Interview with Jill Tattersall (‘For Your Convenience’ Artist)

Words by Evie Brett

Following the success of the opening night of ‘For Your Convenience’ at the Norman Rea Gallery, I (albeit virtually over email) sat down with mixed-media artist Jill Tattersall to chat about all things colour, reclaimed materiality, and even the odd tin can! Jill is a York-based maker, although she has previously lived and worked in both Brighton and Lincolnshire, whose practice is foregrounded by an attempt to make sense of the world around her. She also frequently makes use of throwaway or reclaimed materials to bring her evocative, and indeed glowing, works to life. Here then is Jill Tattersall, in ten questions.

E: Please give us a run down of your artistic practice and what inspires you to create the work that you do.

J: I constantly experiment with materials and techniques, often using my own hand-made paper - time-consuming to make, but with a unique, unpredictable texture. I use mainly water-based paints, inks, dyes and pigments to build up intense and glowing colour. Throwaway or reclaimed elements can sit side-by-side with ‘precious’ gold and silver leaf. I work in series, including Night Skies and Waste Not. My main preoccupation is with patterns. They’re all round us; we’re made up of them ourselves. Force meets counter-force and patterns emerge: coasts and weather systems, stars and galaxies, trees and blood vessels, maps and mazes. It’s where science and art intersect.

Still Time?

E: How long have you been making art in one form or another?

J: All my life, since childhood. An inspirational art teacher made life at my secondary girls’ school bearable, though we were steered away from studying art. I never felt capable of being ‘an artist’. I earned my living for years as a lecturer in medieval French literature. I had to give this up for family reasons, but was then able to do City and Guilds courses in art and design, textiles and ceramics at my local college. I‘ve been seriously making and selling art (‘an artist’) for twenty years or so.

Still Time? detail

E: What is your favourite aspect of your artistic practice and why?

J: Letting go; putting my (overused) analytical brain on one side and following my instinct, experimenting, and simply seeing what emerges. Art, music (I trained as a singer) and cooking are all connected for me!

Celebration Over

E: In your work, you regularly make use of colour. In what ways is colour particularly important to you as an artist?

J: It’s intrinsic to being human, a huge part of our perception of the world. It contributes to our survival and safety as well as our enjoyment of life. I recently lost my sense of taste through Covid and it felt like seeing only in black and white. Losing colour would be like losing a dimension.

After the Party

E: The employment of reclaimed materials is also central to your body of work; why is this?

J: My German mother brought me up not to waste things. I spent some years as a child in Africa and saw how local people made practical and decorative items out of the natural materials all around them (bark-cloth, beads, wood carving…). Wood versus plastic; butter versus margarine: I‘ve always disliked highly manufactured materials, convenience foods and excess packaging. It’s true some innovations have been revolutionary and many now seem essential. But we’re seeing the results of our profligate and indiscriminate use of materials. 160 years ago Dickens wrote a vivid description of a rubbish mountain in ‘Our Mutual Friend’. Now we really are drowning in rubbish and it’s polluting our lands and seas. Need I say I’m a dedicated skip-hunter?

Found Art: My Table-Top Cloth

E: Do you feel that the art industry is one particularly in need of more sustainable practices?

J: Yes. There’s still a huge snobbery surrounding ‘fine art’ and materials. My mantra is’ if it doesn’t rub off, rot or fade I’ll try it out’. I saw a wonderful exhibition with work by Picasso done in wartime when he was marooned in Paris in dismal conditions. He used anything and everything that came to hand – he saw its possibilities and inbuilt advantages and used them to fullest effect.

Night Sky 1066, Regent’s Park Station

E: Responding to the impacts of ‘Convenience Culture’ is at the heart of what we’re trying to achieve with this exhibition; how do you feel that ‘Convenience Culture’ invades both your life more generally as well as your artistic practice?

J: Artists’ materials, as everything else from food to clothing are often highly manufactured with toxic materials (not a new thing, but we at least now know the truth). I avoid these as far as possible just as I avoid convenience foods and over packaged goods. But I’m as guilty as anyone of buying my mushrooms unthinkingly in a plastic carton. (Though I have used even these and their often enticing patterns to mould paper on – see illustrations!) We find ourselves complicit in our disastrous convenience culture, and this I really mind.

Ferret, 40,000 years old

E: In what ways do you feel that your body of work responds to the themes of the exhibition?

J: All these works in one way or another explore the relation of value, worth, and price/cost. Art is a prime example of how these become confused. And who decides what is art? Beauty and meaning are where you find them. Found art is a delight. So I’m making a dual statement by using found materials. Squashed tin cans? Fine! The ones I’ve used have colour and exciting shapes. They also speak volumes about waste.

Light, Sunshine, Colour

E: Why do you think institutions like the Norman Rea Gallery are important, both for artists based in York and further afield?

J: Normal and community art events - whether workshops, open studios, exhibitions or craft/art markets - are brilliant and necessary for our delight and instruction. But there’s inevitably a need to ‘level down’, to follow the most accessible, easy and well-understood themes and projects in order to be inclusive. That’s excellent, but we also need someone to be doing the blue-skies thinking, the creative innovations, the difficult topics, the untrodden paths…. Set us challenges, introduce new projects… So thank you to everyone who enables this to happen.

No Name (Rust)

E: Finally, if you had to sum up your practice in three words, what would they be?

J: Light, colour, force.

Three pieces of Jill’s, entitled Still Time?, Celebration Over, and After the Party will be exhibited at the Norman Rea Gallery in ‘For Your Convenience’, running now until Friday 13th December.