Archeology of Memory

Whitney McVeigh Interviewed by Alexander Caspari

You went to work with the artist and poet Wei Ligang in China in 2017 and created an amazing body of paintings on rice paper in his studio. Could you talk a little about that experience?

I arrived at Ligang’s studio in February 2017. There were so many interesting people passing through his space during the time including an opera singer who seemed to have lived for centuries. We shared a love of poetry, philosophy, painting and literature and a belief that its possible to channel knowledge and history through the brush; Ligang from an Eastern perspective and myself from the West. I was in his studio for five weeks. It was cold and when not working, we’d sit in his kitchen, preparing food and discussing the poetics of language. We’d been through similar periods of uncertainty. We discussed painting as a metaphor, its symbolism, the origins of language and the intricacies of the line in Chinese ink. I once spoke with a writer about inhabiting a medium, finding a place to live within the work, and working on this scale, you have the experience of being in the painting. Next year I’ll return to develop the work begun there. Ligang brought me back to the piano, I played when younger and his method, the immediacy of improvisation and the producing of sound, can be approached in the same way as painting.

My work is about drawing from ‘nature’ (in the way John Berger writes about nature as the essence or inside of what is being represented) and it was there I developed an understanding of the true potential of movement of the brush. I’m interested in a kind of constant renegotiation of identity and that history is in the ordinary and can remind us of our universality.

I read you met Louise Bourgeois in one of her salons in 2007. Could you speak a little about that process and also about other important artistic influences? We have previously discussed the writings of Robert Motherwell as well as some of his early drawings…

The Collected Writings of Robert Motherwell (edited by Stephanie Terenzio 1992) taught me about a freedom that comes with painting. One can look at paintings and understand a great deal but a large part of my learning is from reading essays, interviews and letters by artists. When living in Edinburgh in my twenties I spent several days a week in The Fine Art Library reading. David Sylvester’s Interviews with American Artists (2001) taught me about process. Francis Bacon’s The Brutality of Fact (1975 it’s original title), showed me, unlike at art school, that the task is to step outside of what we know. Lorca, Borges, Mansfield, Rilke and other writers did too. When I discovered Bill Viola’s Reason’s for Knocking at an Empty House (1995) I’d known his work for some time. His writings and his interest in the Eastern Mystic tradition are aligned with my interests in Eastern philosophy. They are thought provoking extracts on the human condition. Another book is Twentieth Century Artists on Art (1986) edited by Dore Ashton  that touches on the vitality of primitive art and through interview, shows the artists expressing powerful beliefs and fears through painting and sculpture. Hans Hartung says in one of the interview’s “Everything we feel deeply must be expressed.”

I was given Louise Bourgeois’ book Destruction of the Father, Reconstruction of the Father (1998) by my mother in the 90’s. I didn’t know her work well and I was immediately drawn to her honesty about her life. I later went with a writer, who I was collaborating with at the time, to the archive library of the Tate where we listened to several recordings of her in interview. The salon in NY was one of the great moments of my life. There was a curator from the Pompidou centre who was installing Anselm Kiefer’s work, a theatre director, students from Berlin and a Brazilian artist who was collaborating with Louise Bourgeois at the time. She gave each of us her time and we sat her in sitting-room with all her books and maquette's, joined to the kitchen. I was aware that some of the great painters including Motherwell had been in that same room.

I would say most of my learning has come from travel and engaging with people. Intuition and following the map of one’s life has been valuable and taken me to unexpected places. In 2012, I developed a concept on oral histories inviting people to say a line about memory along the silk route in Kyrgyzstan. What it did was connect me to the people there, I realised how every step is a process that leads us to the next.

I am particularly interested in ideas surrounding trace and human imprint that your works on found papers and photographs evoke. Each of the objects you select have quite particular energies and identities. They carry embodied histories of touch sometimes visible yet often inscrutable. For me these works often occupy an engaging space somewhere between vision and knowledge, accumulation and erasure. I wondered if you could speak a little about the process by which you choose an object to work on and how you decide what form of intervention to make?

In Freud's Civilisations and Discontents, there’s a section on the ‘conservation of the mind’ where he says ‘everything survives in some way or another, and is capable under certain conditions of being brought to light again’. Sometimes a photograph or an object belonging to a person speaks deeply of time and of my own experience. There’s a sense of waiting to be shown what the material brings. Jung believed images exist in us before we are born, and I believe the task in this lifetime is to draw these out, this is also what I meant by archaic memory and future history. I work with space and time and preexisting matter.  Like all of life, everything passes, has an end and we are left with traces.

In the found photographs which we plan to exhibit at Photo London, the drawings form in collaboration, as if led by the existing image. I only see what’s drawn later, there’s a profound trust in receiving the image, if that makes sense. I’ve talked about this with reference to painting before, I’m attempting to access an invisible space in the same way a poet uses words, the material is a way of channeling or intuitively finding truth. 

You have often worked on site specific archival installations. For instance, your work at St Peter’s Church at Kettles Yard, Cambridge or most recently at Mount Stuart Visual Arts in Scotland. Could you talk about the importance of the archive in your practice? Do you view these site-specific works as a form of institutional critique and why are these histories of places and people so vital to draw out?

 As I said, I work with spaces and with what the space yields. I bring my own experience to the space and collaborate with history.  In some ways it’s a critique by working with the belief that what took place in the space remains. At Mount Stuart, I read through hundreds of letters, to and from the women in the house. In the end, I created a brass plate positioned on the lawn, in line with the icon of the Madonna and Child which adorns the eastern elevation of Mount Stuart facing the Firth of Clyde. The letter evokes landscape and memory reflecting my own concerns for the world, as well as answering the question raised by Augusta Crichton-Stuart "What is Worthwhile Doing in this World". It was intentionally ambiguous as to whom the voices belong. In this way, between writer, subject and viewer the work speaks to universal history.

