Abstract
An interview between Paul Hetherington and Hephzibah Rendle-Short in London on 23 October 2013. Hephzibah Rendle-Short reflects on her joint practices as a visual artist and a psychoanalyst, and discusses points of connection between the two.
Paul Hetherington: I was reading the emails you sent me, and I was also reading your book. I thought we could start by talking about the book and the project it documents.
Hephzibah: The book was a part of an exhibition. It was an invitation by Clare Hall, a Cambridge college. I took various elements of what I was doing as an artist and brought them together: working with the available space in the college and what I had been doing with stah-scopes in my studio. These are objects that enable a viewer to look back at old work in the form of a painted image and, in doing so, something of the future is produced as a digital image. Also, because I had a long-standing relationship with the college, they were interested in the painting I had done previously. The book is not a description, it’s not an account, and it’s not even a diagram. It’s a nodal point of these intersections.
In the exhibition space, I had both paintings from the 1980s and images in my stah-scopes. The stah-scopes actually weren’t in the show but were the objects through which images could be viewed. I think what surprised me was that the whole thing seemed to be precisely about looking—the idea of being looked at, the gaze, how we look, how I look, how I’m looked at.
Paul Hetherington: I was reading the emails you sent me, and I was also reading your book. I thought we could start by talking about the book and the project it documents.
Hephzibah: The book was a part of an exhibition. It was an invitation by Clare Hall, a Cambridge college. I took various elements of what I was doing as an artist and brought them together: working with the available space in the college and what I had been doing with stah-scopes in my studio. These are objects that enable a viewer to look back at old work in the form of a painted image and, in doing so, something of the future is produced as a digital image. Also, because I had a long-standing relationship with the college, they were interested in the painting I had done previously. The book is not a description, it’s not an account, and it’s not even a diagram. It’s a nodal point of these intersections.
In the exhibition space, I had both paintings from the 1980s and images in my stah-scopes. The stah-scopes actually weren’t in the show but were the objects through which images could be viewed. I think what surprised me was that the whole thing seemed to be precisely about looking—the idea of being looked at, the gaze, how we look, how I look, how I’m looked at.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 1-22 |
| Number of pages | 22 |
| Journal | Axon: Creative Explorations |
| Volume | 5 |
| Issue number | 2 |
| Publication status | Published - 2015 |