Talking Passions: Felicity Inkpen

This week Adam met with the incredible talent that is Miss Felicity Inkpen. Quoted as a physicist with an art problem, or an artist with a science problem, Felicity’s inquisitive mind never fails to create art that constantly sparks conversation and pushes the boundaries, giving you an insight into her deeply curious nature. I managed to catch up with her in her studio to talk about science, art, and her latest exhibition, ‘L’appel du vide’.

Adam Chisman (TP). “As a young girl what did you want to be when you grew up and how did you get to where you are now?”

Felicity Inkpen (FI). “I can’t remember a time when I didn’t want to be an artist. My parents tell me that I would have been about three the first time I told them that was what I was going to do, so my love of art just seemed to come from somewhere unknown. But that was never quite enough for me unfortunately, I was never quite satisfied with just that idea. I had this vague idea that I was going to be a vet, and then a doctor, and then when I was thirteen I watched a documentary on space. I can remember very clearly, very vividly watching this, and my eyes getting wider and wider. And I tuned to my Dad and I said, ‘What do I need to do, to be able to look at images of stars and galaxies all day?’ And he said, ‘You have to be a scientist, you have to be a physicist’, so that was that, I was going to be a scientist. [Laughs.] I’ve wandered into other careers and dabbled. I worked in publishing for four years, but it’s always come back to art and science whatever I’ve done. Although, after studying physics at university, I’m now doing my PHD, which is actually in neuroscience. So I’ve got a little bit far away from just looking at stars, but it’s all within the same remit of being fascinated by things.”

TP. “Well, the large-scale and the small-scale, and the pathways between neurons, there may be correlations image-wise? And the patterns in nature that crop up again and again.”

FI. “Absolutely, and that’s definitely something that I think about probably too much. I kind of obsess over patterns, and analogies, and the maths that can be used to describe different systems, whether they are microscopic or macroscopic, or universal. I’m always bugging my friends in my neuroscience lab because I’m always saying, ‘Second law of thermodynamics. Best law!. Because I haven’t yet found something that doesn’t come down to the second law of thermodynamics, which basically says, everything gets more complicated. In a nutshell that’s what it says.”

TP. “What a beautiful law. Well you just had your exhibition ‘L’appel du vide’ recently and I really enjoyed it. Can you tell me a bit about the name first of all, and how it relates to the pieces?”

FI. “So ‘L’appel du vide’ literally means ‘the call of the void’. It’s the feeling that you get when you’re walking across a bridge, or you’re on the edge of a cliff, and that little voice in the back of your head says, ‘Go on, jump!’ And that idea absolutely fascinated me, and as soon as I started thinking about that I started making analogies and connections between different folklore and mythology. So you have Odysseus and the Sirens, you have Mermaids, you have Kelpies, which is a Scottish myth. You have all these different legends and folklore across different cultures which relate to this idea of being drawn to something that is destructive, and being irresistibly drawn. It’s not about being depressed, and it’s not about being self-destructive intrinsically, but it’s about having these different manifestations that draw you towards your own oblivion. I think that’s something that I definitely suffer from, and the fascinating thing about having this exhibition on has been all the different people who’ve come in and talked to me about their experience of ‘L’appel du vide.’ So one person might say that they see something disgusting and they wonder what it might be like to put it in their mouth, and another person says they’re at a bar and suddenly they want to punch somebody and they have no idea why. I’ve never felt the punch people bit but it seems like it’s quite a universal feeling. So with the artwork that I’ve been making my whole life, but in particular the last few years, I’m trying to look inside myself and find the parts of my personality that make me a bit uncomfortable, that make me feel a bit vulnerable. And it’s about trying to find the courage to put them on show and say, ‘Maybe it’s just me but..’ And so the whole exhibition was essentially my own manifestations, my own versions or sirens, or mermaids, or kelpies, the ones that kind of exist in my mind and saying, ‘This is what it looks like inside my head, when these self destructive, embracing-oblivion-type thoughts pass across it. What does it look like inside your head?’ So I’ve had so many great conversations with people this last week.”

TP. “Amazing. Have people been quite open about it?”

FI. “Yeah, it’s always terrifying to do something like that, to say to people, ‘This is what it looks like.’ Because you worry, and it sounds silly, but you think, ‘Are people gonna laugh in my face? Are people gonna say that I’m crazy?’ And the wonderful thing about sharing your own experience time and time again is that no one ever does that, people just say, ‘Yeah, me to.’ That’s worth it alone. It’s also wonderful and very, cathartic isn’t quite the right word, when you spend so long on creating these pieces of art, and you have such an obsession with it, and it’s such a big part of my time and my life, and you have to sacrifice other things right? When people say, ‘Have you seen that show on Netflix?’ and I’m like, ‘No.. No I haven’t seen that show.”

