Anna Mays in her studio, photo courtesy of Anna Mays
Damaris Athene: Can you tell me a bit about yourself? So were you born in Dublin?
Anna Mays: Yeah I was born in Dublin and lived here all my life until I was 18 and then I went to study Fine Art printmaking at the University of Brighton, which I completed during the first wave of the pandemic. I was planning on going traveling after that but then everything happened at once: there was a lockdown, I just finished my degree, and I had to move out. So I'm back in Dublin, trying to figure out where to go next from here balancing part-time work and making art.
DA: How was it finishing your degree in the pandemic? That must have been really weird?
AM: At the beginning it was weird because we were all a bit frightened. We'd never had anything like this before. I had come home to surprise my Mum for her birthday and I ended up staying there for nine weeks. I didn't get back to Brighton before the studio closed and my friends had to clear up my studio for me. So it was all really strange, but I found ways to adapt to working at home. I came out with a whole load of work and ideas, but some of it still feels quite unfinished. I'd love to go to a printmaking workshop and do some of it properly.
DA: Were there any pieces in particular?
AM: Yeah, a piece called ‘Transcendence’, which is a shadow assemblage. It's made from radiology imagery. I collaborated with a radiologist who was so helpful and provided me with anonymous scans and my own brain scan. I had a CET scan of a thorax, which I was able to 3D render with medical software and print out onto perspex using a home printer. I chopped up the prints and when I stuck them to the wall I realised the lights above were casting shadows resulting in a shadow-y butterfly-y piece. It was at an interesting time because the piece involves lungs and is about something very tangible becoming intangible, referencing ideas of lost touch. I reflected afterwards and thought, Okay, this is at a time where there's a virus that's attacking your lungs and, you know, we're all deprived of touch which is something that plays such an important role in our day to day lives. So whether that was subconscious or not, I don't really know. I would really like to resolve it, screen printing it onto thicker sheets of perspex.
‘Transcendence’ 2020, Digital Print on Perspex
80 x 90 cm
Photo courtesy of Anna Mays
DA: Could you tell me a bit more about your practice?
AM: Yeah! So, I make work that circulates around themes of the human body and the position of the body in contemporary Western society; how our perspective on it is being shaped by rapidly advancing technologies and science and medicine. I also try to explore some of the ideas around the synthetic and transformational body. I explore the internal and external body through digital realms such as the microscopic and radiological where the body is in an infinite and timeless state. But, also through more physical work, which have intimate, raw and direct values and that incorporate transitory materials, subject to time, decay and change. I combine those avenues of making together to form strange relationships between internal, external, and micro/macro. I look at the micro as a little universe of cells and enzymes and stuff that lives inside us and the macro being the outside world. I feel like today we're so absorbed in the macro that we completely forget about our internal bodies until we're reminded of it in the case of something being wrong, like we're sick and then we freak out, because we're so detached and disconnected from it. It's that feeling of detachment and the idea of our insides being this unknown space that I try to explore in my work.
DA: So many things you said there resonate with my work!
AM: *laughs* I love that.
DA: Can you speak a bit more about your process?
AM: Yeah. I have an etched steel plate, which I use to cast sheets of latex like for my light boxes. I would start off with an imprint of my body on fabric, which I’d then expose, in screen printing, and then print. Then I’d scan it, extract it, fragment it and expose it again, repeating the process. Finally I’d screen print varnish onto the steel plate to etch.
DA: I think I'm following, it's sounds very complicated! When you're making the imprint onto the fabric, are you painting yourself? Painting the fabric?
AM: I cover myself in oil, print my body onto the fabric and then dust the sheet with graphite and charcoal, and then the image will appear. Then that will block out the light when I'm exposing it for screen printing and form the image. I use these etching plates to then rub with graphite and pigment and dust and ash and then I pour latex on top of it. So I end up with these prints trapped in latex. Then latex as material is just yeah, well its non rigid so I can make my light boxes from it, and do weird things with it.
