THE OBJECT AT HAND
In Conversation with Artist Liam Everett
Liam Everett has moved back from France to his Northern California land where he has recently finished building a home and studio and the beginnings of a biodynamic farm. I am first greeted by the family dog and then graciously by Everett's wife and daughter who had just harvested apples from their orchard. It is late summer and we are sitting and talking in Everett's studio—a former barn—about 80 kilometres North of San Francisco in West Sonoma County looking out towards the Pacific Ocean. It's very hot and the evidence of a major drought is all around us. I have been following Everett's performative and theatrical paintings over a decade since his MFA exhibition at the California College of Art (2012) through his first solo exhibition at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (2017) and his successive international exhibitions. Everett's recent group of three paintings, which he refers to as Four Corners_, 2022, consists of_ Untitled (Piano Drop), Untitled (Re-animator) and Untitled (Unmade Overtones) and these paintings surround us as we converse.
Natasha: Why Four Corners? Is that the space of the studio or the canvas?
Liam: The title is more of a reference to the land, as in the four directions—North/ South/ East/ West. It is also a nod to the four points on a stage and to the 'missing' painting, as there are only three visible in the exhibition. The fourth is always the 'not-yet'. Or maybe it refers to the invisible wall that delineates the frontier between spectators and the spectacle?
Natasha: I see the apparition of new objects that I haven't seen before in your work and I was wondering if you could talk about them: dominos, saws, trowels, hammers, wedges.... How do they operate in the context of your recent interest in working through, studying and researching Jungian analysis?
Liam: I never saw what you just called dominos as such. It is somewhat uncanny as the actual image is not of a domino per se but instead it is a print remnant made by pressing a steel mending plate, which is normally used as framing hardware to connect beams. The fact that the image of dominos showed up for you really ties in to the Jungian sand-tray images I have been collecting. Jungian-based sand-tray therapy uses trays filled with sand and a variety of miniatures that can be placed in the trays. You use your imagination to create three-dimensional scenes or stories that bypass the thinking and analytical brain and can bring to light what may otherwise not be visible.
Natasha: Jung wrote that 'Often the hands know how to solve a riddle with which the intellect has wrestled in vain.' You have always worked with ideas around everyday objects holding multiple meanings.
Liam: Yes. What I'm interested in is the potential for a highly recognisable object to transform itself in such a way that it begins to shed its original utilitarian personae. As soon as these objects are transferred to a two-dimensional surface, there is this kind of tragic-comical transmutation that occurs in which they start to take on alternate connotations.
I think of it as de-evolving, where the object is divorced of its first reality and then inevitably begins to develop new valences, ones that I didn't anticipate. They often end up looking like sad props culled from the back stage of an agit prop theatre. The intention with this material is not just to repurpose it but to also rearrange the ideas and concepts that I associate with them.
Natasha: What about the orbs in each painting—you call them running moons—I can't help but think they turn the paintings into some kind of landscape.
Liam: Actually what you refer to as moons are simply crude imprints from five gallon plastic buckets. But you are right they do point to landscape.
Natasha: So we would be looking down into the buckets.
Liam: Exactly. The irony is that the bulk of these paintings are made as I'm looking down upon them. I'm literally on top of the substrate in many cases, standing on the surface, something like an actor on a stage or a temporary platform.
Natasha: You work on the floor?
Liam: Yes, I have to because otherwise these things will fall apart or fall off. When I finally put them up on the wall their reality completely changes. The literal perspective of how I'm seeing these things takes a dramatic shift... It's really absurd because if I'm manipulating a thing in one way and then I put it up on the wall, everything that I was directing just dissolves. Out of that rupture are the beginnings of a new narrative that I actually have nothing to do with.
Natasha: Makes sense. Like in the sandbox.
Liam: Yes and to that effect, I feel like this is when the paintings begin to assert themselves.
Natasha: You use, in terms of your process, this idea of repurposing. Can you address this?
