Dr. Jo Melvin is a professor in fine arts and feminisms at Chelsea College of Art in London, director and curator of the Barry Flanagan estate. Joe is also an art historian, a writer, a lecturer, a filmmaker, a curator and an exhibition maker.
Éadaoin Glynn chatted to Jo in The Warrior Artist Podcast [episode 31].
Jo describes ending up in art school ‘by default’
“I sort of ended up in art school almost by default. I was always interested in art.. but I think the reason I went to art school was because I had a place to do English at university, and I suddenly realised about two months before I was due to start that I really didn’t want to do that. I felt that I would be hitting myself against a wall, and I wanted to be doing something that gave me more open situations.
I went to the local art school in the UK….I literally had to beg them to take me. I said, if you don’t take me, I’ll have to go to university. I thought I was a bit crazy. I had some drawings and some notes and some paintings as well, but I didn’t have a proper portfolio, not like someone who had really been working hard to get in into it. I mean, it was serious, but it wasn’t impressive or in any form, really. I think it was much more about an attitude of mind and and a quest for something that would allow me to determine what I was doing and how I was doing it.”
Jo found art school very rigid
“I think I really steered my own path, which meant that I went, I read the stuff I wanted to read. I went to the lectures which varied. Some were very interesting, some were really boring, and and then I followed the artists whose work I liked.”
“I’d had a similar experience when I’d seen work by Barry Flanagan in the basement of the Tate Gallery, as it was in those days, and I saw, you know, a pile of folded blankets, and I thought it similarly to the Yves Klein. I felt that, if that could be art, well, that’s pretty remarkable, which is why it was that route that I thought, you know, rather than going down the university, traditional academic path, I don’t want to do that. I didn’t want to be closed into some sort of form that I can’t escape from.”
After art college
“After my degree, I tried to survive as an artist for a short time, maybe three years. And during that time, in order to have some cash, I used to do a bit of teaching, mainly the violin. And then I realised that this wasn’t sustainable, so I more or less decided that I was going to keep my practice in my head, and I didn’t quite know how I was going to do that, but I was very interested in the problems of making work, and I went into teaching.”
Jo was inspired by reading Marion Milner ‘On Not Being Able to Paint’
“Milner talks about the complexities of societal expectation as inhibitors in the creative process, and how to get rid of these things that sit on one’s shoulders, these expectations that sit on the shoulders and make work in a way which is free.
I wrote her a letter and asked her if I could meet her. And I really wanted to take some photographs of her as well, and of her space. She was an old lady at this time. She was well into her eighties. She could have been ninety, and she was so generous with her time. She invited me to her house, which was full of art and full of sculpture, and she graciously showed me a large range of work, and she also allowed me to photograph, to come back and take photographs of her, which I found so moving.
That was that sort of set in motion what I had already been doing, which was, if I if there was an artist whose work I liked, or someone, you know, involved in art practice, maybe not actually practicing as an artist, but, you know, in this case, the psychoanalyst or writer, I would send them a letter and now, and I would say, you know, if they had time to meet and and talk.”
Meeting Francis Bacon
“I met Francis Bacon in the same way.. and he said -shall we meet for breakfast? It was, it was quite an extraordinary situation. I had breakfast with him, which was for about two hours, and he talked non stop, and I asked him about painting and difficulties. Do you have difficulties with painting? You know, what is it? How do you manage to do it? And you know, something a bit like, what you do really with these, with these podcasts, is trying to get inside or behind the eyes of another and sort of see or think and feel into what it is that they’re grappling with. And he, too, was incredibly generous talking about this. And this was actually when this was before I did my MA, I was actually an undergraduate, so I was quite substantially younger, and I was really astonished, and I made notes afterwards, as soon as we’d finished, because I was too nervous to sit there writing while he was while he was talking, and I was trying to eat my breakfast, you know, which I didn’t actually really feel like, because I was quite tense.
He spoke about a reluctance, always needing to overcome his reluctance, which was like a kind of threshold, kind of pain threshold. And it wasn’t easy. It wasn’t an easy business. And yet, if he didn’t do it, he would have an ache. You know, there would always be this ache. So it’s something which is, you know, driving one, but also you don’t want to face.”
About her own work at that time
“I was looking for a way to express the inexpressible magic..this kind of moment, which is quixotic, like looking like lying in a wood, looking up at magnificent trees, you know, and that sort of sensation of being connected to the earth and being a part of the earth. I found the work that I made to be unsatisfactory and frustrating.”
On moving away from making work to collaborating and teaching:
“I just didn’t feel satisfied. .. It always felt that there was something that wasn’t quite right.. I found that in speaking around ideas and attempting to reach ideas through speaking with other people..I could get to something. So it felt like, in a way, speaking to reach the thing that I was trying to reach, that I was trying to allude to, was like.. the basic material, the medium for the work. And then that move more towards forms of collaboration, in terms of collaborating, you know, with ideas, perhaps.”
“The privilege of teaching is, is an essential part of a creative process. I have correspondence with people all over the world, who respond to the work that I’m doing.”
On her position as lecturer in Feminisms
“I felt that I needed to identify very clearly with a feminism’s ideological positions. I feel quite strongly that there are so many types of feminism.. there are all these different elements of what it is to be a feminist. And now it’s perhaps even more contested. So I felt that, because I’m teaching and in a university, I felt that it was essential to have a title to to that is inclusive, so that any anyone involved or thinking about feminist theories, and different theories of feminism and different waves of feminism, would understand that this would be grouped within the rubric of Feminisms.”
Her advice to her students:
“I do encourage students to do that, to be open minded and to stick their necks out, to put themselves forward if they want to, if there’s something that they want to do, to go for it, and to have that courage.”