Screen printed imprint on tracing paper rubbed with graphite, ash and dust, photo courtesy of Anna Mays
DA: Does it degrade?
AM: Yeah, it does. I've already seen my sheets start to change, which I really like because they've got this life of their own that I can't control. The idea of using the latex is to reference the real the living body, something actually changing. I then to use that against digital work, which is the complete opposite.
DA: I think it works really well having that contrast. It's interesting what you're saying about the digital having an infinite quality to it because there's so much inbuilt obsolescence within technology, and we’re constantly upgrading to the newest format or device. It's strange how things disappear in a way that can be hidden from us.
AM: Yeah, that's a really interesting way of looking at it. I've never thought of that before, actually. I guess I'm purely looking at the way the body transforms from the physical into the digital and the reaction I have towards how it changes, or in fact doesn’t change. I can return to the same digital image and it won’t have changed whereas my actual body will. The reason I use my own body all the time is because it's accessible to me. I can imprint my body, look at it through the microscopic, and through a CET of my own brain. It's unusual having different bodily relationships to these processes. The imprint is quite an intimate thing. I actually feel quite connected to it because it’s a result of direct contact. With the microscope, I guess there is feelings of distance and detachment because there is literal separation put in place through the lens and from the screen. They can look quite dreamlike. Looking at my brain through the CET is almost the scariest. It's really a reduction of me into this vessel for someone else to understand in the most medical terms. It completely separates the person from their body and there is a total sense of depersonalisation, it’s simplified and broken down as much as possible. It becomes this really futuristic looking thing.
DA: Yeah, totally. You're never gonna look at that MRI and be like, that's my prefrontal cortex!
AM: Yeah, exactly.
DA: Maybe this would be a good opportunity for you to talk about your use of different media a bit more? I’m thinking of the piece you make with the film and plastic sheets.
AM: Yeah, that’s ‘Clinical’. I don't want my work to be about the figurative body, it is more about expanding beyond its physical state and to look at deeper questions beyond that. So I feel like sometimes the right thing to do is for the work to be more experienced, rather than seen. Installation feels like the right way to communicate some of the ideas behind my work. When there's the combination of senses involved, it can allow sometimes for deeper, well more unique, takes on a piece of work. Sometimes you want to overwhelm or disorientate that’s not to say its necessarily always going to be pleasant! A lot of the work I make is to try describe how it's our occupation of the body that comes to perceive and understand the sensory world.
Video of ‘Clinical’ by Anna Mays
DA: Yeah I completely agree that if someone's having a physical experience with something, you're getting so much more, you're getting all of that sensory input. It completely makes sense with the things that you're exploring. What is it that you're working on at the moment?
AM: I'm making an 8ft light box, big enough to step inside. It’s taking ages because the latex sheets have to dry outside, which is not ideal during the winter months. The idea for it combines two previous pieces of work that I've made; 'Expansion', which is a latex light box and that installation ‘Clinical’. The idea is that you'll step into the light box and the latex is illuminated. It transforms from looking like decaying flesh to looking a bit like alabaster stone, which is this marble that's used in sacred places. It looks like it has some sense of importance, which comments on that celebration of life. For 'Clinical' I collaborated with my boyfriend Jack Idiens who is a sound artist, and we made this body-scape from recordings of bodily sounds, like scratching, chewing and swallowing, which he then synthesised and abstracted. We're gonna make another one for this light box that will be interactive allowing you to change the bodily sounds.
DA: That's very cool.
AM: I struggled with the latex for so long. I had such an attachment to them because they were such intimate things. I kept having ideas for presentation and quite often the effect was gore and horror and that was really not what I was trying to do. Thankfully, the light box just happened one day.
DA: Were there any particular artists you were looking at? Or did it spontaneously happen?
AM: Spontaneously. But, now I'm actually thinking about it, a friend of mine Emily Diamond who was studying sculpture at Brighton while I was there and is the latex Queen of Brighton, casts trees whole trees with latex. She had an exhibition where she had her massive tree cast and lit it in some way with a mirror underneath it. The work she makes is amazing. Yeah, inspiring for sure.
