“I would quite like a bit of a shout now.”

Sarah Praill: It’s been an interesting journey in transitioning from being a book designer for Thames & Hudson to spending more time as an artist. I stepped away from full time work in 2017 and joined HAUSPRINT, which has been an amazing community for me, enabling me to dive into my own artistic world. As a book designer you’re at the service of other people, you’re in the service industry, peeping behind the scenes of many fantastic artists’ lives – Howard Hodgkin, Paula Rego, David Hockney – so I worked on wonderful projects and with many well known, fascinating artists and institutions, but I was always peeping behind the scenes, and it came to the point where I thought, “I want to be the artist”.

I had a very dear friend called Andrew Vass who died and was a wonderful artist. He dared me to take the step, he said, “Sarah, you need to take yourself seriously as an artist, and go for it,” so in 2010 I did an MA in Fine Art at the University of the Arts. I have a background in drawing, and I realised I wanted to push further into the surface of things, I really wanted to explore printmaking, so I joined HAUSPRINT and it’s been a really wonderful community.

The title of my exhibition at HAUSPRINT is “To carry a feeling”. What does that mean to me? I did write this quite daring statement and I thought I’m going to actually say this is what it means to me and what images mean to me:

“Images are carriers of thought and feeling. A holding space. Like archeology, they evidence something beneath the verbal. The image is a stand in, it can talk back on our behalf. It can ask a question. It is a translation of one thing into another. An articulation. A talisman. A prayer or an act of incantation.”

With a background as a book designer for Thames & Hudson a lot of the influences of the discipline have spilled over into my work. I think that book design is about the juxtaposition and dialogue between things, and often between the text and the image. In my own journey there’s always a quarrel going on between text and image – does the image need text? What does the image do that the text can’t? This is the backdrop to a lot of my thinking in this body of work.

The reason they’re all on shelves is important because I’ve always felt that one image was never enough to say the thing that I was trying to say. Each image felt like a letter, or a word, so together maybe they’ll form a sentence. There’s something about the limitation of a single image and I think as an artist it’s the reason you get out of bed in the morning, because it’s never enough, it’s never saying the thing that you’re trying to get to. I do a lot of thinking in my studio (I work from home) and in lockdown I was going to have an exhibition that was cancelled, so my son-in-law put up some little shelves for me so I could curate my own show. I loved those shelves so much because I could play around and put things next to each other. 

I do love the playfulness of the dialogue between one thing against another and how they might amplify each other and inform each other. Almost by even comparing one to another, why that face is different than that face, or that one is better than that one, or that one evokes a different feeling. I feel that the image speaks back to me, and I like it – it’s as if the image emerges and it’s chatting to me – it’s asked me a question and then I can move onto the next one. I feel a strong relationship to them.

“Let me live, love and say it well in good sentences.” – Sylvia Plath, The Journals of Sylvia Plath

Q: So have you arranged these shelves to be like sentences then?

Yes, definitely. I’ve also put up texts next to the groups of images but I’m ambivalent about that. Do you need the words? Should an image be able to stand on its own? 

You have to let the image go into the world on its own and have its own interpretation and my question is, what do you explain and what do you choose to leave out, and does it matter? And who cares? And all those questions, all those monkeys come out of the wardrobe every time you’re making work and especially when you’re displaying work to other people, you have to confront how other people read it. A friend of mine bought one of these aeroplanes and he said, “Oh I think it’s to do with ecology and we’re never going to be able to fly an aeroplane again, and the background to the plane is the future,” and I was surprised. I thought, well, good for you. 

These works are quite personal and they come from the archaeology under my feet that I dredge up and they reflect different parts of my life. These were made when I became a grandmother, but someone said she thought the figure was like a pregnant woman, and the airplane was like a womb. It’s interesting how an image lands beyond its maker.

Q: With a background as a book designer, have you put together the images here purely visually? I’d like to ask what the connection is between the plane and the woman – it there a literal connection in your head or is it purely visual, and are we allowed to ask?