On working with Barry Flanagan
“I think he felt a bit trapped by the sort of requirements of an established artist, a known artist..they have a whole entourage, they have a lot of assistance, they have a production line…it’s more like when one becomes a designer and, you know, have obligations towards things to be produced.
Flanagan had a his first solo exhibition, literally, a few days after graduation in the summer of 1966 and that show attracted full attention, attention widespread across the UK, across Europe, and also the US, which is a sort of pretty wide exposure for a young artist. And that’s how Lucy Lippard first saw his work.”
Flanagan’s Sand as Sculpture
“Barry put sand on the floor, actually on the carpet..he made this pile of sand from a sack which he poured, and then he scooped the sand out in in the cone..to create a kind of almost like a volcano shape. He scooped it out north, south, west, east..it looks a little bit like a crater… this work was the work that really attracted people’s attention. Because, how could sand be sculpture?”
Flanagan’s self editing and recording of work
“From the very beginning of 1964 [Flanagan] was keeping records of the work he made…sometimes he would come back and say, destroyed.. which I find very interesting..the sort of self editing process.”
On curating Flanagan’s work
“I wanted to find a way to get back to the moment of decision making with those exhibitions..so that there would be something of the excitement of that decision making.. so that..the work that I would be showing, the archival documentation..would be what many people would might consider to be peripheral or marginal..not the main thing. But for me, those things are what enables the so called main thing, and they without them, the main thing isn’t of any interest…these things involve discussions with other people and documentation of those discussions and points of contention and moments of indecision, so often far more group led than the singular, monolithic or retrospective exhibition, for example, which I have to say I resist.
My preference with curating is actually to situate the work, and that means situating it within its domain, of its milieu, and that milieu must include a lot of this archival material and the conversations with other people that have gone on…One can curate in so many different ways…I don’t like showing a story that’s already known. I don’t want to reinforce something. I want to bring questions.
His work always is aware of notions of distribution, accessibility, where the idea begins and ends, how an idea is distributed.”
Silent lip poem over orange you, for you, for you, a poem for the lips.
“Silence was an important element in Barry’s conversation. ..the end of this period of silence was marked by him pushing his chair back, standing up in this little restaurant where we were, which was on the first floor, and performing the poem. There were a few people sitting in the restaurant, other people, and they realised that something was going on ..they were surprised, and he performed it to me, looking directly into my eyes, directly. Wow. It was very intense.”
On making space for her own work
“I speak as a woman who wears many hats, academic, scholar, teacher, mother, alongside the simultaneous development of my artistic, curatorial and exhibition making practices. Until recently, I had no time for proper attention to what I consider my medium – film “
Her exhibition in The Horse Dublin [2024]
“I’m making a series of very short films, working with my partner, who is a painter, Jeff Gibbons..I’m curating the show, and we will be including a number of paintings.”
The challenge of returning to her creative practice
“It is slightly daunting.. because I’ve always done so many things at the same time..had so many roles, responsibilities, things…The work, the curatorial work I do is practice. It absolutely is practice.”
Her love of film as a medium
“Film allows a multi-layeredness in a way that for me, I couldn’t get from painting and photography… with film, I feel that I can utilise a simultaneity of of duration and distance and space, which .. something closer to what I’m trying to do.
I write stuff, little bits… I’m not ever reading them… they’re in my head. ..I do this in places where there are other sounds going on, and then I can, you know, edit it and make things come up or down or whatever, and overlay them..it’s like a practice that sneaks back up on itself .. without it really happening…I absolutely do not want it to be didactic.. in the way that a documentary inevitably is.. it’s a fictionalised, autobiographical, fictionalised form, which allows for discursivity of different processes to come into play.”
On art speak
“I hate the language of exclusion, which is in so many theoretical texts. [It] makes me very angry. I really try to open these things out and use everyday language use so that we can all experience it and we can all grapple with it. I don’t want things to have required knowledge beforehand.”
She enjoys working in Ireland
“I find the curiosity to ideas, openness to ideas ,fresh in Ireland.”
Lucy Lippard
“I’ve known Lucy Lippard for a very long time. She’s one of the people that I contacted when I was a student about her practice, and she’s .. still one of my heroes ..someone I really wanted to to respect it enormously, her approach her practice… Ireland, as a country and as a place is .. very much interlinked with her practice, which involves walking and allowing the place, specifics of place to inform thinking and to be a trigger for investigation, archeological, geological, sociological, political investigation, which chime with elements of my practice. So we had a conversation .. around ideas of walking and creative process and what it is to be in a particular place. ‘Imagine being here now’ is what that we call the film.”
A question she would have loved to ask Yves Klein
“I would have loved to have met him… I just would have asked him – how do you do it? How do you keep afloat these elements? How do you conjure magic in your practice?”
Her advice
“Keep your eye on your objectives… not to be deflected by circumstances which mean that you try to please or go with a crowd…keep focused and stick with it. If you believe in it, if you think this is what you want to do, do it. Just do it. Find a way to do it, even if it means working in a coffee shop.. doing something you don’t necessarily want to do. Keep your head space clear and do. It. Find a way to get by and keep your focus where you want it to be. I think that’s what I say, and it’s what I say to students. I say, you know, keep your courage. Do what you believe in, find a way to do it.”
On being busy and time management
“I find doing a lot of different things to be productive. I find that… things spar each other.. and also they feed into each other… I do find traveling and in places of transit.. to be quite useful for thought, for thinking, because I can work anywhere, I can be making notes in my voice memo, or I can be typing, or I can be doing something, you know, on a train, on a plane, in between, while I’m waiting somewhere. And I find that if I don’t have that space, that sort of zone of indeterminacy, I miss it, so I actually seek to have that, because it’s very helpful for my creative process. So it generates ideas.”