Interview with Gaynor Evelyn Sweeney: Art – Flesh and Philosophy.
Written by Victoria Samantha Smith
Photographs Gaynor Evelyn Sweeney © 2007.
28 May 2007.

Gaynor Evelyn Sweeney, a visual artist infamous for her live art interventions and founding of Transvoyeur, is one of the most proactive contemporary artists I have encountered. She can not be described as conventional, but explores a wide variety of media and technology in her creative and live art practice.

Some perceive her art and interventions as eccentric and at times her work touching on subjects most would prefer to avoid. Her art maybe explicit and provocative to the sensibilities of conventional society, but they motivate further investigation of the self and the subject matter. Her work is fusion of socio-cultural annotations, including subjects of science and arts in a visual framework of visual language and how art is experienced.

Her work ranges from her interventions of standing naked in the Louvre (Paris, France) by the Mona Lisa with the words inscribed across her body, ‘Je suis art’. This was titled ‘Ars Gratias Artis’, translated from Latin, ‘Art for Arts Sake’ (2001-2). A commentary by Sweeney of the socio-cultural relationship of the body politics versus the genre of canons in art and history.

These interventions of institutions, art and architecture formed an earlier part of her live art, but she is also an established painter and sculpture in Fine Art, commissioned by several dignitaries and private clients in Cheshire and in the South of England (1986 – 2000). Indeed, her creativity stems back to her family, who are each practitioners in one form or another.

Smith: When did you first become interested in art and recognised yourself as an artist?

Sweeney: My interest in art goes way back. My father is an artist and it is something both my siblings and I were inducted into from a very young age. There is not a time I do not remember life being without art, as my first recollections either relate to observing my father paint, him teaching or sitting as models for him. It is rather amusing, because rebellion for us in my family meant going to get a normal job, where as those raised in conventional families would perceived the aspirations of artists as such.

Art in my family is a generational thing. We were brought up with it and previous generations were involved in one form or another as artists, such as painters, commercial artists, sign writers and sculptors. The dilemma about art is if it is in you then it will come out. Maybe a bit of a cliché, but each in my family have all experienced similar and we have each returned to creativity in one form or another. To say ‘when did I recognise myself as an artist’ is a difficult one, because there is no specific moment, rather it is in the family.

It is expressed in many ways, both in philosophical debates, combined with different political and ethical beliefs we each hold that influence our independent practices to the how we choose to create something. Although saying this, most of my siblings and I will put our hands to most things. Each of us have inherited in one way another the passion for creativity from our parents and our individual beliefs equally as strong, that arguments in my families household tend to be on opposing ideologies, rather than normal family arguments. Saying this though, we all very close too and the family is the core element to who we each are.

In school though I was always in my own world, I would do things spontaneously and sensory orientated. I remember reading the word ‘sentience’ and then the work of Descartes, particularly the term, ‘I think, therefore I am’.

I became fixated at thirteen what these meant. I would instinctively do things that to others would seem irrational, but I had my naïve implicit reasons. For example, one early spring, the snow had come late that year. The weather changed drastically to a blizzard and once calmed down everyone left the cover of the school. I remember looking up, only seeing the purple haze in the sky and the blanket of white snow, not seeing anyone, but only hearing in a distance children squealing with the cold or giggling as they made snow balls. I stepped out, removed my shoes, and walked out with my eyes closed. The walk home was only fifteen to twenty minutes, but I walked it completely with eyes tight shut and my feet numb with the cold. My own rationale was care of Descartes. My obsession of ‘I think, therefore I am’. I wanted to experience my physical awareness in the space I moved by my feet touching the extreme cold and only but with that.