TP. “Because it does become a part of you doesn’t it, your connection with your own art. Everyone’s different, but it is a little piece of your soul that you’re bearing.”

FI. “Absolutely. I have a little trouble with the word soul, because as a scientist I’m not sure how well soul is defined, and how it’s interpreted by different people. But definitely that piece of the weird network of connections inside my head that makes me who I am, out there for people to see and connect with. And people do connect with it, which is just an absolute joy. And you want to be a bit cool, and you want to not, sort of, say that it’s joyful. You want be like, ‘Yeah, whatever.’ But it is, it’s just great. It’s just great that, when you’re an artist you have this absolute privilege that you can connect with so many different people. Everyone can relate to art, or can see themselves in art. And it doesn’t matter what part of society they come from, everyone comes in and you can have a conversation with them, and that’s really liberating, and yeah, it’s an absolute privilege.” 

TP. “Wonderful. And you work in several mediums including pen, oil and collage. Where did you develop your style and has it changed much over the years?”

FI. “Absolutely, it changes all the time. Well I didn’t go to art school, I went to university to do physics instead, so I am criminally untrained, and I am always waiting for somebody to turn around and say that I’m doing it wrong. But nobody’s done that yet. The collage is something that I’ve been doing on and off since I was about fifteen or sixteen. I really enjoy collage because it’s messy and fun for a start, but also, you have to have a vision in your head, you’re kind of aiming towards it, and nobody can see what you’re doing until you get there. So it’s quite fun to watch other people think, ‘What are you doing? You’re making a mess.’ Laughs. And then for it to suddenly come together and you’re like, ‘Ha ha.. told ya!’ I’ve got a collage of my Grandfather, and it took my three months to make because the pieces of paper are so small. People often say my collages look like oil too, and they have to get up really close before they say, ‘Oh, it’s not oil, it’s paper!’ Again, that’s fun, because you’re tricking them to look closer at stuff. Collage is great for the sense of play, and the big reveal at the end. The pen and ink.. sometimes I wonder if I’m just doing it because of my name? No that’s not true, and actually I’m rubbish with a pencil. You see other people that can create these magnificent works of total photo-realism with a pencil. I can’t, I don’t have whatever skill it is. I can do a quick sketch with a pencil, and it’ll look okay, but those really detailed, beautiful pencil drawings is not a skill that I’ve ever managed to acquire. The pen, I think the fact that it’s much more permanent, it requires that much more focus, and I really enjoy that focus you know. The fact that it’s a bit like meditation, to know exactly where to put that line. Because I don’t sketch things out first when I work in pen. I have the idea of what it should look like in my head, and I will spend a phenomenally long time thinking about every line, and every little dot should be, as I’m sure all artists do. That’s the thing, you have that obsession. The permanence of it. I really like that, and it itself is a kind of metaphor for jumping off the cliff. There’s no going back once you start doing a pen drawing like that, so I really enjoy the focus that pen drawing requires. Obviously oil paint is luscious, and just looks so good, doesn’t it. When it’s done well it looks so good, and when it’s done badly you want to cry.” 

TP. “Well it’s art. You’ve got to take the bad with the good haven’t you. How do you think your science background has influenced your art?”

FI. “Other people seem to differentiate between art and science, or to actually compare them and say that they’re opposites. I think that’s rubbish. To be a good scientist you have to be observant, you have to be objective, you have to be focused, you need to be methodical to a certain degree, ad these are all skills that you need to be a good artist. No good artist just does anything slap-dash, or anything without really caring, and it’s the same for scientists. The other thing I think they both have is that, I think they’re both very very creative, because you’re having to think of things that other people haven’t thought of before. They both require so much imagination. So when I’m thinking about neurons and braincells, I’m thinking about what’s actually going on. How the different molecules that are moving in and out of the braincell create the different currents that produce the different signals, and how those signals are encoded. It’s fascinating, but you have these great talks with other neuroscientists where you just sort of saying, maybe this, maybe that, and it requires a great amount of imagination. Art is the same. They both really help each other.” 

TP. “Amazing. Now your beautiful studio is in The Island, the studio complex and arts facility based in Bristol. Can you tell how you’re involved with them and any other Bristol projects you’re involved in?”

