This program was recorded on February 2, 12 pm ET.
Caragh Thuring will talk to Polly Staple, Director of Collection, British Art, Tate, about her artistic practice and her recent projects.
About Caragh Thuring
Born in Brussels in 1972, Caragh Thuring moved to London in 1995, the same year that she received a BA in fine art from Nottingham Trent University. Thuring’s paintings of people and places interweave history, the present, and the future into works that evoke technological and human themes. Her work sits between the abstract and the representational, where gravity and chance (in the form of drips and painterly gestures) contribute to the imagery and atmosphere. Her method conveys a sense of breathless speed. She paints fluidly and intuitively, never making preparatory drawings. Large areas of her paintings often leave the unprimed linen exposed. Some of her imagery includes figurative elements inspired by other artists such as Manet or Titian, as well as the industrial landscape.
Thuring has also worked with architecture, using the fabric of buildings and their locations as starting points to create visual and textural additions to the structures that implicate the entire space and the occupants as part of the composition. Recent commissions include “Great Things Lie Ahead” (2020) with 6a architects for Holborn Community Association, London, and “Eruzione del 2020” (2020) at Le Sirenuse, Positano, Italy. A richly illustrated first monograph, “Very Fantastically Arranged,” was published by MIT Press in September 2023 and is the first to comprehensively document Thuring’s work. She has participated in both solo and group exhibitions worldwide. Her work is in the collections of Buffalo AKG Art Museum in the United States and Arts Council Collection, Government Art Collection, the Hepworth Wakefield, and Tate in the United Kingdom. Thuring lives and works in London and in Argyll, Scotland.
Artists in Conversation
Join us for lively and inspiring conversations with some of today’s most notable artists. “Artists in Conversation” brings together curators and artists to discuss artistic practices and insights into their work.
[Polly Staple] Hi, everyone. We’re going to wait a little moment for people to join, and then Caragh and I are gonna start. I’m just watching the numbers, so let’s give it a few seconds. OK, it’s kind of leveled out for a bit.
Oh no, here we go. [Polly chuckling] OK, I think maybe, Caragh, if it’s all right with you, we should start, and we’re recording, OK. Hello again, everyone. Welcome to the Yale Center for British Art’s online series, “Artists in Conversation.” I’m Polly Staple, director of collection,
British Art at Tate, and I’m delighted to welcome artist Caragh Thuring to the program today. Caragh, would you like to say hi? [Caragh Thuring] Hi, and thanks, Polly, for that, and thanks to Yale for the invitation. It’s nice to be here. I can’t see anybody,
But I guess there’s some people out there. [Polly Staple] I can see a few of them on numbers. Caragh and I are both speaking to you from London. Caragh is in her studio and I am at home. And while we talk, we’re gonna start it soon,
You’ll see a scrolling selection of images of Caragh’s paintings, which will start shortly after I’ve done some housekeeping notes. And we might pause on some of the images as we go, but I’ll come back to this. We’d both like to thank Jane Nowosadko,
Head of public programs at Yale, for the invitation, and Linda Paine, senior administrative assistant, for your help with the talk today. Before we begin then, the housekeeping notes. Please note that this program will be recorded. Your camera and sound are muted,
And will remain so throughout the program. We will be using the Q&A feature, which is located on your navigation bar, to gather your questions for Caragh, and they will be answered at, well, not all of them maybe, but a few of them we have time for
At the end of the program. But please do feel free to submit your questions at any time. If you would like closed captioning, a live transcript is available by clicking the icon on your navigation bar. Yale University and the Yale Center for British Art
Acknowledge the indigenous people and nations, including Mohegan, Mashantucket Pequot, Eastern Pequot, Schaghticoke, Golden Hill Paugussett, Niantic, and the Quinnipiac, and other Algonquian-speaking people have stewarded through generations the lands and waterways of what is now the state of Connecticut. We honor and respect the enduring relationship
That exists between these peoples and nations and this land. Linda, could you start scrolling the images please? So, before we launch into our conversation, I have a short biography of Caragh’s to share with you. Caragh Thuring’s paintings of people and places
Interweave history, the present, and the future into works that evoke technological and human themes. The work sits between the abstract and the representational. And more recently, Caragh has painted on bespoke woven fabric of her own imagery and photographs. Caragh has also collaborated
With 6a architects on a community center in Holborn in London, using its location and the building’s materials to create visual and textural additions to the structure that implicate the entire space and the occupants as part of the composition. All of this, we will touch on today.
