Artist Story: Oliver Doe

Please give a brief introduction to yourself and your artistic practice

I think that I always knew, from a very young age, that I wanted to become an artist. As a child I drew relentlessly – much to the chagrin of my parents with the amount of paper that I got through, as supportive as they were. But during my school years I was mostly pushed in very academic directions and I considered studying architecture for a long time, as it would have allowed me to combine my aptitudes for creativity and maths and science. It took some conversations with my very inspirational high school art teacher, Simon Crow, to realise that I was actually just dedicated to making art and the best way to achieve this was to go to art school.

I ended up doing my BA at Newcastle University from 2012-16 and it proved really formational: getting away from home and into an environment that was all about art, with great studios, tutors, workshops and a strong network of accessible galleries and spaces. Being there allowed me to develop as both a person and an artist, and I ended up staying in the city for eight years whilst I worked on everything after my graduation. Learning more about myself in those years has truly shaped the work that I do now, concerned with identity and ways of becoming and communicating the self. Having begun thinking about queer identity as part of my practice during my BA, around 2015, it’s still the cornerstone of everything that I research and make now.

Why did you choose the language of abstraction, and minimal abstraction in particular, to explore queer communication and identity?

Put simply, I had a very abstract time getting to grips with who I was during my student years: figuring out where I could place myself, my relationship to my body and others, and the way I saw the world as a fledgeling queer.

When I began to research abstraction in modernisms, particularly in the works of minimalists like Ellsworth Kelly, Leon Polk Smith and Agnes Martin, I began to find this queer way of looking as a presence in their work and began to understand the relationships between abstraction as an artistic methodology and the abstract ways in which queer identities are constructed. There is of course a lot more to it but I like to leave some of it to be unpicked in the work itself!

Do you work quickly, or do individual works develop over a period of time?

For many years, I worked really rapidly: with numerous paintings or drawings always on the go at once. My practice was fairly non-stop as I was interested in making as much work as I could to cover as much of the ground of my research as possible. When I started my MFA in 2020, and certainly with the shift towards text-based work, I realised the necessity of slowing down. The works needed breathing space and I needed more time to consider what was really going on in the image and in the translation from research into practice. Whilst I still work fairly relentlessly on paintings it’s certainly a much slower and more considered process now, and things indeed spend more time in development. There have been a few leaps, aesthetically speaking, but everything has been in fact quite a linear development since then.

Is there an intentional ambiguity to your work, particularly in terms of the shapes and forms that you employ in your paintings?

Yes! We have to come to terms with the fact that we can never know or understand absolutely everything – even that which is right in front of us. I recognise that there are parts of my life, and the wider bracket of queer, that some people will never quite get to grips with, and what I like to do is to turn those things back, to re-present them in a way which is wilfully impossible to read. Rather than trying to fumble through misunderstandings, we present only something that is opaque, that cannot be understood, and there can be quite a lot of meaning to be found in that too.

Language, or rather the breakdown of language, looks to have a growing presence in your paintings. Is this a shift from, or a continuation of, your more bodily referencing work?

I’ve had an interest in the workings of language and text for years and not just as a writer. I think my first experiments with text-based artworks came when I was still in school and it was something that always hung on in the background. I spent a long time thinking about the relationship between text and image, especially as I saw my poetic writing as part of my wider artistic practice, but I always had a concern that putting text into the image was too direct. By the time I got to the point of doing the minimal paintings, which were sort of collaged figurative images, the titles had become really important, really poetic, and gave the image a lot of power. So I wanted to experiment with pushing that. I was also feeling that some of those figures began repeating themselves and wanted to refresh the aesthetics of the paintings a bit, so the experimental cocoon of my MFA gave me the space to just try it out. It took a while to get the feeling of the text ‘right’, but by treating it in the same way as I had been treating photographs in relation to painting, I realised that actually it wasn’t such a huge leap, and that these words and letters could become such characters in the image.

Eventually the more linear text got pulled apart, further towards abstraction and breaking down that meaning away from comprehension and toward ambiguity, until at this point, everything has started overlapping again and in a way doesn’t feel so textual. There’s been a strength in the continuity of medium and treatment, though, and using the same techniques has allowed everything to feel consistent whilst I’ve been working, changing, and adapting.

Is camouflage something you think about? Words seem to break down to the extent that they start to look like the forms we might associate with camouflage or even dazzle ship design. Is the notion of something being hidden, or perhaps hidden in plain sight, important? Are you interested in visual or optical trickery?

Indeed! I was explaining dazzle camouflage to my partner just the other day. Whilst I wouldn’t say it’s something that’s a direct influence on how I’m making images, I think it’s something inevitable in the readings of the work, especially as so much of the meaning is camouflaged, contextually speaking. Those words and phrases are there but have been broken up and re-layered, so that there’s more than meets the eye when everything is first seen.

Op art ways of thinking, especially in connection with research into 1960s abstraction, do have an influence on my processes and I’ve found working with very specific colour relationships to be really fruitful. By using colours that are completely ‘clashing’, or very close in value but different in hue, I’ve made some paintings that, to use art critic, Jan Verwoert’s favourite descriptive term for them, are ‘uncomfortably vibrational’. Creating that sense of visual discomfort or agitation, layers on top of the removal of meaning from the context, just as queer, in its best sense, is confrontational, difficult, and vibrational.

