Artist Story: Miranda Whall

Please give a brief introduction to yourself and your artistic practice

I am an interdisciplinary artist and full-time university lecturer. My father was an artist and lecturer and then head of Fine Art at Coventry Polytechnic (now Coventry University) and my mum was a very creative academic. I grew up in a house full of text, images, objects, and ideas that resonated deeply but never made any sense. For example, a red and white poster that said SLOW hung over the stairs alongside a large painting of a woman (my mum) hovering horizontally over a flight of steps, and a painting of a naked woman’s back sitting under a strange cloud-like form which I now realise was inspired by The Bride Stripped Bare from Marcel Duchamp’s The Large Glass. Portrait of the Journalist Sylvia von Harden by Otto Dix hung in the toilet on a dark green William Morris wallpaper, and a poster of Rrose Sélavy, Duchamp’s female alter ego, hung on the kitchen wall amidst a whole array of other curious art works, images, and objects. Weird metal blobs, a heavy burnished steel box and painted wooden bricks sufficed as Sindy’s house and the imaginary school and farm. If we wanted to hang out with dad at the weekends, we had to help him make elements of his impenetrably complex ongoing installation that I also never understood. A lot of our unconventional and (at that time) embarrassing house was handmade; mum made our beautiful clothes and soft toys and dad made furniture including a copy of Gerrit Rietveld’s famous Red Blue Chair.

So, my early references to art were rich and abundant materially, visually, conceptually, and intellectually. To summarise, from an early age I didn’t know where life ended and art began – they were, and still are, the same thing to me. I wanted to be a fashion designer, but in my interview for the fashion course at Liverpool they told me to go away and do fine art because my drawings were too big and too visceral. I cried for a day and never looked back; I discovered The Female Eunuch, Helen Chadwick, Mary Kelly, the Venus of Willendorf, plaster, latex, resin, clay, chicken wire and everything else, and had the best time of my life on the foundation course at Coventry.

Your ongoing work Crossed Paths is a multi-iteration project with various outcomes, but central to the work is a series of crawling performances where you attempt to “get out of the habitat of human and into the habitat of animal or plant”. How did Crossed Paths come about and what are the ideas behind the work?

Following the making of an extensive video and audio multi-screen installation titled Passage (2009-12), which mimicked an epic quest in search of something elusive, transient or difficult to define that took me across continents and cultures, I wanted to immerse myself in an intensive summer of ‘play’; intuitively led experimentation exploring my local landscape, performance, and filmmaking through embodied experience. The inspiration for my approach came from Nan Shepherd’s beautiful and strikingly eloquent meditation on the Cairngorm mountains, Scotland. In her book The Living Mountain, drafted in 1945, Shepherd wrote “Lay the head down, or better still, face away from what you look at, and bend with straddled legs till you see your world upside down”... “This is how the earth must see itself.” So, I did as she suggested and I found myself going ‘in’ to achieve what Shepherd calls an “accession of interiority”, leaving the outer world of materiality to reach the inner landscape of the spirit. So up there in the mountains, in the long and sheep nibbled grass, the ice-cold pools, under the blue skies punctuated by large drifting fluffy white clouds, remote and with what felt like all the time in the world, I was not only in heaven, but I was finding a way into what became a new way of working and thinking. I got down on my hands and knees, called a friend to borrow her sheep skin and found that I loved crawling.

You use technology attached to your body to record and live-cast the performances and technical clothing for comfort and protection. Was this use of technology something that you considered deeply before undertaking the project?

In the period of experimentation referenced above I began using GoPro cameras, first attached to my ankles as I walked the rocky mountain paths in just socks, then attached to trees so that the trees could see and be seen from multiple perspectives. I attached GoPros to my dinghy as it drifted on the pools in the wind, I attached them under and above the cattle grid and then to my body as I crawled, eventually I was wearing 15 cameras on my limbs, stomach, head, bum, mouth and back. The camera covered body, when crawling, fascinated me – I loved getting home to trawl through the thousands of minutes of seemingly unremarkable footage that revealed a landscape that I had not seen as fully or at all with my eyes. I realised that my body eyes could see in a totally new way, from a multiperspective – multiple coexisting point of view. It fascinated me that they saw my body in relation to itself and the cameras and the landscape simultaneously. I was dispersed, de-centred and dis-embodied, in it and part of it, all. I realised I was exploring material entanglement “in which various and variable materialities collide, congeal, morph, evolve and disintegrate” to quote Michel Serres in his book The Birth of Physics. The cameras and the clothing that I wear; red trainers, sunglasses, black Lycra, gloves, knee pads, etc, have become a kind of alter ego, or a familiar characterisation.