It’s about thought forms and it’s about thinking and remembering. The image was taken from a tiny figure that I’d seen in the Ashmolean Museum, and to me, she’s trying to pat her head and rub her tummy at the same time, and she’s quite bewildered by what’s going on. 

The aeroplane comes from a journey from Luxor to Aswan that I did 35 years ago when my oldest daughter was a baby and I saw these images of aeroplanes on houses in Egypt, which told people how they had gone on the Hajj. People had painted a plane or a camel, or even horses on their mud houses, to show how they’d got there. How they travelled to Mecca. I felt that was something special. Also I’d seen an inscription of a whale drawn like a map, so there’s something about the internal story within the inside form of something that feels important to me, and I felt like this plane embodied the strangeness of how I got here. I’m a grandmother, how did that happen? There’s the journey I’d taken with my daughter as a baby, and then this daughter had just had her second child. All of that’s in there, so it’s about thoughts and feelings and memory.

“The compensation of growing old was simply this; that the passions remain as strong as ever, but one has gained – at last! – the power which adds the supreme flavour to existence, – the power of takng hold of experience, of turning it around, slowly, in the light.” – Virginia Woolf, Mrs Dalloway

The other big influence of my life is when I used to draw with the Royal drawing School every Friday in the British Museum. I love grave goods, and inscriptions, and specially Greek lekythos, which have this beautiful chalky surface. A lekythos is a tall thin funerary pot that has the most delicate drawings on, and it’s this surface that holds the trace of something that’s faded. There’s something about the drawing of something on this surface that I love and it’s a been a huge influence on me. My drawing of objects in the British Museum speak across time of birth, life, death. I am so moved by them, these objects that carry something so deep of human experience. In that sense, my images are carriers of what’s been going on in my life and how I’m feeling. They are very personal works that are the backdrop to what’s going on consciously and unconsciously. 

Jennifer A. Gonzalez coined the term autotopography, how we use objects to map ourselves, and how we employ an autotopography through mementos – we all have objects that we surround ourselves with that have a narrative.  I think the image is a way of materialising memory. 

Someone else who’s really important is Andrzej Jackowski, whose drawings are now on at the Towner Gallery in the exhibition Drawing the Unspeakable. He wrote that he painted a space in which he could live and the image for me is that way of drawing something or making a space in which I feel I make sense of life. 

It feels a very important thing for me, making an image. It’s not just the depiction of something, it’s trying to mine the archaeology underneath my feet.

Q: The way you’re doing it, you’re harking back to history, it’s your history but it’s also a bigger, longer, deeper history that you seem drawn to, these ancient objects.

The 2013 exhibition Ice Age art was a big influence. John Berger talked about these bears that were found in the Chauvet cave, there was a mother bear and a baby bear, and they’d left their scratch marks on the wall, and it was like, I am here, I’ve left my mark and there’s something I think in human beings, we want to leave a mark, leave a trace, leave evidence of having been here in whatever way. There is this human need across history and time for all of us to put our mark down. That’s another backdrop to things.

When I was at Thames & Hudson I worked with this fantastic photographer called Roger Ballen. Many many years ago I’d stuck a photocopy of this image on my wall, which to me is like a drawing – it has the animal, you’re projecting something onto the animal and it has this drawn element with the coat hangers. Thames and Hudson asked me if I’d like to work with him on a book and I said, yes, I absolutely do. I went on to do six books with him. 

He was a geologist who went on to be a very successful photographer, and he sees his image-making as mining in a geological sense, mining human psychology and what is going on in the unconscious. He gave me a beautiful print of the rabbit image and I now have an original on my wall. So I feel that resonance with the geology, the archaeology of something that you can put into your work that comes up through your feet. 

In my exhibition, there’s a tray of things on a table which I feel is like the archaeology underneath all the work. It’s quite coded and veiled and I don’t feel I need to explain all of it but there are clues, it’s like an inscription or a code.  