Caragh has participated in both solo and group exhibitions worldwide. Originally born in Brussels, Caragh has, for many years, lived and worked in London and Scotland. And a short bio for me. I am Polly Staple, a curator and writer based in London.
I am director of collection, British Art at Tate. Tate holds the national collection of British art from 1500 to the present day, and international, modern, and contemporary art. This one collection is shown across Tate’s four sites, and extensively loaned out nationally and internationally.
And I’m very pleased to share that Caragh’s work is held in Tate’s collection. Prior to taking up my position at Tate in January 2020, I was director of Chisenhale Gallery for eleven years, and Chisenhale is a not-for-profit institution in London’s East End,
Where, in 2014, we made an exhibition of Caragh’s work. And so it is great to be here to revisit Caragh’s work and speak with Caragh today, after, I realized, Caragh, it’s ten years that has been past, [both chuckling]
[Polly Staple] which makes me feel old, since we made that exhibition. And actually, great timing, because the image that is on the screen right now is actually one of the images from the show. So, we’ll come back to how Caragh displays her images.
But, Caragh, I thought we could, well, you’ve recently made a comprehensive book, called “Very Fantastically Arranged,” compiling work from the past twenty years. And in 2023, last year, you had a significant survey show at Hastings Contemporary here in the UK,
So it feels like a good moment to take stock. And I wondered, actually, to kick us off whether you would like to say anything first about the selection of images we’re sharing today and how our audience is seeing them. [Caragh Thuring] Yes, well, making the book,
I sort of realized that, you know, maybe people didn’t know different parts of the work, and it sort of evolves. I mean, none of the images that you’re looking at now are in any chronological fashion, but they’re grouped in almost, you know,
Sort of groupings in the way that I’ve painted them. So now we’re looking at some tartan paintings. And then, you know, previously there’s been submarines, there’s been all sorts of groupings of work that have come, or volcanoes that have come in and out
Throughout my practice, really, from the beginning. And so they build up over that period. It’s actually more like fifteen years, I think, that I’ve been working. So the book has a sort of overview of that. And I just wanted to put these images together in that way
So that there was a sort of loose, sort of subliminal understanding of the work in a way, and not talk about specific paintings, because in a way that’s not really how I work, so. It’s a bit more how I work, [Polly Staple] Well I was going.
[Caragh Thuring] in the sense of. [Polly Staple] Yeah, because we don’t, we’re not seeing any dates, we’re not seeing titles either. But the book itself is very beautiful. In fact, I’m gonna hold it up so people can see. It’s a very, it’s a beautiful monograph,
Designed by John Morgan Studio, and I really recommend it. But you get to see the images here today. And I was actually thinking to build on that sort of arrangement, ’cause the title of the book, which is after a painting,
Which came up quite early on in this scroll of images, is “Very Fantastically Arranged,” which is an apt title for your work in this talk. And I was thinking about how, I mean, this is starting from the outside and we’ll kind of go in,
We’ll talk about volcanoes shortly and submarines, but I was thinking your work works on a register of sort of suggestion, collage, atmosphere, clues, as a viewer, sometimes they feel like a game to decipher, and there’s a great deal of pleasure to be had here,
But it’s, you don’t necessarily sink into a comfortable armchair when you are looking at your painting. I mean, it’s a pleasure, but you’re apt, I feel at least when I’m looking at ’em, you are actively sort of scanning
And decoding a succession of marks or symbols and motifs to put together meaning. And then over time, in relation to the talk, we see them build on repetition. I mean, would you agree with that? Does that sort of ring true?
[Caragh Thuring] Well, there’s definitely reoccurring aspects to the work and there’s this sort of twinning and repetition that sort of goes through the work. And when I first started painting, again, I always thought about sculpture actually and not painting.
I thought about the physicality of something in space, and as a human, having to navigate that space. And not, I wasn’t sort of interested in creating vignettes or images that we all recognize because painting has a long history of that, in a sense.
