MS: The use of newspapers as both material and subject matter sits within a strong art historico Schwitters and Warhol. Yet the way that newspapers have often been appropriated in the past has been about the use of found text and image. Your work cancels out the text and the image so that it becomes something other. There seems to be a tension in your work, between the political gesture of censoring or cancelling out the news and the simultaneous production of an aesthetic object. Would you say this was true? AF: I’m interested in the sense that newspapers are already a kind of edited, manipulated information… that there are differences of political bent within newspapers, that there is supposedly one left leaning, and one right leaning and others which position themselves in the centre. And yet there’s not such a great range of information portrayed, just subtle differences. By destroying or compressing the newspapers, you take away their power lead as an information carrier… the thing that gives you the information. At first the piece retains the sense of being a carrier, but it quickly becomes thwarted by the process and switches into something else. In a sense there is a transformation between the destructive political gesture and the creative process. It is both politically and formally significant that the pieces are not solid black; that they have quite an inflected surface, with lots of different colours and ghostly images coming through. In a sense, what is left is a residue or composite image where unpredictable or chaotic elements are made explicit. MS: Are you interested in a kind of random aesthetic then, in the idea of a sort of entropic uniformity? AF: Yes, the aesthetic that is generated by cancellation and exploring the point can be reached with a kind of randomness. Like a lot of people I guess, there is the potential to get stuck in a trap, where I can’t find a way to make an image, so I’ll find something which exists and use that to bite through a set of rules, to create a new image. It’s sort of a way out of subjective decision-making… but then I end up finding other subjective forms and I am always trying to find a way of marrying the two together… this rigorous structural side and then this much looser sculptural aspect to my work where the subjective always comes in quite strongly. Miria Swain
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