Joanne Robertson Works With Immediacy

How did the book come about?

I met Kirstie Sequitin at a book launch she organised for the book she published on the painter Carole Gibbons, and we spoke about an idea to create a book which had writing and images in it. I went through a lot of typewriter stuff and decided I wanted to make new, blue pastel drawings instead of showing all my restless old writing. 

I studied art, and I've always loved art books, and ideas being made into that format. I've made my own books before, with Byron Coley, a friend in America. We set up a publishing company called Bad Taste Press and we release these weird books together. It’s because we both work across mediums a lot. Books can create a space for looking at ideas, I think, that you can't always describe with other mediums. 

The word ‘improvisation’ is often used when describing your work. I’m interested in what you think of that term, and how your approach to improvisation might have changed over the years?

The best work that I've made, or the work that I've liked the most, has come from a process that allows all the things to come into the frame. It's like a fast editing process, almost like you’re sketching, but then that is the work, that's the finished piece somehow. It’s quite a fun way to make things, because you have to be very lateral in your mind and use a lot of different things at once. It can be quite destructive too, and you work with your emotions a lot. 

It’s immediacy, I think, that I work with, and a vocabulary that's been developed over time that I can access through experimentation across mediums. I have this kind of secret language. I really like to start with not knowing, and then to allow something to come to fruition by doing. I don't know if there's a better term than improvisation, but improvisation can be an easy way to explain a complex idea.

I was always interested, at art school, in this idea of a priori in philosophy; not having too much of an idea in terms of subject matter, and then other ideas coming into the work through doing it. There's always something that exists before you. So ‘improvisation’ is complex, but that's maybe how I use it, as a way to describe a lack of resolve before starting.

In another interview of yours, you had a quote that I loved, that when you paint you think it's important to try and let go of control. 

[The guitarist] Derek Bailey talks about that in terms of improvisation in his book. I don't plan out every section of the canvas. If I'm making something like a painting, I think it's quite exciting to try and almost allow the painting to tell you where to put things by letting go. I quite like to let the music or the paint do its thing, and then I start to try to catch it and move it around accordingly. Again, it's this idea that you don't know until you start making it.

There's also still, I guess, a lot of control, in the sense of, you still have a huge amount of authority in terms of the decisions you’re making as you create the piece.

And making the colours. I'm really obsessed with colours. I spend a lot of time thinking about colour, and looking at how others have used colour throughout the history of painting, and I like to think about different texts that I've read. I was reading Sartre on Giacometti last night – I like a lot of sculptors’ drawings, and for instance I love Eva Hesse’s paintings. I love artists who cross over different mediums. 

Why do you think they appeal to you so much?

I like painting that's performative and physical and chaotic, and is a process-based thing rather than a resolved painting, image, surface. Maybe it’s because it’s more connected to music. I love the Fluxus movement, because it’s so much about collaboration and crossover between things, and a sort of destructiveness. A leaving out of ideas that allows other ideas to come in, rather than just, ‘This is the perfect thing, this is the perfect work.’

Those are the things I would go towards as a young person, and now as an older person too. I realised today as I was planning a teaching workshop that I'm still the same, the same ideas are still there. They just kind of grow, which is cool, because I think maybe other people go through ideas and then keep moving. 

It sounds also that a lot of intuition is needed in the way you work, because you need to know when something's right, or that it's not right. 

There's a lot of intuition, but there's also a lot of space for it to fail, which then means you think of something to keep it going. I love that, patching it together, that collage-ous way of making things. I love Kathy Acker, that sort of postmodern, catatonic state, mixing it all up. 

You collaborate with other people quite often.

I do and I don't. I mean, I spend most of my time alone or with my family and friends. I spend a lot of time with friends, a lot of time talking on the phone about relationships and life, giggling and being silly. Then I spend most of my time working alone, I would say, which gives me a lot to give to a collaborative relationship. I'm not a serial collaborator. I step away from that quite a lot because I wouldn't be able to come up with ideas, I think, if I was always working with someone else. I would be a bit lost. I spent a lot of time pottering around on my own or sitting in a room in London when I was single, writing tons of music. Maybe I'm quite solitary, in a way. 