Your performances are often mediated in some way whether through a live-feed or video, or in earlier works through animation. But you’ve also created a number of crawling works with an audience – often an unwitting one – present while you perform the work. How does this change or affect the work?

I think there is a difference in how the issues inherent in the work are experienced and this resides in whether the encounter is accidental or intentional. Stumbling upon my slow and laborious crawling body carrying a heavy potted tree on my back along the wet and wind-swept shopping streets of Glasgow, or the hot and stale piss, and vomit-stained pavements of Doncaster, or the deserted Aberystwyth promenade during the winter lockdown is clearly an uncomfortable and awkward experience for the passer-by. I think my urban crawling projects agitate and unsettle most when experienced situationally and relationally; I am a human being, a woman (although I am mostly mistaken for a man) and a middle-aged woman in an uncompromised, humiliating position, close to the ground – a place from which we are meant to grow and evolve. Crawling is a backwards step, so to find oneself or witness someone down there again with children, animals and ‘vulnerable’ people, rubbish, dog shit, and chewing gum is not desirable or enviable, but in my mind it is necessary. The social space is a very challenging platform, I am new to it and so learning each time what is at stake. I find it thrilling and deeply unnerving, I feel both vulnerable and empowered. I am excited to keep exploring the camera covered human/animal/vegetal/technological hybrid, temporarily becoming an ‘it’, an other, an alliance, a symbiotic union, a co-creating community, an interconnected future.

Your exhibition ‘Crossed Paths’ at Oriel Davies Gallery, Newtown, in 2018 included a number of creative commissions in response to your work. How important was collaboration and working with creatives from different art forms in the development and recording of the project and in presenting its outcomes?

It is wonderful to have the funding and support to enable collaboration. I love collaborating, commissioning, and co-producing, it just expands and extends the work in unimaginable ways. When I developed Passage, I worked with over 90 people including actors, writers, translators, composers and musicians. I worked with a Sufi dancer (whirling dervish), a Welsh male voice choir, a shepherd, a rice farmer, a flamenco singer, a Turkish hammam masseur and so many more incredible people from Mexico, Thailand, Berlin, Istanbul, France, Spain and Wales. And so, to build upon this experience, for Crossed Paths – Sheep, which was the first of the Crossed Paths projects, I commissioned 8 local songwriters/composers and musicians, a poet, and a writer. I gave the musicians a simple brief; respond to the landscape and or my crawling performance. I then edited my GoPro footage in response to their compositions. This was a fascinating process. I had no idea what I would receive or how I would work with what I received. Each one was brilliant and so different, the editing process was great fun, freeing and totally unpredictable.

Your work is often durational in nature, with performance works lasting a set time, while your early video works were presented on an infinite loop, potentially continuing forever. And during lockdown you also started live-streaming works. Has your approach to the temporal nature of performing and to viewing the work changed?

I have become really interested in duration, I like to work with rules, shapes, and structures. A specific duration of time offers limitations which become freeing, and defining a specific duration takes away extraneous decisions. I think in relation to non-humans, time frames are irrelevant, so employing them becomes absurd, and I like absurdity. What does 100 minutes have to do with an oak tree? Or 100 hours have to do with a piece of paper? Or 24 hours to a badger? The durational frame around the encounters enhance the disconnect, our differences become striking. I think it is important we recognise the severity of our differences in order to move toward connection.

I have arrived late to the live-stream platform, I discovered it as a useful tool during lockdown. I found it fascinating that I could do something so subtle, so uneventful, and so seemingly irrelevant as to stare at an oak tree on the hour every hour for 24 hours and that people would want to join me/us. People had us on their phones next to their pillows as they went to sleep and woke up, as they worked in their studios and as they walked around the house. People wrote us poems, and my neighbours came to sit close by. I found this audience relationship so satisfying, it is a platform I want to pursue further, but it’s probable that the interest in this project was particular to lockdown.

As you’ve mentioned, during lockdown you developed a body of work that involved staring at an oak tree. With reference to the work you’ve said that “boredom is vital and mistakenly avoided in life and in art. I love boredom in art.” Can you explain this, and how it impacts on, and is apparent in your work. Was lockdown a productive time for developing ideas and new projects, or disruptive in that you had to put other projects on hold.

