing. I can remember having a really grim time of it, on first entering art school. It wasn’t what I wanted it to be. It was actually more like school (clue’s in the name!), and I utterly loathed school. In any case, after a couple of years I settled into it, and I fully embraced my ‘destiny’. I did, however, hate the need to be labelled or pigeon-holed, in both my work practice and personal life. I also went to art school at a pretty young age – straight from high school. There were no ‘gap years’ then, not that I would have been able to afford one – that was for Tories.

I was a queer child, and I’d consider myself as bisexual now. That obviously led to some intense confusion for a young adult trying to find their place in the world. To make matters more difficult, I’d certainly say I was pretty gender fluid in my appearance – around the age of eleven or twelve I was often mistaken for a girl. I was bullied massively at school. Kids really can be total arseholes, but so can the adults. To this day, I can remember a whole classroom laughing at me when a teacher exclaimed, “Oh, I thought you were a girl”. Thanks, teach! I now realise that I was very much, being born in 1982, smack-bang in Section 28 territory. Art, and humour, seemed to be the only ‘salvation’ for me growing up. Even the harshest bully would exclaim positively at a drawing of mine in art class. It was a very strange dichotomy; the bully making you hate yourself to the core whilst praising your work to the extreme. It didn’t make sense, but then life never does make sense. I had to make sense of it.

In addition to drawing and sculpting, music has played a very strong role in my life. My brother was more technically musical, but I would always write songs and sing. I taught myself crudely to ‘play’ the piano. Between the ages of 16-18, after inheriting my brother’s programmable Casio keyboard and a 4-track recorder, I recorded fairly naïve things. Some are actually pretty good! You can hear my first album, The Venga Bus Ran Me Over, on my Soundcloud page. Around this time, just before going to art school, I can vividly remember my parents saying to me something like “why are you doing that?”, as if to say “you don’t do music”. That struck me as odd. I didn’t see any reason why not. I was a creative person; I didn’t see any difference between applying myself to a drawing or song. Why should I? Without realising it at the time, I was actually quite resolute in simply doing what felt right, and not limiting myself. I went on to form a short-lived duo with my brother called Twentymen which was more of a collaboration. We made an album which is also up on my Soundcloud. I’d like to have persisted with our duo, but I don’t really think my brother wanted to commit to that. In any case, I prefer now just dipping in and out of music when the mood takes.

Chiming with my parents’ saying, “why are you doing that?” in regard to my music, I experienced a similar feeling around my third year of art school. A lecturer said that a drawing and a sculpture that I had done “could almost have been by two different people”. They said this as a negative. I can see that they were clearly looking for a running theme, or a cohesive thread, but I viewed this factor as a positive. I saw no problem whatsoever with producing a subtle drawing one day, or a brash sculpture the next. At the time I was writing an essay about entartete kunst (degenerate art), and I was thrilled by the unapologetic depth and variety of Otto Dix’s works. They could leap and veer from almost Holbein-esque paintings, to the most graphically sobering of pen and ink drawings, or almost caricature-like depictions of the grotesque war victims. It was both real life and theatre all in one, with no clear boundary implied. These were all works produced within a very short frame of time, it wasn’t an observation based on a lifetime of works. It introduced me to the notion that art could, would, and should be chaotic. It struck a deep chord with me, as did reading Brian Eno discussing art as the one place where “you CAN crash your plane and walk away from it”. Everything didn’t have to make sense, and that made sense to me.

Is there a specific overarching theme that you can identify all the way through your work?

I’ve always been fond of the idea of theatrical sets and costumes (think of my work, Two Schoolgirls Dressed as a Hill). I like the notion of a preposterous, fantastical or absurd image ultimately being made ‘real’ or possible based on the notion that it is a costume, a facade, an intended folly or artifice of sorts.

I’ve been described, by the artist and writer John Beagles, as having a fairly adolescent approach and I’d agree with this. He wasn’t being derogatory (at least I don’t think he was!). So, a theme of play, or a playful approach. I like to stick up two fingers at things and have, what I’d maybe flatter myself to think of as, a ‘punk attitude’. I like the basic notion of punk, in the sense that even not being good at something, should not mean that your take on it is invalid. I think losing a sense of preciousness is vital. Sure, you may look back on some works that you did and think “aah, yeah, that is actually a bit shit”, but I’d still champion doing something and failing rather than not attempting at all. Taking a risk is vital to keep a creative process from going stale.