Anna casting latex outside, photo courtesy of Anna Mays
DA: Are there any other artists are you particularly take inspiration from?
AM: I'll start by saying Dorothy Cross, an Irish artist. I remember when I first started making work with the latex and was looking inside ears and stuff, I was thinking, Okay, this is getting weird. Maybe I was somewhat embarrassed of it at some points and didn't really know how to show people. But she helped me to embrace the strange, she uses things like cow udders in her work! I remember listening to an interview with her and at that point thinking, Yeah, fuck it!
DA: Go for it!
AM: Exactly. Yeah, so she's amazing. Camilla Hanney is another one. She’s actually my best friend's sister but she reminds me of Dorothy Cross in some ways. She does really beautiful installations. The ones that particularly amaze me are her floor installations where she dusts bone, dust, ash and I’m pretty sure blood as well through lace and makes these impermanent, fragile installations on the ground. They're absolutely gorgeous.
DA: It sounds amazing!
AM: Yeah, she's really interesting. Another three ladies are Helen Chadwick, Ana Mendieta, and Eva Hesse. All died far too young sadly. But yeah, they're incredibly inspirational.
DA: A great bunch! This is a difficult question – what's your favourite piece that you've made?
AM: I'd say 'Expansion', the light box. I think particularly because I struggled with it for so long. It's from that I've had the most inspiration for future pieces, seeing how it transformed from something quite grotesque to something that felt quite meaningful. It felt like an important moment for me, trying to address those deeper questions of being human, not just about our physicality, but it got me on to thinking about the stars and religion and things that we don't know.
‘Expansion’ 2020, Latex, Ash, Dust, Pigment, Graphite, Charcoal, Wood & lamp
80 x 120 cm
Photo courtesy of Anna Mays
DA: What drew you to making work about the body? Was there something particular that triggered your interest into that disassociation that we have in terms of medicine and technology?
AM: When I was in school and in my foundation I was most engaged in drawing people, figures and bodies. Then that led me onto doing imprinting. I think it was the primal effect of imprinting and what that felt like that drew me in. I remember watching Anthony Gormley speaking in a documentary about how art began, how people were trying to leave traces of themselves to try to understand their place in the world and to understand time. I thought that was really interesting. My dissertation spoke about the imprint quite a lot, how you leave a trace and it is yours, but it's also not yours at the same time. That something that is detached and separated from you is still yours. I kept developing the work until I got on to using the digital, I think I began to feel my own sense detachment looking at the body in this way. Maybe it is more personal than I thought it was. I used to be a hypochondriac and I would think I was dying all the time. I was always sending myself to the doctors thinking that there was something really wrong with me. So maybe it's just me trying to connect back a bit more.
Decaying latex, photo courtesy of Anna Mays
DA: Do you feel that you're a lot less like that now that you feel more connected to your body?
AM: Definitely. I think that probably came with age because I only started making work about it slightly after being that way. I think another trigger was doing research into things like transhumanism and seeing how we're living so much longer and how the human body body is actually changing with technology. Honestly, there are so many amazing benefits of it, but then there's also that point where you start to feel a bit skeptical and just hope it goes in the right way. I actually saw one thing, which I thought was really disturbing. It’s a patch that you put on your skin with an LED display that would show your heartbeat, your blood pressure and apparently your emotions as well so it could tell you when you're angry or stressed. I thought that that's the pinnacle, this definition of being detached from yourself. You know, when you can't tell how you're feeling? Well obviously sometimes you can't tell how we're feeling but not to the point that we need a little device to tell me okay, I must be sad now.
DA: Next level mood rings! I don't know if you had those when you were younger? *laughs*
AM: *laughs* I was so into mood rings!
DA: It's weird, isn't it? All these things we want to do to ourselves, all this measuring...Well Anna thank you so much. It's been so lovely meeting you.
AM: Thanks for talking to me.