Some of my touchstone artworks are durational. For example, Tehching Hsieh’s One Year Performances, On Kawara’s One Million Years and the Today series, Tom Friedman’s 1000 Hours of Staring, Chris Burden’s Bed Piece, Tilda Swinton and Cornelia Parker’s The Maybe, Roman Opalka’s paintings of numbers from one to infinity, and Marie Cool and Fabio Balducci’s paired down and measured gestures with a single material or object. I have been listening to Arvo Pärt’s monotonous and mesmerising Tintinnabuli compositions while I draw the thousands of numbers emitted from the earth in my current project, When Earth Speaks. I find repetition, simplicity and exactness thrilling. When I was a student, I poured over Agnes Martin’s horizontal lines. I think I like the freedom within the limitation and the process of testing and pushing something to its limit until it eventually collapses or transforms. I also find Martin Creed’s attentiveness to the quotidian thrilling and wonderfully funny. So yes, I think the best and juicy stuff resides on and beyond the threshold of what we think of as ordinary and boring; the point at which we might walk away is the best bit, and pertinent to today – I think it is the point at which humanity must meet its non-human earthly cohabitors. Being slow and quiet with the twitching blade of grass, the tumbling beetle as it falls from a leaf or the persistent droplet of water that clings to the underside of a bowing twig are the moments we need to sit with and pay attention to, if we are to relearn how to cohabit, again – well. Lockdown was a brilliantly playful and resourceful time for me. I burst into creativity as soon as I was told to go home, responding to artists’ works that related to beds, bedrooms, exile, and isolation in relation to my veg bed and its harvest.

Appropriation proved to be a productive methodology and my patio ‘studio’ was convenient and conducive to impromptu ideas. I think I relished in the absence of competition during that time, it was restful and reassuring to know that everyone had slowed down for a while. Because intense productivity ceased for a little while, I felt I could move deeply into a playful creative practice.

Human and animal interaction has been the subject of your work for some time, from your early watercolour animations and video works. Have your ideas and concerns about this changed over time?

It’s been fantastic to realise recently that my current work connects with my work of over 20 years ago. The video Reading my Diary to the Cows, the lace drawings, the watercolour animations, the video series Marine Dialogues, etc, are all inextricably linked to my current interest in the interactions, ideas, and practices of multiple species, to my exploration of the pluriverse, a world in which many worlds collide, and my attempt to experience and present post-anthropocentric perspectives. It is satisfying to know that I have been agitating the same hunches and probing the same propositions through different media and from multiple perspectives. Each project is a proposition or series of propositions that I don’t know the answers to – I feel I’ve just got to keep moving into entangled worlds of uncertainty.

You’ve performed Crossed Paths works at both COP27 (Conference of the Parties, United Nations) in Sharm El-Sheikh, Egypt, in 2022 and COP26 in Glasgow in 2021. Is your work becoming more political in the light of the deepening climate emergency? You’ve said the work involves a kind of slow or gentle activism. Can you explain what this means?

In her essay A Cyborg Manifesto (1985), in which the concept of the cyborg represents the rejection of the separation of human from animal and human from machine, Donna Haraway said that “we must learn to stay with the trouble”. By this she meant that living and dying together on a damaged earth will prove more conducive to the kind of thinking that would provide the means to building more liveable futures. The umbrella title for my current projects is Co – becoming; multispecies mingling and the art of attentiveness; passionate emersion could also be thrown in. I can’t see what else there is to do other than “stay with the trouble” in my art and in my life, and simply do my best to mingle and pay attention.

When I was down there on my hands and knees in the gales and driving rain in Glasgow, when we had a little glimmer of hope that that would be the COP that might save us, I felt that I was doing the right thing at the right time. I felt that crawling under the weight of a living tree – and thereby proposing an alternative way of thinking and being – was the only and the best thing I could do. My proposal is a purposefully topsy-turvy, muddled up, inside out, upside down and non-hierarchical way of being. Maybe it was my dad’s SLOW sign that has continued to inspire me, coupled with the ideas of Sarah Corbett’s Craftivist Collective. Reading her book, How to be a Craftivist: The Art of Gentle Protest, gave me a new awareness of what protest and activism can be. Slow activism is about mindful and purposeful change, it is non-exclusive of diverse people and other living beings, it is not about solutions, but it is about questioning the solutions we propose.

You’re dealing with some quite complex philosophical, existential and environmental ideas and issues. What role does humour play in communicating these ideas?

If I feel scared and I am making myself laugh then I will follow the hunch and make the work, if these two components are present then I am reassured the idea is worth pursuing and the work is worth making. In my practice the ingredients for a successful project are: humour, beauty, fear, suffering and potential madness. When I start my projects, I always find myself saying aloud “who’s bright idea was this” followed by a wave of despair followed by sheer dogged determination. I absolutely hate putting on the GoPro cameras and carrying heavy trees on my back especially if it’s hot, wet, and windy and if people hurl abuse at me, but I guess I feel I must suffer for my art, and I must suffer from amnesia because I find myself doing these uncomfortable and unpleasant things again!