And it’s never, it’s people want to be comfortable when they look at images. They enjoy being comfortable, I think, and they want to see something that they recognize, and they understand, and it makes them feel secure, maybe,
In how they react to it or what, their relationship to it. So I was sort of very conscious of that and sort of purposely tried to avoid that, at some level, really. And so the work became about how, for me, how do you engage somebody
When something two-dimensional is smeared, sort of around the edge of the space. How do you pull someone into that? And how do you physically get them? You know, if someone has to walk around a sculpture, or watch a film, there’s people in the film,
You know, you’re moving, you’re editing all the time. You can avoid anything sort of uncomfortable or anything that you don’t want to sort of look at, or quickly move on. Whereas a painting, you have to look at it for a long time.
And a sculpture, you are moving around the physicality of the object, and you know what the material is. So I was interested in how to sort of undermine both, you know, making a painting and sort of add something to it, maybe.
[Polly Staple] That, I mean, actually we should pause, we don’t need to pause, but this image is actually a good one, ’cause there’s often in, I mean, not in all, but there’s often, I’m always interested in your use of sort of space within the paintings. [Caragh Thuring] Mm-hmm.
[Polly Staple] Does that relate? You know, sometimes you’d, particularly in some of your early paintings, there’s a sort of knife-edge that you seem to be walking on, of sometimes there can be large stretches of bare canvas.
[Caragh Thuring] Well, I sort of didn’t, again, it was that thing where a lot of painting is overworked. There’s so much paint, you know, because you’re making a painting, you have to use paint, and you have to pile it on and scrape it off.
And I wanted to sort of do the least possible required to get something across, in a way, and not in a lazy way, but just to get the essence of something, or to try and suggest something, so that it was a bit like your sort of brain synapses
Are sort of shifting around, and making their own sort of channels and roots. And I, so it was sort of about that. And I also wanted it to be like a piece of paper. I thought, how, and that’s why they’re not primed.
It’s what can I do that’s sort of just like drawing something on a piece of paper. So each painting’s almost like a drawing. And it certainly was at the beginning when I started working again. It was very much about, you know, just making a drawing, really,
And sort of allowing people to fill in the gaps, a bit like when you read words, you sort of can actually fill in quite a lot with your own brain. And of course, everyone will bring their own version
Of the story to that, I mean, it’s not even a story, but their own sort of reading of that. [Polly Staple] Does that mean, just in terms of your process, does that mean that you . . . there’s quite a lot of rejects, in terms of the, [chuckling]
You know, in that when you are approaching the, making a painting, like? [Caragh Thuring] Well, that’s funny, ’cause actually that’s something I never did. I always kept work and made it work somehow. I always used to talk about them as failures,
So each painting was a failure in a way, because that enabled you to do the next one. And so each work was like a learning process, and a sort of way of making the next work. So it wasn’t, you know,
If you reject something, you don’t deal with it, so it’s about how do you tackle this thing. And it doesn’t mean it was a success, and there was never an ambition for this to be, you know, a finished success or an ideal situation because that doesn’t exist.
So it’s just about this sort of this just journey or this just sort of activity that you fill your time with and you just keep sort of meandering around and looking for different things. And I think that also goes into the thing
About the way I’ve hung the work, say in the Chisenhale, and what you were saying earlier about editing, when what I was saying about editing in films, but the paintings are sort of like edits as well, you know, sort of,
There’s always something in my mind going on beyond what’s painted on that canvas. So there’s, it’s just part of something, and there’s something behind it. There could be something to the side of it. There could be something in front of it.
And as a viewer you are always, you know, sucked into that, or there’s an attempt to suck you into that sort of space. [Polly Staple] Mm-hmm. I mean, as a viewer, I mean, we’ll come back at various stages to the making of the paintings.
But as a viewer, I’m always struck by, and actually that one was quite a good one, of this kind of dis . . . obviously, dis . . . I’m thinking about the present moment and how your paintings will relate to the present moment.
And I don’t know whether what I’m gonna project onto them, how it sits with you. There’s a question there, I guess. But, you know, I also often think about this sort of disrupted viewpoint that’s in your paintings.