These philosophies from a young age were due to my parent’s influence and their belief all of us should be well read. Indeed, I remember turning thirteen and my father introduced each of my siblings and I to all the various philosophical and political theories, publications and texts, stating ‘… you have five years until you vote and before you make you choice of your beliefs you need to understand …’. Even now, my parent’s home has one room with every wall filled with books and a tendency I have inherited. I have my own room with an array of books on philosophy, arts, history and much more. This is one of my passions, as I believe it is the greatest thing to learning. Indeed, I can become critical if I see a book being defaced, but all humans have their individual hang-ups and that is one of mine petty ones. I became fixated with Marx and Hegel and by the time I was fifteen years old declared myself a Communist and Atheist. I remember arguing with my parents and they stated this is ‘but the arrogance of youth’.

Smith: Can you explain your artwork?

Sweeney: At the moment, my art is set around live art. During my academia on the Fine Art Degree, I decided to remove the traditional art practices of painting and sculpture to the basic elements of what constituted much of my art, which was the human form, both in context, concept and critical analysis. I had explored performance sporadically before this, but made the conscious decision to pursue the art through the body. From 2001, I had already started to exhibit and initiate performances throughout the Northwest of England, both in a gallery context and the urban environment. I then considered the canonisation of the body and flesh, whether implicit or explicit, and how this has been institutionalised and commodified through historical reference and media. This still forms the focus of my art, but has extended to one of contemporary issues.

My line of enquiry has usually evolved from the critical analysis of socio-cultural and political factors, ranging from the human body, origin, existence and sentience and how these relate to civilisation. From what forms our biological edifice comparable to the structure of society and the semiotics of media and cultural expressions of postmodern life. My work has been both within a gallery context and to the urban space of a city, but other live interventions have transpired in the Louvre (Paris), the Museum of Modern Art (New York), the Tate Modern (London), the Brandenburg Gates (Berlin), the Little Mermaid (Copenhagen) and so forth. I have had work included in the Performance Art Festival (Cleveland, Ohio), the Liverpool Biennial 2002 and 2004 and other festivals and exhibitions in Tokyo and New York.

Critical analysis provides the structure to both inform and enlighten my performances, some of which become critiques themselves of contemporary art and culture.

I have been fortunate to collaborate with some exceptional artists in my early professional development. These have included working with artists, such as Guillermo Gomez Pena in Excentris, Robert Pacitti in Finale, Sumer Erek in the Bath, Alexei Kostroma and others.

Smith: You are renowned for your live art and interventions in various spaces. What subjects or genre inspires you to produce a performance?

Sweeney: My interests have never been one singularly aligned to the arts. Although I adore going to museums and galleries and getting lost in someone else’s work, my passion extends to other subjects, including history and science. Significantly technology and new advancements.

I like to explore new media, whether with various digital media, such as video or photography and at times web based projects. I have looked at more alternative modes of expression, such as robotics, holography, lasers and optical engineering, through to my more recent interest of genetics. I am still exploring this subject and inspired by many artists, such as Eduardo Kac and others, who have tested the both socio-cultural and scientific boundaries.

Smith: You have combined various media to your photographic work, including live art and further through digital video media. Can you please describe this and the relationship across your art practice of the live art element and your significance of the various recording approaches?

Sometimes these various subjects can form the research of the concept, which maybe communicated through another process, such as live art, digital media or installations. Other times I may include the actual technology within the art itself. Depends really on the nature of the project.

I am very much inspired by history and philosophy, as well as my contemporaries, and will embody at times visual references relative to the subject, concepts or theories.

There is for obvious reasons an explicit side to my work, as the naked human form is used. A lot of the time my own, but I have employed models, including male and female forms as the subject too. I did a lot of this in my earlier work when I would look at all sides of the spectrum on gender politics of the human form. A lot of my new work has looked at both again, but this is yet to be finalised and shown, as it is still in development.

Smith: What artists have inspired you and why?

Sweeney: It is not only artists that have inspired my art, but a range of research material, such history, philosophy, science, sociology and much more.