I’m currently creating a studio that relates to the notion that objects are receptacles for memory and their tangibility has an ontological significance, that their inherent histories can transfer a sense of universality to the viewer. We walk into a world where the viewer takes on new meaning through history. The isolating, elevating and expanding of materials entrusts the work to reflect and spur philosophical understandings of history, time and memory.

At Kettle’s Yard, I was responding to St Peter’s Church, parts of it dating back to the 12th Century. Jim Ede sought a dialogue between the viewer and objects in his home, he believed in the sacred in the everyday. By sitting in the chair, you were invited to become part of the narrative of the installation in a sense. With site-specific work, one absorbs history and it is regenerated in the work. Hunting Song, a site-specific installation for the 55th Venice Biennale was made in a former wood craft and ship-building workshop dating back to the 16th century. I created a fictional old curiosity shop with a diverse collection of objects from my own ‘collection’ interwoven with ‘found’ objects located on site at the Gervasuti Foundation. The radio was playing voices, evoking human presence.

In many ways as well as an artist you are also a collector. What are some of your favourite objects?

Increasingly I see collections as part of the work and woven between the objects are drawings that trace my own existence. In Brazil last year and in South Africa, I formed work based on collections from nature. I met an archaeologist at Serra da Capivara who was in his late 60’s. His work is all about uncovering history, his excavating a similar approach of letting the landscape yield. We discussed landscape and its holding of memory over thousands of years. There was an almost mythological energy to these places, both are ancient civilisations with human traces scattered over 250 miles.

A favourite object is a wooden part of a boat I found in the North West of Scotland 25 years ago. It’s come to every home and more recently I brought it back to the studio. It felt necessary to hold on to this and relates to my interests in Wind Ships and Alan Villiers stories behind his photographs. Sometimes there’s a desire to understand what it is to have lived before and the wood, with it’s bent nails and frayed body tells its own story. My work looks at the tracing of time and echos of human history, it allows the object to be itself.

The other is a book in my studio found in a secondhand shop in South Africa. Around the room were various plastic objects and piles of old newspapers and up on a shelf a small blue hard-backed book. Inside was a note from a man to a woman about the spiritual qualities of nature alongside photographs of trees. The woman had gone out and found the same branches of a small tree and placed it inside. The preface of the book reads“It is possible to gather gold, where it may be had, with moonlight”. It is a window into a woman’s life. The book was published in the UK in 1938 and yet made the journey to South Africa. It speaks of the ordinary intimate spaces that we create in order to remember.

Whitney McVeigh

Whitney McVeigh (born 1968) is an American visual artist and writer, best known for her paintings and installation art. She has travelled extensively to carry out her practice and held residencies in Brazil, Mexico, India, China and South Africa. Her work investigates personal and collective memory and alludes to the layering of time. Her paintings are preoccupied with the complexity and dual layers of the body and explore languages with origins in Eastern and Western philosophy. Over a twenty-year period the artist has amassed a collection of objects in the studio weighted by their unique patternations; tracing former lives and the once tangible relationship an individual may have had with the object. As an artist, she acts as custodian of these ‘markers’, isolating yet elevating the materials, entrusting them to reflect and spur philosophical understandings of history, time and memory.

Whitney McVeigh was featured in the BBC4 television documentary, Where is Modern Art Now (2009) alongside Sir Anthony Caro, Michael Landy, Grayson Perry and Cornelia Parker. She was nominated for the Sovereign European Art Prize (2008) by Saatchi Gallery director, Rebecca Wilson. Simon Schama’s recent essay on McVeigh’s practice ‘The Happenstance of Illumination’(2018) was included in his book Wordy (Simon & Schuster), published in June 2019. Her work featured in ‘Imagined Spaces’ edited by Kirsty Gunn & Gail Low with Voyage Out Press & Saraband Books (2020), an anthology that creates a “space” between understanding and the imagination. In Autumn 2022 a new collection of McVeigh’s limited editions will be launched at Renzo Piano Building Workshops’s newly designed building Shard Place (London). McVeigh’s work can be found in public and private collections worldwide.

Recent solo exhibitions include; ‘Temporality, Cardi Projects, Cardi Gallery (2020), What is Worthwhile Doing in this World, Mount Stuart Visual Arts, Scotland (2019), Elegy to Nature, Eykyn Maclean, New York (2018), Language of Memory, Summerhall Arts, Edinburgh (2016), Inventory: Invisible Companion, Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge (2015), New Work, Michael Goedhuis, London (2015) and presentation of the film ‘Birth’: Origins at the end of life at the Royal Academy, London (2015). Recent group exhibitions include, Fermata, Encounter, London (2021), Photo London, Somerset House, London (2021) with Encounter, What Remains, Encounter, London (2021), Artist Rooms, Encounter, London (2020), ‘Shapes in Clouds’ Encounter, London (2019), Plato in LA: Contemporary Artists’ Visions, Getty Villa, Los Angeles (2018), Not a Single Story, The Wanas Foundation, Sweden with Nirox Foundation, South Africa (2018), Culture Lines: Sans Frontieres, Metamatic-Taf Foundation, Athens (2016), Unlocking the Diary, The Archiving of Nameless Memories, Folkestone Triennial, Kent (2014) and Glass Stress, White Light/White Heat, 55th Venice Biennale, Venice (2013).