“The word History comes from an ancient Greek verb ίστωρειν meaning “to ask.” One who asks about things – about their dimensions, weight, location, moods, names, holiness, smell – is an historian, but the asking is not idle. It is when you are asking about something that you realize you yourself have survived it, and so you must carry it, or fashion it into a thing that carries itself.” – Anne Carson, Nox

There is a quarrel within me about the personal. At art college when I was doing my MA they kept saying, “oh it’s the personal,” or “it’s so emotive, it’s emotional” and the message was you’ve got to have an idea, stop talking about your feelings, we can’t bear it. Now I think it’s shifted, you can talk about personal things, but I also think there is a question about what you choose to reveal and is it relevent or are you just being self indulgent? As artists, I think we all have those questions about who cares, there’s awful things happening out there, but it makes sense to me to make images, and I enjoy it, and I’m retired, and I think I can do what I like. I don’t have to try and sell my work if I don’t want to, and it’s my equivalent of the bear’s claw.

Q: What does a day at HAUSPRINT look like?

When I work here, I come with a huge pile of papers of drawings and photocopies and books all spilling out all over the place and I put it down and all day long I’m sifting and sorting things and looking and thinking and feeling. I listen to a lot of podcasts, and by about five o’clock, six o’clock I suddenly start making images. I pull out things that feel relevant to how I’m feeling on that day and then out of that starts to come an image that interests me, and then I repeat it over and over again. 

Q: Can you talk more about the images of women?

I’m quite intrigued by the mood of all these different women – some are cross, or fed-up, or tired, or bewildered, or whatever, but I’m quite astonished by how they emerge when you pull the paper back. So that’s a really important thing to me, to make iterations of the same thing. 

It’s like when you’re choosing a teddy bear, or a doll, when you’re a child, and you think, oh that one’s got a nicer face than that one, or why is that one looking grumpy? I feel that the image speaks back to me in some way and I have a conversation with it, and the ones that work I feel quite attached to, they’re important to me because I feel they’re reflecting my self or my mood or what’s going on in my head, or what’s going on in the background of my life. I feel it’s giving it some respect and it feels that it matters.

Q: What medium are you using, are you drawing straight away or are you printmaking?

I do monoprints, but I also do a lot of drawing. Like in the morning when I get up I just do a drawing, just a scribble of something and then I work back over them and look at them. Sometimes I can’t or don’t even remember how I made it, or why I made it, but it’s like a little diary or a notation of something.

Q: How does that then develop from the initial image?

The series of women came from a drawing that I’d made of a little figure, that I thought, oh look, she looks quite interesting – in fact it was from a little figurine of a man, but I’d made it into my thing, so I suppose it’s also about translating something. I think any image-making is an act of translation of one thing into another.

Q: It also feels like you’re telling stories. I think the top left image really works in what you were talking about and layering, and traces, and what the faint writing we can see might be and how she relates to it. I like the emptiness, but it’s not empty.

I was thinking at one point about Japanese ma space and the idea of the empty space containing something and how you fill it. The empty space is never empty, there’s always something in it and there’s the noise of something. Sometimes I’m quarrelling with figuration and moving away from being explicit or illustrative, so there’s a conversation going on there.

I am aware that book design is about the intervals and where things are placed on the page and that’s really strong. Now I want to get much grubbier and less perfect or less beautiful. There’s something I’d like to explore which is more provisional. From the new prints on bits of material in the rectangular display case I want to grow things much bigger and not to close things down. 

It’s very seductive, printmaking, with the intervals and the beautiful paper, and it has this trap I think, of being just beautiful, that you can be seduced by it. I’m now moving more into painting and exploring paint as a medium which has a lot of potential I think to be far more complicated and challenging, It has a different kind of potential for the emergent image.