I read a manifold of other material from Homer, Socrates, Plato, Darwin, Einstein, Archimedes, Oppenheimer, Victor Hugo, Cervantes, Zola and on and on. Later I started to read things from Mary Wollstonecraft , Lucretia Mott, Emmeline Pankhurst, Madame Marie Curie, Anas Nin, Hannah Arendt, Simone De Beauvoir, Iris Murdoch, including anything and everything I could on historical females, such as Cleopatra, Saint Joan of Arc, Boudicca, Marie Antoinette and more. In one way or another, these have both inspired and shaped the person I am now and indeed my artwork.

Myself, I tend to be inclined to fallen heroes or heroes from the ordinary of one form or another, such as Boudicca, Saint Joan of Arc, Ghandi, Socrates, Karl Marx, Anne Frank and many more. A lot of my art over the years has been founded on these various influences. Again a peculiar and idiosyncratic combination, but all with something extraordinary and yet still human about them. Indeed the drive of beliefs that found civilisations, not merely in a religious context, but more inherent than that. I perceive the constructs of religion as artificial and spirituality as something separate and down to the individual. Not to be preconceived by scriptures textually out of historical context. Although in my work, I do reference at times certain visual dialogue cognitive to western culture. Those ideologies which informed the self of time and place and I suppose go all the way back to my teenage years to walking home in the snow with no shoes; wanting to understand the physical experience in the meaning of the idea imbued by Descartes. Maybe, it is not surprising from this one moment, where I employ my body for an experience of an idea that I end up doing performance art some nearly twenty years later.

Artists who inspire me, and to simple put it, test my mind, body and soul, without trying to sound to passé, are ones like Orlan, Franko B, Guillermo Gomez Pena, Stelarc, David Hoyle and many others. They make me think of who I am, where I am and the greater concept of spatiality of society, history and where each of us are in the line of existence. David Hoyle, who in the early to mid nineties was Divine David on television and presented a programme of alternative video shorts. I was working in an office then and every week I would tune into this one programme. Normally I hate television and have the attention span of a gold fish with it, unless it is something that particularly intrigues me. A few years later, I actually watched Hoyle in a gallery in Liverpool (England). I was grinning like a Cheshire Cat and in awe. I thought to myself: ‘Well! Bloody hell! Who would have thought!�

Smith: What subjects shape and influence your work and how?

Sweeney: Anything and everything I suppose and has relevance during the research process of developing a new idea. However, as a concept evolves it is refined down to the final piece. It could be something that touches on an historical source, but combined with new technology. For example, the recent work done for the Independents Biennial 2006 was set on genetics. However, this was structured through a series of live performances with an installation comparative to the sterile environment of a surgical space, but the mass of folds in the material representative of paintings in the High Renaissance period. This was done purposely, because during this time in history too, art and science were integral in new ideas realised. Art was something to epitomise it.

I suppose this piece I refer to is the concept of the ideal too in post modern society. Significantly, as it was a consideration of the social understanding of choice on the subject of conception and donation.

Albeit the ‘set-up’ of the installation where my own position was obtuse, legs spread and in one hand a meat baster and held between my legs a mirror, which reflected the central point of my genitals. The reflection is society looking back at itself on this subject of donation and the meat baster recognisable as the common tool for self-insemination on the subject of donation and conception. It is rather a painful subject, because we tend to idealise the idea of conception and when those who do not have the ability rely medical intervention, the reality is blatantly exposed and experienced. The end product of this performance is a digital short and a set of life size images.

This piece is a social commentary on the societal intervention of the subject of conception and the fundamental practice of genetics. There are several constructs in this work which explore intervention of the body, not only the literal of inception of the meat baster, but the temporal, those more intrinsic to the individuals who rely on such methods. The piece is justly titled ‘Darwinian Donation (DIY)’. The next stage of my work looks at the more hierarchal approaches of donation in terms of genetics and the precepts of scientific and governmental policy and practice. The simplest form of genetics in an historical context is when humans intervene themselves, such as selective breeding, whether by humans or human intervention of other creatures.

Smith: What motivates you to create through the various digital media and performance media? Is there a defining difference or do the two interrelate significantly?