FI. “I joined The Island back in 2011, which is when I first moved to Bristol. I’ve had different studios across the building, but this is my favourite one so far, so I hope I stay here. It’s just such a wonderful community of people that you get to meet, so many different interesting people from all walks of life, all of whom are very open, and very up for a conversation. Nobody’s  closed off, so it’s very easy to collaborate, and I’ve had the privilege of being part of different group shows that have been exhibited here, and in different places across Bristol. I think the organisation of The Island is perfect, I really get on with the coordinators here. I think they pitch it just right, between being liberated and creative, but without it becoming complete anarchy and nothing of worth being produced. It’s pitched at exactly the right level so it suits me really well. Other projects? I am currently on the board of trustees for a charity called artists first. It’s a wonderful little Bristol-based charity. Essentially it’s a collective of learning-disabled artists, and as a charity we provide them with studio space, materials and exhibition opportunities. But the over-arching aim of the charity is so much more than helping artists to be artists, it’s actually about challenging preconceptions, because the members of the collective do have learning disabilities, but that does not mean that their art is any less worthwhile. And that’s what the charity is about, it’s about trying to change those preconceptions and trying to say to people that it doesn’t matter who you are or where you come from, if you’re making good art, then it’s good art, and your art is worth something. That’s a wonderful organisation to be involved in, and I feel very lucky to be a part of that. Last September I got very much involved in the Calais Refugee Solidarity Bristol Organisation that you might of heard about. Unfortunately I had to step back from that project because I had to do my PHD, my PHD was taking up too much time and I couldn’t do both. I was really really sad to say I’m gonna have to step back from this now, but I also think it’s important to know what your limits are and not promise things that you can’t deliver. But that was a really exciting time because I got involved with them right at the start, and we did this huge collection of different donations to take to refugees in Calais. It was great for so many different reasons; A, you’re providing relief for so many people who need it, and B, you’re seeing the people of Bristol all coming together, and you’re seeing the crazy amount of kindness that people have within them. I was kind of at the front line of that, and being bombarded with peoples kindness and generosity, so that was an incredibly lucky place for me to be. The other thing, and the thing that I was aiming to achieve, was changing the conversation around the topic of refugees, which I think we succeeded in because we managed to make it onto the 6 ‘o’ clock news on the BBC. That was pretty cool. It means that the conversation doesn’t become, ‘Oh, look at these immigrants wanting to steal our jobs.’ Instead it becomes, ‘Look at the humanity of all people, and look at what people in Bristol are ready and willing to do to acknowledge that humanity.’ It was great to be involved in that.” Smiles.

TP. “Amazing, that’s so uplifting. So finally Fliss, what do you have in store for us over the next few months?”

FI. “That is the hardest question. After spending this whole week being a bit sidetracked from PHD stuff with the exhibition, I’m back to the lab. I’m doing a whole load of coding at the moment to try and analyse some data that I collected back in October November time, and also to try and build some mathematical models of how neurons work, and things like that. So that isn’t related to art at all, but makes me feel just as excited. Laughs. And also it’s nice, because I’m a very visual person, I find ways of translating the maths into visual images, which I think is good because it helps to communicate the different ideas. I’m very excited to do that, and I was adapting my code ever so slightly earlier today, and making a whole load of pretty pictures, and sent them of to my supervisor in a really excited way. Laughs. In terms of art, I’m very excited to be thinking about something other than the embracing of oblivion. I have a list of different things that I want to start thinking about, things like trying to understand different mental conditions and depict them for example, and trying to think about my own physicality, and how I think about that. Like I was saying before, if you can put the things that you experience out into the open you can spark conversations, and that’s something I’m very interested in. Or possibly just following my own curiosity about a million different topics, that’s why I do what I do and why I feel very lucky to do what I do, both on the art side, and on the science side. Because essentially I’m an extremely curious person and I get to follow my thought down the rabbit hole. That’s what I do.”

Here’s a feature on Bristol24/7 called Talking Passions. It’s a Bristol-based interview series that hopes to inspire your creative side by interviewing passionate individuals in Bristol’s arts and music scenes. The driving force behind the series is a belief that within each of us is a creative soul with untold capabilities. It’s not always easy to follow your dreams and try to make it work, and it should be celebrated!

Started by local journalist Adam Chisman, and with links to various Collectives in the city including Liquifyah, The Coconut Collective, as well as Irish online magazine Ceol Caint, Talking Passions comes in two weekly parts, with brand new written interviews on talkingpassions.com and Bristol24/7 and audio interviews on BCFM’s The Bristol Music Show and Soundcloud.

If you’d like to get in touch with Felicity about her artwork or for anything science related, you can find her on Facebook, Instagram or Twitter.

If you’d like to know more about The Island studio and exhibition space you can contact them via the website.

Words: Adam Chisman (Talking Passions)

Pictures: Ceri-Wyn Thomas & ShotAway

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