Drawing plays a central role in your work. Are you someone who always has a sketchbook and pen or pencil to hand?

I try to be, but when ideas occur, I usually scrawl something on a post-it note or the back of a receipt. I think that probably says a lot. It’s very hard to find time to draw without properly planning time for it. I have to really commit to the time and to make it happen, which is hard these days. My default mode would probably be to draw all the time if I could, but that isn’t practical when you’ve got washing to hang out, or a Zoom call to join. When I am drawing, I’m probably in my happiest place. It’s like time slows down and you just wander off into your own universe.

How important are narrative and storytelling in your work? For your gallery shows, do you come up with an overall concept before you start to make individual works?

I view it quite like song writing I suppose. I might have a ‘single’ in mind, I suppose a good album has at least three. I then seek out simply to compliment or contrast based on these. Obviously, there are some ‘B-sides’ along the way, which will be pruned with editing. I like deciding on a title quite early on, as I feel this kind of poetic statement can then influence further new works or help to sort of ‘distil’ what it is I’m aiming for. So, for example, with the show ‘From Spiceworld to Brexit’, I obviously wanted to play with the imagery of the Spice Girls, but from my perspective that’s a colourful tool to explore as a metaphor for (what I see) as the decline of the UK. It’s not all sugar and spice. The viewer may also apply their own narrative. On the one hand, I love the fact that you can walk into a gallery, read a piece of text and then look at a work, but it’s also important to encourage interpretation. There isn’t a wrong or right answer.

The figures and objects that make up your installations are often exquisitely sculpted and carefully painted. Do you have a bit of an obsessive eye for detail?

Yes. Badly. I actually drove myself insane once when I was varnishing a canvas for something. I kept on seeing microscopic hairs and had to obsessively remove them. To the point of mania. I stopped myself with the decision that trying to remove ‘flaws’ in a work made by a human being is pointless. It’s impossible. So, embrace them. That’s not to say I now just stick pubes on things willy-nilly, but I don’t zoom in on a speck of dust so much.

What role does humour play in your work? Is humour a way to deal with darker or perhaps more personal themes?

I think most artists are to some degree ‘damaged’ people. As I mentioned previously “being funny and good at art” certainly acted as a protective shield to a degree at school. I think anyone who devotes huge chunks of their life locked away or whatever, putting something out there into the universe as some means of communication is in some way a damaged person. I think creativity is deeply cathartic. I certainly know that some works, especially during my divorce, were really quite involved with intense detail, and certainly must have kept me sane, or at least distracted me during a very unpleasant time. Clearly this also brings forth notions of control, or a lack of it. I think art, our own creations, is one thing that we can to some degree have some sort of control of, which can be therapeutic in darker times. I went from being divorced to mourning the death of my ex-wife in a fairly short space of time, and the work I was creating during these hard times was no doubt an incredible anchor against the waves of confusion and pain that I was processing.

Your gallery installations can fuse together any number of elements and reference points – from myth, religion, fairy-tale, folklore, horror and the apocalypse to everyday people and situations. But would you say your work has become more focussed or restrained as it has developed?

I think I now try to cast a slightly less broad brushstroke in terms of influence and themes. I think that’s just something that comes with age and being slightly less erratic in terms of attention span, or perhaps the self-editing gets better. I certainly always present a set of works which have been ‘honed’ or edited down in some way. It is never a case of having a gallery or a curator visit my studio and just see what I’ve got. So, perhaps it is important for me to stress that while my themes may sometimes be flippant, or purposefully so, my shows are never just a hodgepodge or cross section of where I happen to be at that point in time. Currently, I’m very much focused on small metal works inspired, in part, by Greek votive offerings and Mexican milagros. Quite often, when I’m experimenting with a new way of working, I will end up producing something en masse. When I’ve gained confidence, I like to be excessive and go full pelt – when I’m happy, that is, that I’m not making a mistake or wasting my time. So, currently, it’s very much about the milagros, or (as I choose to call them) ‘Faux Milagros’. The sense of artifice, or souvenir is an important factor to me.

How important has the influence of other cultures – and non-European cultures in particular – been as an inspiration for your work?