And it often, I mean, I’ve got a very messy desktop today, [chuckling] but from what I can see on screen, apart from your lovely paintings, is a lot of different files. And I often think that your paintings are, you know,
They are of, you know, somehow they communicate something of our present moment, and how we see, and how we work with images and digital technology. So I think, I mean, if I can turn that into a question, what is your relationship to all of that?
[Caragh Thuring] Well, I think there’s a sort of fractured nature to our existence, and has been over the, you know, it’s been getting bigger [chuckling] and bigger over the last, you know, at least since I’ve been born, and increasingly maybe in the last twenty years.
And I think that the sort of way, and also just as humans, the way we navigate our streets or our spaces, those are fractured moments. We focus in on something, we look at the floor, and look at a detail,
Then we’ve got the whole sort of scene in front of us. So these focuses are going in and out. And that’s another thing I always wanted to, or was sort of interested in making details more important than the bigger picture or something within the painting.
So, in a way, they were arrangements of things that you sort of edit and see as you’re moving around the world. [Polly Staple] Mm-hmm. [Caragh Thuring] And I think that that is probably very close to how we do experience it. We’re constantly distracted.
We’re constantly, you know, not really, I mean, like nothing’s finished, nothing’s sort of, that I paint, is finished or sort of hammered home. It’s always left with space and gaps, but you still understand what it is.
And I think it, yeah, I think it does relate to the way that we experience everything at the moment. And I think that’s very, you know, I think if you’re, if you make, if you’re an artist or if you make things, you absorb all these things, you know,
And that goes into the work in whatever way, whether it’s subtly, or whether you are didactic about it, or however you choose to make your work, really. [Polly Staple] This is gonna sound like an abrupt right turn, but I know that we’re in the middle
Of the image sequence of the volcanoes, and I thought maybe we could move from talking about composition to talking about some of the kind of images that you use, because you use these recurring motifs almost as hooks, and submarine, as you mentioned, submarines,
Oil rigs, tartan, bricks, windows, I’ve got a whole long list. Recently, sausages appeared quite a lot, and bow ties. But so I thought we could look at some of those motifs, and volcanoes, we’re in the volcano section at the moment.
[Caragh Thuring] Well, this painting, actually, this is worth noting, was the first painting I ever made after not painting for about ten years or making any work. And I had got a studio for about three months and made this painting in that period.
And I had no idea what to make when I started work again. So I thought, well what’s, you know, it was a very sort of precious moment, in a sense, very, or pressured, more likely. So I thought, well, I always enjoyed looking at these cross-sections of volcanoes
At school and in geography books. And again, it’s that sort of idea of volcano as something that’s hidden, but it erupts on the surface, and then it makes something above the surface. So it operates in all these different planes, and we have to,
It is not something we can control as humans. And so I made a sort of, I just made this painting, and then that’s continued throughout the practice. And I think they also are metaphors for everything that we experience, you know, personally, or politically, or financially,
Or, you know, within our bodies. They sort of cover a lot of bases, I think. [Polly Staple] This is actually, yeah, I was gonna say why the volcano, [chuckling] and you’ve answered perfectly. And this one’s actually quite an interesting one
Because you see the sort of cross-section of the volcano. But if we move on, I think we, you’ve also painted, you know, you’ve painted volcanoes as bricks, and some are dormant, some are sort of seem like pyramids. You’ve also made some,
I think there’s gonna be one coming up shortly, but which is there’s figures staring into the abyss of a volcano, so yeah. [Caragh Thuring Possibility of space. [Polly Staple] That one, oh there we go, magic. [Caragh Thuring] I mean, that doesn’t actually make sense
Because you’re looking either out of the crater from the bottom of the volcano, or you’re looking into the crater, but these people are sort of in a landscape, looking at this sort of sky. So it’s an impossible situation. And I think, yeah, I feel like there’s,
It is just these different layers that you’re, you know, these different spaces. So it’s inverting all those possibilities and putting the viewer into a different space, and making them reassess their position in relation to everything sort of around them.
And the bricks, you know, I was thinking of the pyramids and also the fact that a brick comes from the earth, so it comes out of the ground, it’s manufactured to then make a building above the ground. And a volcano does exactly the same, in a natural way.