Liam: This goes back to a point in my practice when I really came to the conclusion that I didn't want to lead a painting with ideas, instead I wanted the paintings to be led by their surroundings or immediate context. That was maybe 10 or 15 years ago. I had had a really frustrating day in the studio and just started to throw everything I had on top of the painting: chairs, buckets, debris, tools, anything I could find in the space. Then I began outlining and making marks around this material, almost as a way of taking inventory or creating an archive of what was in the studio.
I was trying to generate a series of questions regarding the nature of practice, on a kind of ontological level: What does it mean to be present with practice in the studio? How can this presence or presencing be sustained? And perhaps most important, what does this heightened state of presence look like, especially within the constraints of the two-dimensional?
Natasha: Like you were recording your process through the inventory of the objects. Where do these objects come from to begin with?
Liam: Almost all of these tools or images that you see are from things I found here on the land, in the pasture, the orchard, the redwood groves. Some were buried; some were under piles of farm debris that accumulated over the years. Almost all of these relics are broken or missing parts or simply just rusted away.
Natasha: Leftovers, scraps, vestiges... Objects that had lost their use value?
Liam: Yes, useless objects. But when you pick them up something new happens, there is still a charge. It's like what Heidegger refers to as the 'object at hand.' Once it's literally in your hand, or has your attention, it suddenly takes on quite a different presence than when it's not at hand.
Natasha: That's the title of our talk I have decided: Object at Hand. It says it all.
Liam: Ironically these defunct objects return to things that are 'useful' as they are repurposed as tools to make paintings. I'm looking at a painting that has a hatchet in it and a machete and those were used to clear the slope here, by the previous owners I imagine.
Natasha: Is there something about the ready-made that's happening as well?
Liam: I prefer to think about these objects as props. I pick these things up and move them around, like on a stage set. In this way it functions as a choreographic practice. Okay, how do we start? Well, let's not even ask ourselves that question, let's allow the space and the objects to direct us in how to move from one corner to the other or how to make a mark or gesture from one section of the painting to the other. The other intention here is to find a way in which the idea and action appear simultaneously, neither preceding the other. For me that's the biggest struggle in painting: how to make a gesture that is not premeditated.
Natasha: It's like these objects are indexing the action and referring back to painting because they have become embedded in the process of making the painting. Do you think about collage?
Liam: Yes but very broadly. I've been in a space many times where someone has asked me directly, 'Is this collage?' I don't think of myself so much as a painter as I do a builder. So these paintings are built, they are constructed. That's also my approach to colour. I don't have a relationship with colour in a traditional sense, each colour for me represents a certain density and a certain speed and that's how they're applied in the way that you would build a structure that you didn't want to fall down, you know?
Natasha: So in keeping with that, what is your relationship to time in terms of your process?
Liam: I connect the time problem to speed. And there is a very particular speed that I'm looking for, not just in my paintings but when I approach art in general, whether it's dance or film or literature. I'm really craving a certain kind of tempo. It's the reason that most of my paintings in the studio fail because I realise I've taken over the tempo of the work and for me that's the beginning of the end. This is also why I use these particular objects. I'm looking for a scenario in which the painting starts functioning in such a way that it establishes its own timing and then I'm just kind of moving around it and learning from it. I think these set of problems are based in time.
Natasha: You talk a lot about dance and choreography and obviously, movement. Can you talk a little bit more about that and how your paintings relate to the body and space?
Liam: Well, the quick answer is that they're extremely physical to make. I wish I were the kind of painter that could sit and then approach the painting and make a mark and then do some blending and then maybe sit down again and reflect on my actions. A lot of the processes that I'm using are quite gruesome and not much fun... There's this caustic mix of sand, alcohol, water—three substances that at an alchemical level resist each other. And sometimes I use oil... So with all these things being used together, it almost feels at times that in 90% of the life of making one of these paintings, I'm being pushed out or repelled.
Natasha: They are resistant.
Liam: Yes and so I'm constantly trying to get in the painting as it pushes me out.
Natasha: I like that. Getting into the 'unconscious' of the painting maybe?