Sweeney: Digital media is one of those points of technology that permeate everything in life, indeed art as well. Art is itself takes from technology, life, experience, concepts, etc., to derive a sense of something. Whether it is photograph or video digital media, it is used to both document and archive my work or then edited to evolve into something other.

Although, at times I have combined an earlier performance and modified it with digital media to form an installation, as part of live art piece. Simply to test parameters on the concepts of spatiality. It really depends on the piece though and each piece is research and derives differently.

Smith: Do you use any other media as research source or in production of your art?

Sweeney: It depends on the piece. As stated, I have employed an array of different media. The commonality in them all is the body.

I have used so many different and diverse sources of media at times it is hard to keep track of what I have done. I have used things as simple as paints or pens for inscription, whether on the body or something else. Through to more complex and technological approaches.

I like the hybridisation in my work, not centralising it to one core theme, but to try to explicate the concept of lineage by influence. To try to imbue a line of enquiry that in some way encapsulates how everything is connected and interrelates. Moreover, without one element the other would not exist. It is impossible to derive everything, but rather those elements significant to the core subject or concepts of the work.

Generally, when I start an idea I am open to possible sources to enable the idea to be realised.

Smith: What do you plan for the future as an artist in your professional practice?

Sweeney: My current research and for two years has related to genetics. This I will be continuing with for another two years. Part of it relates to my academic studies at the moment, but is forms my professional interests too.

I do have this hankering though to return to painting for a time, but I think this will be a private pursuit when I have spare time away from my main practice with live art.

The next two years are going to be quite busy, as I have several things in the pipe line. Although I have been working in a lot of collective initiatives through Transvoyeur, which have been immensely rewarding, I will be focusing more on my independent practice to finalise the last stages of this recent research I have been pursuing.

The new work involves working with a geneticist and engineers to realise to the fullest potential what I envisage.

Smith: What are the positive and negative experiences of being an artist?

Sweeney: The role of an artist is like any other job. It comes with both positive and negative attributes. The most positive quality for me is having the liberty to actually do something I adore and moreover to be with like-minded people.

The obvious negative one is the financial restrictions an artist experiences. Basically, an artist is some who is self-employed and with this comes the need for insight and understanding of business. This is something the art schools need to consider more when students are finalising their degree, because there is no actual infrastructure in place to provide knowledge needed for the basics of the business side. It would be a good idea for universities to put into place a module that teaches the fundamentals of business practice.

Most artists end up in teaching or lecturing, because of the instability of an income. There are obvious things like commissions, residencies, etc., but these realistically are few and far between and hence why most go into education of one form or another. It is an occupation one has to go in with ones eyes open, because the most of the time you will self-subsidise new work being researched and developed.

It is important to be focused and committed too, because it is a role that is dependent on self-discipline and motivation.

Smith: What do you want to be remembered for?

Sweeney: This question I think is amusing. It is the epitome of all questions for an artist and that of the notion of fame and money too. I think regardless of all these ideologies of how a successful artist is measured by society, the bottom line is that one has to enjoy it. If I was to be remembered for anything, I think I would like it to be for simply being me.

Not the pretentious façade, which can permeate the arts. As the American's refer to it as BS. I cherish life and appreciate people to be themselves and this is how I would want to be remembered by those who knew me. I can not control how others view my work, as this will inevitably change in the historical context it is viewed.

I remember my first interview years ago. I had a fixed quizzical expression on my face. I think the interviewer misinterpreted my demeanour; rather it was a case that I found the whole process strange. I perceive myself in my head as merely ‘me – Gaynor’. I love art, but art is a material product of experience and experience comes from life. I think this is where a big mistake is made in the arts and there is too much self-adulation and undeservedly self-proscribed.

For further information on Sweeney and her art:

E-mail: ges1967@hotmail.com
Website: www.gaynorevelynsweeney.co.uk

For future events Sweeney is involved with Transvoyeur:

E-mail: transvoyeuruk@hotmail.co.uk
Website: www.transvoyeur.com