I can't give without giving a lot to myself. The well runs dry, if I do that. I have no ideas. Right now I'm really enjoying a sort of studious period, because my son's old enough now for me to have some time to do that again. 

Did you find that part of early motherhood hard, when it is so consuming? 

I loved it, because it was all about experiencing something very physical, and very much to do with real life. Especially because I think a lot of my work is about this idea of the blur between real life and art, there's not really a separation. It’s more everything is almost extending out of experience, and emotions. 

Early motherhood was really cool for me. I found it inspiring and interesting, because I was playing a lot of gigs, and I was making a lot of paintings for shows. So it was quite challenging. It's almost a blur, like the album name, but that name is a reference to painting in that ‘eyes half open style’, when you look at a composition to make sure it's good, and you almost take away the colour by closing your eyes a bit, and you just see the composition and the tone. Early motherhood was very fun as well. I found it very fun, just slobbing around with your tits hanging out drinking hot chocolate. 

What’s the relationship between your art practice and your music? 

It's always been in and out. When I was younger I was doing a lot of art. When I was 25 I did a museum show at the ICA with my friend Lucy Stein, and we did a bunch of shows really straight out of art school. I was thrown into that world a wee bit, and felt like I did a ton of painting, and then I sort of thought, ‘Okay, this music thing's calling me. Why don't I just see where that leads.’

I've always been underground, but recently there's been a bit of attention. I'm not trying to be a mainstream musician in any way, and I'm very focused on my art, more so maybe than my music. But I like that I'm doing music in this way and that it's reaching a different audience. We're in this era where so many people would love to be the next blah, blah, blah, but I'm interested in things that haven't existed maybe.

I think it's an idea of professionalism and snobbery, in a way, that stops people from exploring. I've always written music and I've always painted. So for me, it got to that point of, if I keep trying to say which one I'm going to do, I'm just boring myself, because I won’t ever stop doing either. I probably spend more time painting, but my music comes out very immediately, it's a very pure form of expression, of getting something out. My music is very, five minutes here, five minutes there. I've written albums in two days. I find painting so complex, and it's so connected to what I've studied and everything else. I am obsessed with painting, and I spend a lot of time thinking about it. But my music just sort of comes out.

I’ve just written a piece on Joan Mitchell for the Transatlantique series published by les presses du réel. She loved music, and her dad said to her, because she was a great poet, “You can't be the jack of all trades.” Whereas my dad said to me, “Be the jack of all trades.” Now I didn't just listen to my dad, obviously, I was listening to my tutors at art school as well, and they were all saying, “Be it all. Do it all.” Time has moved on from that fear of doing two things. I think you can do two things now, I think you can do five things, probably. 

It's whether or not you care about whether it's consumed or not, and I don't really care. I don't really sit around going, “Is anyone going to like this?” I'm just doing it because I have to. It's like an involuntary thing, I have to do it. 

How do you find the different parts of your practice structure the rest of it, for instance the time you need to spend touring as a musician?

Well I'm not touring too much because I don't want to be going away all the time. But I do think it's important to share what it feels like to sing. I love singing. That's what I've done since I was a little girl, singing all around the house, singing my way through the day, in the studio. So singing in front of people is so emotionally interesting to me, because you're singing to these strangers. It’s a really sensitive, strange experience that I don't quite know the value of yet, but I'm trusting in the unknown with it. 

My mum is a born again, I sort of grew up in the Methodist church a little bit, and I don't know if it's connected to that. I've sort of rejected all of that, obviously, growing up, and she's not very serious about it. She more did it as a sort of community thing. I think that's the thing that I like about music, that it brings people together. You're in a vulnerable state on stage performing something very emotional that feels to me like how I connect to really good paintings. A lot of painters that I love, the artists I love, they really put you on the spot with them in a vulnerable space. I'm really interested in that emotionality and poetry in all art forms.