You’ve mentioned your poetic writing, and you also make performance works. How do these different elements of your practice connect? Is the act of making paintings a performative one for you?

I wouldn’t necessarily call the act of painting performative – more so meditative – but certainly performativity is something that I see as inherent to the images that I make: the interplay between characters, colours, foreground and background. This is something that has been inspired by performing, and choreographing performances. I think that there is so much about the performativity of language in doing this work that has to be captured in the paintings, and the best way to think about that is through the way that elements of the image perform and the performativity of the finished painting as an ‘actor’ in the space. How does it perform towards its audience and with the other works around it?

I started taking poetic writing seriously around 2014 when I was offered my first chance to publish some of my writing. It’s developed a lot since then, but after quite a few pamphlets, and the full collection that I published in 2017 (and launched at Vane!), my writing practice has shifted away from the rules of poetry and towards something a little looser – more so writing as an artistic practice than poetry. That’s actually been quite freeing, as I no longer feel frustrated by the need to fit a form, a certain length, style etc, but the writing can do whatever it likes and is free to change from day to day. I now spend quite some time free writing. Sometimes this does end up feeling quite poetic, but often it can function as a literal performance score; as a short story; as a script; or as something wholly abstract. I’ve begun to take that approach towards creating performances too, where they can all come from different directions often with a written basis.

I now find that my practice functions best when all of its elements – painting, performance, text and recently photography – begin to work symbiotically. When dealing with this kind of abstraction, having little keys and clues in one part of the work that can point to signs within another, allows for little glimpses through the opacity and abstraction, and even allows me to see new relationships from time to time.

The colours you use often make reference to various codes or ciphers that relate to queer culture, but is there also an instinctive aspect to your use of colour? Is it important for viewers to understand the coded colour references that you employ or are you happy for people to connect with these colours in a more emotional or visceral way?

It's definitely instinctive. Most of the time, the colour is really specific and a specific reference back to something that’s come up in my research. That can be something as simple as the colour of a character’s shirt in a film, or a description of something from a novel, as well as more precise sets of references like the hanky code. Sometimes there is a bit of room for manoeuvre though, and often I’ll work backwards, thinking along the lines of “I want to make a red painting now – what fits that?”. This way of working has a bit more creative license.

In either case it’s unlikely that more than a few people will immediately recognise what is being coded into the colour and I’m always excited to see what people think it might be, even when it’s not accurate, because at least it is provoking an inquisitive response, one that is indeed emotional or visceral, and gives that person something to find a connection with.

You’ve been living in Rotterdam in the Netherlands for a couple of years. Does the city have a strong and supportive art scene? How does it compare with the art scene in Newcastle or other cities where you’ve been based?

It has been quite hard to settle here in the Netherlands. I moved during the first summer of Covid lockdowns, so getting to meet people outside of the small environment of my MFA programme was tough – galleries, artist-run spaces, and institutions have been closed for long periods, so I missed a lot of socialisation into the local art scene. Having said that, the spaces that are now open again are really welcoming and I’m starting to see some great things popping up.

The housing crisis here also affects the availability of studios, which are relatively expensive, tough to find, and often don’t last long. I’m currently just working in a little home studio whilst I try to find my feet after graduating here. It’s tough to break into the Dutch art scene as a foreigner, but it’s beginning to happen for me slowly. One thing that helps is that a large part of the emerging art scene here is connected to the Piet Zwart Institute where I studied, and a lot of alumni are still around with studios, project spaces, and other roles in the art world here, which is encouraging. The city is also really well connected to the rest of Europe and the UK so travel for shows isn’t so hard when needed.

One thing I miss about the scene in Newcastle though, is how accessible it was for everyone – both audiences and artists – to get involved. The amount of ‘smaller’ galleries that recent graduates and emerging artists were able to show in is fantastic relative to the size of the city, and it’s something that isn’t such a part of the culture in Rotterdam and Amsterdam, which lean more towards the institutional and high-end. Having the support of galleries like Vane, Gallagher & Turner, with whom I worked for a long time, and organisations like the NewBridge Project, where I had my studio, was fundamental for me and they’re incredible resources for Newcastle and Gateshead as a creative place.

I’m currently looking at options for drawing my current research on language, abstraction and queer theory into a PhD, so a return to the UK may be on the cards for the near future, wherever it may land me!

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

At the end of 2016, not long after finishing my BA, I wanted to branch into the curatorial with a project I’d developed out of my own practice, on queer minimalism. I had no real idea how to push this beyond student-type projects but having been going to Vane’s exhibitions for a while by that point and developing a good relationship with them, I remember tentatively asking Paul and Chris for advice. I was surprised that they offered to do the show with me, dependent on funding, and offered me the break that I really needed.

Having never written a significant funding application at that point, they took the time to lead me through the entire process and support the application, which was awarded first time. I still refer to the resulting show, ‘You’re Reading Into It’, as a major turning point for me – they allowed me to begin properly professionalising my career as an artist-curator and were wholly supportive of everything about that project.

Not too long after that, we began developing my first significant solo exhibition, ‘Somewhere In Between’, which opened at Vane in the summer of 2019 with yet another successful funding application that Vane had supported. That show is still one of my biggest achievements to date and has really shaped what I’m doing now as an artist, so in that sense a lot of my professional career is owed to Vane!

Interview by Stephen Palmer

Read more about Oliver Doe’s exhibitions at Vane.