Q: I think it’s very unusual the way you’ve positioned your images on the paper in this sequence and it looks very much like it comes from a book designer, but I wondered if it’s a purely visual thing or is there something else going on in the positioning of the images? Is there a reason they are pushed right up into this corner?

I see them as these absent minded women, so they are sometimes not wanting to be centred, they are moving through the space. That also interests me, the idea of moving through a space, my donkey rabbits are moving through a space from left to right, they are trying not to be central all the time because it’s easy to be very central, and I’m trying to push myself beyond that.

Q: It’s about moving away from the edge and expanding out and in printing the way you are, you’re taking away that parameter?

Yes, and the containment – sometimes I think things are too contained, because of the containment of everything and the way I present it. I had this Artist mentor last year and he said to me “the playground is where interesting things can happen. The classroom is where they’re shown.” 

I kept sending my uploads all done like a book design and he said, “Who do you think you are?” And I said, “Well, I’m a book designer actually”. He thought I was presenting my work as though it was high art or an art catalogue, but I couldn’t help myself but do that. He made a point that I thought was really important which was that it’s the playground, and the unknown spaces that are interesting, and we try to contain something because we want it so badly. It’s the classroom where the work of the playground is shown, but it shouldn’t be the classroom where it’s made. There is something that resonates with me about containment and playfulness, and something being beautiful and provisional. And all the time, as artists, I think we are quarrelling with these opposite things, and going from here to there and moving back again.

Q: I think also when you juxtapose something it feels a bit more safe, like there’s two things that keep each other company. If you have one piece that’s so strong, it’s bold, it’s daring, it has to be explained a lot more than if you have two holding each other.

Maybe it’s because they’re like whispers or they’re a bit quiet so I’m trying to amplify their noise, and that’s again hiding, not revealing. I feel they are very like a whisper and I would quite like a bit of a shout now.

Q: Also it makes you look again, and again, and again when there is more than one. 

I also felt one is never enough. Maybe it’s like a greediness, but it never felt satisfying to me to have just one. I think that’s something about the iteration of printmaking, you have a ghost image you can then go back into, because you get a second image that you can have another chance at. Even making monoprints you can take risks because you’ve got another one. It doesn’t matter if you wreck it. You can wreck that one over there but you’ve still got the residue of it left on the plate, so it pushes you on to take another risk.

Q: It feels to me that actually all the empty space is doing all the shouting. That’s all the stuff that you’re not saying.

There is something about empty space. My MA was called “presencing of absence”, so the empty space is an important component and how to activate space is something I’m often thinking about. And how something is held in space; the little donkey rabbits are held in space as if they’re in air, and that interests me – how you hold the thing in the figure-and-ground, I just call it space. The air around a thing matters to me, how that’s supported.

Q: Is there something in the ritual, and the rhythm of a ritual that’s important?

It’s very important. It’s also about the mindful or the meditative. I’ve got this luxury now to be by myself and enjoy my own company away from noise of family, and grandchildren, and my parents. There is a lot of noise in life and I really value that quiet coming here, it’s a very lovely space, it’s got the energy of other people working here, and you’re just tiddlypomming and thinking and dreaming. There’s not an eye for selling work, it’s just something that matters to me and I get pleasure from. It’s given me great joy, stepping away from work and stepping away from the noise in life.

“The fundamental quality of his being was absence.
My work is a way of working out my difficulties with myself and the world.” – Paul Auster talking to Eleanor Wachtel, Writers & Company

Q: Given infinite sources, time and everything else, would you add music to presenting your work, or would you deliberately decide to not have music?

I think it’s a really interesting question because years ago I saw an exhibition of Charlotte Salomon’s work and they had classical music playing that you could listen to as you went around the exhibition. The aural background to making this work is that I’m always listening to podcasts, I love listening to Eleanor Wachtel interviewing writers. I’m an insatiable consumer of literary sources, I’m always listening to something and that’s a great joy to me, it’s like I’m fed with a lot of literary references. I think it’s that noise I like, the noise of other people who are trying to make sense of things, and they use words to write it.