You’ve just completed a durational drawing performance When Earth Speaks at Aberystwyth Arts Centre working with data recording fluctuations in soil temperature and soil moisture in the Cambrian Mountains. Has drawing always played an important role in your practice? How has the way you work with drawing changed and developed during your career?

I am like a wind-up toy, I will go off at full speed in the direction I am placed, I find all of my ideas come in the same media until for some reason it changes (if someone winds me up and faces me in another direction for instance). So, it seems I have just been wound-up and faced towards drawing because all of my ideas are now running in this direction. But in seriousness, this is mostly due to practical circumstances. Being a full-time lecturer leaves me with no or very little time, and I find conceptualising in my ‘studio head’ and coordinating relational and situational projects very hard when my time and thinking is constantly interrupted. I know, from my drawing practice of almost 20 years ago, that drawing can be picked up and put down much more easily and so I have been desperate to find a drawing practice again. I am so glad that the numerical data streamed from an agri-sensor network recently installed on the top of a mountain in West Wales has offered me a way back in. It is amazing to be able to return to the drawing board to do an hour while my son is at football or 20 minutes while the rice is boiling. It makes me feel grounded, complete, and very satisfied. The drawing performances are a new direction. My hope is that a live durational drawing performance will offer an audience ways into the data, and the issues linked to soil being reduced to a stream of numbers, but also into the concept of soil time; non-human time. I am planning a series of When Earth Speaks performances (When Earth Speaks – to humans, to plants, cows, birds, the river, the sea, the sky, paintings, sculpture, etc), because I realised when performing in Aberystwyth Arts Centre to humans drinking coffee and chatting that the meaning of the work resides in the audience response, or rather non-response; I think the question in this work is about who or what isn’t listening?

You're also working on a project called Soil Voices. The 24 hour live-stream performance for this was cancelled due to the death of Queen Elizabeth II in September 2022. Can you say a bit about this project and if you are still hoping to continue with it?

Soil Voices and When Earth Speaks, discussed above, both focus on the disconnect between the data stream emitted from the agri-sensor readings of the temperature and moisture (wetness) of the soil every 15 minutes over 24 hours ad infinitum and my attempt to make visible the invisible. I psychologically and physically prepared myself to lay in a self-dug ditch on a 600m high mountain top for 24 hours last June so it was a huge blow to have it cancelled, especially in those circumstances, but yes, I will be returning to the ditch and to the project this summer as I do feel the idea is worth pursuing. I am still sufficiently intrigued by it to go through with it, and it is a good opportunity to find out if the live stream platform still works for such a seemingly uneventful event.

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

I moved up to the north east from London in 2002, with my partner at the time. He had been awarded the Berwick Gymnasium Fellowship and so we lived in Berwick-upon-Tweed and ended up buying a house there. I had a residency at Stills gallery, in Edinburgh, and quickly found a group of friends and many opportunities in both Edinburgh and Newcastle. Berwick was an ideal location – equidistant from two large and vibrant cities connected by a fast train service with the benefits of the sea, air, huge beaches and landscape. I loved it.

I found myself connected to a wonderful group of emerging artists in Newcastle and I was supported by the then Arts Council England North East, ISIS Arts (now D6: Culture in Transit), BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, Waygood Gallery, the Globe Gallery, the then Artists Newsletter, and various other organisations and individuals. I had never known a regional arts network, having mostly only lived and worked as an artist in London since graduating from the Royal Academy Schools, but found it to be vastly more accessible, approachable, and supportive than I could have imagined. BALTIC was in its first years and there was a real buzz in the city and the region, although there were some tensions as BALTIC supported some regional artists and not others, and there was a sense that the large institution was sucking up most of the ACE regional budget. But in its wake small artist-run galleries and initiatives were emerging. My sense was that it was a good time to be in Newcastle.

Vane was already established and working with artists on site-specific, temporal projects around the city, so it was exciting to meet them, follow what they were doing and to be around when they set up in their first gallery space. I remember Paul and Chris came over to Berlin while I was undertaking the first Arts Council England North East Residency there – they came to meet other artists too, giving me some fantastic introductions. I had a solo show, ‘Where the monkey sleeps’, at Vane in 2005 and they took my work to international art fairs, which was very exciting and novel at the time. Being supported by Vane over the years has meant a great deal, it has given me confidence and enabled me to network and pursue opportunities that might otherwise have been closed to me. I am delighted and very excited to be working with Vane again on a second solo exhibition.

Interview by Stephen Palmer