I guess performing is just you with all these people watching you, you’re almost giving yourself to them. There’s also an element of risk. To me it feels like an inherently brave thing to do.

Yes, and it's not my natural impulse to want to be watched at all. But I've gotten used to it recently, and it almost feels like a confidence building thing, and like it's really helping me paint. I always use things that I find hard in my painting, and then take them back into the painting, in terms of risk taking with myself. 

I used to be so brave, and so wild, that I feel I had to soften and change slightly, and now I'm going back into it with more tools and knowledge of how paint works, and that's so exciting for me. With music, it's the same. A lot of the music I sing live was written in a very specific time period, and I'm going back into that a little bit now, but it's like I’ve grown up somehow, in a weird way. I'm sure I’ll grow up again, too. I'm really interested in these stages of life in terms of knowledge building, and how they cross over. It’s like when you're at a crossroads creatively. You're at a crossroads, and you can go quite a lot of ways, and it’s about trusting taking a leap or a risk with the technical control that you have learned through doing, and through experimenting.

You said some of your teachers at art school were really formative. Now you're teaching yourself, do you enjoy it? And do you learn from it?

I love the idea that you sort of collectively build confidence around strange, abstract ideas. And I think I do learn. It wasn’t just my teachers who were formative though, it was my peers. My peers were more important in many ways than my teachers. But the teachers I had were really great at recognising that it was about peer development, and then saying, “Run with that one. Don't go down that road because it's just trying to prove you're good at something. Do this risky one.” They were risk takers, and that's what I think good teachers can do. They can hold your fear and put it away for you a little bit. 

Being able to share the knowledge you’ve accumulated about things you're passionate about is cool. Talking about that with people is cool, and I like to build confidence. I like kind of nerdy, weird, experimental characters who just really love what they're doing. I love that about weird fans of music, as well, they're so deep head and interesting, and so smart. One thing about music, and I wish this would happen in art, that people would say what art does for them more. You know, is it making you feel something? I feel like, with music, you meet someone who's just had a really tough time and they say, “Oh, that really helped.” I hope art can do that. 

You said earlier about your practice, that when you look back at work, you can see that there have always been certain things in it.

Yeah, I don't think I've changed since I was like 15, really. I mean I have definitely changed, I speak in contradictions, by the way. But I just don't ever believe I know what I'm doing, I'm just figuring it out. 

The book is very centered around guitars, and the form of the guitar. 

When I paint, I work with my imagination, but I work in this way that it is semi-figurative, even though it looks abstract. Often figures come into it, or it's like part of a face or a body and then I take it out. The guitar drawings were almost like bodies. So it was me trying to understand the body again. The shape of a guitar body has always been in all my paintings. 

It wasn't anything that I was thinking about in an obvious way, but I was doing these nail varnish record sleeves for Blankforms, whilst talking to my friend, Bradley Kronz. I used to paint with nail varnish a lot when I was a kid, and when I went to Glasgow School of Art I did it a little bit too. I started doing some again, and something that happens when I'm painting quite automatically, is this body shape emerges, which is a little bit of a take on the Picasso/Braque female body shape. It’s a loose reference to Riot Girl, and the whole, the orifice, or things that aren't fixed.

It’s this idea of the self and then the world and this body, and then the guitar shapes are supposed to almost be like my body somehow, I think. From that came these kind of freeform shapes, with little bits of text around them. I was using the guitar as a body, but not in a way that was cringe. I was trying not to make it cringe, because it feels really cringe when I explain it. But I think that's what I'm really interested in as well, this line. It feels a little bit risky for me, like it could collapse, or it could annoy someone a little bit. I quite like getting under people’s skin in that way.