Very. I’ve always enjoyed feeling a sense of otherness, or an alien feeling. I suppose it is wanderlust turned into creation. I vividly remember as a five-year-old being in a strangely desolate church in the Pyrenees. It was empty, apart from a wall of wax votive offerings – depictions of limbs mostly. Some kind of strange amputee themed altar. I was fascinated. That sense of intrigue, awe and otherness is something I’m always keen to channel. I can literally spend hours in a supermarket abroad, let alone a museum or a gallery.

Alongside your gallery work, as part of Alasdair & Jock, you make animated videos spanning music, commercials and public art projections. How did this element of your practice come about?

Alasdair was actually one of my first ever flatmates at art school. I went to art school thinking I’d do animation, and then found out (on a week-long taster course as you did then) that it was not for me. I was far too impatient. In around 2008 Alasdair asked me to collaborate on a project, and it went really well, perhaps to both of our surprise we then went on to do more. We’re on a bit of a hiatus right now as Alasdair is working on a solo documentary project, but I’m looking forward to doing more. Our most well-known work is probably our music video for Here Comes the Sun by The Beatles. Produced in 2019 by my dearly departed friend Maria Manton, the video has amassed 108 million views so far. That’s bizarre, and certainly testament to trying out a collaboration in addition to your own practice, you simply never know what it’ll cook up, and that’s great.

And you’ve created a range of tee shirt designs working with the label VONK. Many of these designs feature icons, legends (and otherwise) from the world of entertainment and celebrity. What is it about the idea of ‘celebrity’ that fascinates you?

I’ve never shied from the ‘lowbrow’. In fact, I love it. I think the throw-away nature of celebrity culture, certainly post Big Brother, Pop Idol, etc, and the sheer scale of the Spice Girls in the late 1990s, is fascinating. It’s a wonderful feast on nostalgia. That doesn’t mean there isn’t scope for subversion or the absurd. The Spice Girls as mermaids was a fairly early design that I put out there, and it’s is still one of my favourites. It’s ridiculous. That’s important to me. If I was just churning out something without any level of finesse or some kind of twist, it would be completely redundant. It’s my take on an extreme.

Tee shirts, video animation, gallery shows. Do you see everything you make as one work – a kind of total artwork – or do you think about each of these as a distinct practice in its own right?

I’d say it’s all me, but I do view a distinct line of separation. I suppose you could house the animation and the apparel in the ‘design’ side of things. Things do tend to bleed into each other though I’d guess. I do, however, like to feel that I do animation and illustration/tee shirt-based things to earn money. I do art in spite of it not earning money. If I lived in a cave, I’d still be making something.

I have sometimes been distinctly aware that some people think I shouldn’t be doing tee shirts in addition to my fine art. But that’s just pure snobbery, which I have absolutely zero time for. My intention is simply to earn a living using my skills, and those can be applied to a number of things in differing ways. I’m a hustler, I have to be. I think people in the art world are generally far too conscious or wary of what people think, not surprising given its clique-y nature. So many artists have ‘normal’ jobs that they balance alongside their practice. You do what you need to do for the bigger picture, as it were. I never wanted to go into teaching for instance. I have done teaching, but I really don’t want to tell students what is right or wrong.

Do you have any particular memories of your experience of working with Vane?

Without doubt, I’d say I became a ‘proper artist’ – whatever that is – after meeting Vane. I think just prior to my representation I was still finding out what sort of work I wanted to do, and of course any artist worth their salt should still essentially carry a fibre of this with them at all times. Each show is a reaction to the show before. It’s a beast that feeds itself, but is never satisfied, and that’s a good thing. The confidence that comes with representation isn’t just the obvious validation, but I think that getting that from such a respected gallery is clearly a great thing to have at a stage in your career when you are still, and to some degree, wet behind the ears with something to learn. I’m always grateful for it. Vane is not only incredibly supportive and knowledgeable, but Paul and Chris are also fun! They are such an integral part of the Newcastle and Gateshead art scene, and to feel part of that is genuinely lovely. After living in London for about 12 years, I was incredibly happy to come back to Newcastle (where I had previously been living from 2005-08). I’m glad that I experienced London, but Newcastle and Gateshead feel like home, and Vane is very much part of that.

Interview by Stephen Palmer