Liam: Yes literally, as I want things to come from the inside of the painting in that way. That's the difference between a heavy additive mark and something that is thin and stains the surface, so that it penetrates the fabric and that's when I think things really begin to cook in a more kind of nourishing way, moving from the interior outward.
Natasha: You use the word nourishing and I can't help but think your studio and home are part of your biodynamic garden where you grow the bulk of your own food. You have been taking classes that relate to biodynamics with Dennis Klocek who lectures on numerous topics such as art, science, consciousness and alchemy.
Liam: A lot of what Klocek is offering are theories and ideas that are culled from Rudolph Steiner's approach to agriculture. I first started getting interested in biodynamic farming several years ago, largely inspired by my daughter's education and her school environment. And so slowly I've begun to make this analogy with the life of a studio and all the elements that go on inside of it with the basic concept of a biodiverse system. And this is also how I think of these tools. There is this shared reality that's going on in the studio and if I feel myself coming in and mandating it, I lose the potential of what could really be generated.
When I start to allow the paintings to direct each other, what becomes quickly apparent is their vital relationship to the studio itself. What follows is the appearance of a network, a mini cosmos that includes everything in the room, the dust, the objects the light, and this thing that inevitably rises up. It's definitely beyond me. You can maybe imagine the optimal biodiverse environment and whether it's on an ecological level or communal level, it only functions when things are in direct contact with each other and there isn't an isolation of parts or ideas.
Natasha: Biodynamics is a regenerative agriculture that goes beyond just sustainability—it is holistic and ecological as well as ethical. It includes a kind of reverence for the land and for water, for food, animals, and each other. It goes beyond sustainability—it's a regenerative agriculture. A lot of the language you use about your work is the same language used in biodynamics theory. Your studio faces your orchard and your gardens. Your relationship between the work that you do out there, tending to your orchard and all the different things that you are growing there are also happening inside the studio.
Liam: Absolutely. I mean, this studio-garden link is quite special and something that has been dreamt into the real. And it's more than a wrench in the machine, as it's really imploded my approach to practice. I'm frightened to use this word, but before I got into gardening I was controlling the outcome of my paintings. And what an ignorant way to enter the realm of garden, you know?
Natasha: You cannot control a garden.
Liam: No, you can, but you end up choking something and that's what I started to experience. So it took me a few years to just stop planting, or transplanting and pruning and instead to just simply watch and witness the plants. A friend, who is both a poet and a gardener, offered me some very simple advice during a recent visit, 'Why don't you just stop and observe?'
Natasha: Working on the land really seems to have changed your paintings.
Liam: They have definitely been touched by this experience. And at first I resisted it but eventually I began to welcome the shift as it felt unpredictable and foreign.
Natasha: But you are literally working in your garden and then going to the studio and then back in the garden. This must be such a different experience than working in a city like Paris, NYC or San Francisco where you have had studios.
Liam: Absolutely. I have even changed the entrance of both the studio and the garden so that they face each other. The concept of regenerative farming is perhaps what I want the studio to absorb the most, so that eventually in the studio I am witness to a practice that is self-generating.
Natasha: You are physically moving between the indoors and the outdoors. What other effects have you discovered from this?
Liam: Living in California with the extensive drought, the intense heat and wild fires, I have to constantly regulate the irrigation and think about our relationship to water.
Natasha: The work on the farm. Do you use any of the farming materials in your painting?
Liam: I use rags, sticks and trowels to apply the pigments. In general I'm drawn to the most quotidian sorts of tools.
Natasha: Quotidian. Like the plastic paint bucket you use to make the running moons.I think that's a really nice way of concluding this interview—with the image of the empty bucket turned upside down. We can conjure the Pina Bausch dance The Waltz of the Plastic Buckets where she choreographs around plastic utensils. I will never get the image out of my mind of the dancer who washes her hair in a red plastic bucket. Or a version of Waiting for Godot I saw in Paris where Vladimir and Estragon are both sitting on plastic buckets... waiting.
Liam: You put a bucket on the stage and all of a sudden it's magical as it reveals a presence. It's another character, it's living.
Interview courtesy Galerie Greta Meert, Brussels. Text: Natasha Boas.
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