I think music is important too. I listen to Max Richter and I like rhythmic repetitive music, but nothing that’s too noisy or shouty. Leonard Cohen – I have a playlist called sad music. I collect sad music. I was learning to play the clarinet when I was 15 and who wants to play scales – you just want to play Mozart’s clarinet concerto, it’s so melancholy, because it’s about feeling alive. That’s what I think, I would have music that was making me feel alive.

Q: I think it’s interesting hearing you talk about how dense the underground of the work is and how light and airy and the colours are that you bring to the surface.

That’s important. It can very easily become emotional vomit. I don’t want them to be miserable images.

“We tell the stories we are capable of.” – Laurie Anderson

Q: I absolutely loved the aeroplane and the palimpset of the monoprint with all the drawing behind it and I love hearing you talk about the cave drawings, and of course we are a storytelling species, and they used to revisit the same sites thousands, sometimes five thousand years difference, with drawings on top on top on top, and you’ve really captured it in that one. I really loved hearing you speak about it.

I think there’s also a formal thing within the skinny line and the fatter line and the splots of the pencil shavings when they go through the press so you’re playing with that, because the black line comes forward and the little tiny ones go back so there’s a complicated conversation I’m having when I’m putting things down.

Q: I love it as well that you’ve inserted your stories, because human history is a visual history, it’s not writing, that comes much later, but you’ve inserted yourself into history.

I’m acknowledging the past and how I fit into the present and the past. At the British Museum you see these objects that really speak so profoundly across time. I’m so moved by a little pair of shoes or a bowl, a neolithic grave would have a pot that someone’s bothered to incise beautiful marks into and put a bead in there, and a lamp, and it’s that articulation, the attempt at an articulation to mark somebody’s life, to come to terms with death in an inadequate way, but that’s all we have, but that someone would dare to, the care that is put into a pot, right back in neolithic times.

Q: Your own work is very moving itself.

Q: How are you thinking about painting and how that might work in relation to paper, writing, images, like a book?

I’m finding that with paint, an image can emerge more and over time. I’m finding that the image is arriving through building up layers. I don’t set out to make a particular image. I’m in the foothills of painting. You can do things which in printmaking you can’t.

Q: Would you envision exhibiting in the same manner as now, like a sequence?

I suddenly realised that maybe a painting can do it in one. That’s taken me three years to realise, that maybe you don’t need ten images.

Q: You mean you can do ten in one painting?

I feel painting is more complicated and complex. I think printmaking encourages seriality, because you get a ghost, so you do one and you’ve still got something left on the plate and you paint the next one, so you’ve got an obvious something to keep going.

Q: I think there is something about printmaking and coming at it in layers, that excavation, that does feed directly into painting, they’re intertwined. They go together and perhaps help you to understand the painting as a process as well. It often isn’t a process, it’s fixed, but it can be a process in the same way.

Q: Will you make prints of your paintings?

Oh I don’t know, I haven’t done enough painting yet, but a lot of artists do do that don’t they? Going back and forth and inbetween. There are some paintings of the donkey rabbits and the zebra and elderly Madonna figure, so the motifs are being explored in different ways.

Q: Certainly these figures do look very painterly, and the backgrounds, they look like you could paint them directly on the wall, like frescoes, where they’re very flat but painterly as well, so you’re getting away from your pages, or even canvases, just go directly onto the wall. All you need is a nice church somewhere!

That would be fabulous. I went to study ancient Roman fresco techniques last year with an A-n artist bursary but I have n’t really had time to really conquer it yet as you have to do it when it’s not too damp and you can’t change things but the idea of that surface and wall painting is very interesting.

Sarah’s reference list

Jennifer A. Gonzalez: Autotopographies (pdf download)
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart: Clarinet Concerto in A major, K.622 (Iceland Symphony Orchestra)
Eleanor Wachtel: Writers & Company (CBS Radio)