It sort of emerges from underneath and builds itself on the surface, and then becomes some sort of structure. And it’s quite, you know, it can be violent, it can be aggressive, it can be beautiful. It covers a lot of things.
And the same as an architecture can be aggressive, or functional, or beautiful, and it’s also man-made. So a brick, for me, is a beautiful combination of something that’s natural and man-made. And then the volcanoes are a sort of, a natural version of that in a way.
[Polly Staple] And also in your work, I see the submarine as a close companion to the volcano, and handily a submarine has just appeared with a volcano in your work. But because submarines, and I know, you know, anyway, tell me about submarines.
[Caragh Thuring] Yeah well, I mean, I grew up in Scotland by the NATO base, American nuclear NATO base in the ’70s for the Cold War. So, you know, I’d be in this landscape, and this incredible man-made object would appear
In front of you in the middle of the water, in this sort of epic natural landscape. So again, it was that very interesting combination of something that was man-made and natural, like the brick, like a building, and also that it sort of operated on these three levels,
And that it was also very dangerous. It was something that was violent and aggressive, and it was also utterly sublime in the way that it would rise out of the water and pierce the sort of surface of the water in this very still way.
And it was this dense matte black that would then sort of be etched against the sort of landscape, really. And the photograph on the front of the book, and the first image that you saw in the slides is actually a photograph from where I grew up living.
You know, that’s the sea in front of us, a picture my father took in the ’70s. [Polly Staple] And what, in painting the submarine, it’s like a desire to sort of understand it? I mean, obviously represent it, but what’s the, yeah, what’s the motivation?
[Caragh Thuring] I think it’s just sort of, it’s something that, again, a lot of the work, I’ve painted docks, it’s this sort of interaction of something man-made and natural. So it is this sort of clash of these things together, and how they operate, and sort of,
A sort of, yeah, expansion of that through all the work, really. It’s just another symbol that represents something that’s aggressive, that’s violent, that operates on different planes, that’s invisible, that’s hidden, that’s mysterious, but also, you know, and a bit like painting itself, it’s mysterious,
It’s a mysterious thing to do, and you don’t really know where you are with it, and you’re always sort of spinning plates to make a painting or to make a group work. And it’s just a sort of another thing, and something that obviously was sort of etched
Into my vision, really, and was very, again, maybe very against the sort of idea of this beautiful landscape that it was emerging in. You know, it was something that was ugly and aggressive in this beautiful landscape, and that clash was fascinating to me, I think.
[Polly Staple] We talked, we had a little chat before doing this talk, and we were talking about biography, and looking back at the work you’ve now made over a series of, [Caragh Thuring] Mm-hmm. [Polly Staples] I don’t quite know where the question is here,
But we started talking about the fact that there is suggestion of your own biography and, you know, the fact that you grew up in Scotland, and tartan, for example, being present. How do you feel about that? Are you interested in communicating that more or?
[Caragh Thuring] I mean, not really, but the funny thing is you realize a certain point after doing all this stuff for a few years, you’re thinking, well, what actually is it about. You know, you make, you don’t actually know what you’re doing when you make work.
And when you make a painting, you always have a very strong intention, and you have ideas, and you have, you know, sensations, and sort of sparks of enthusiasms, and excitements, and ideas. And it’s about how do you, you know,
And then you sort of go on this thing with this canvas, you try to make the work, or whatever you are making it with. And then after a while you sort of get told things by the work, I guess. And so those elements are unavoidable.
I mean, it’s a bit like when someone says, oh, I, a writer says, ‘Oh, it’s nothing to do with me.’ And I always think, actually, unless you experience something, you’re unable to do anything with it, you know, creatively, or in any sense.
I mean, politicians only make policy when something affects them personally. So it’s this sort of, you know, you have to experience things to be able to sort of have output, in a sense. And so I think it’s there,
But it’s not something that I, you know, it’s just there. You can’t avoid it, really. And the tartan is about territory. Tartan in itself is, you know, it’s about territory, really, and so is a dock, so is a submarine, so is a landscape, really.
They’re about people’s sort of, you know, rubbing up against each other, and how one thing relates to another, and about people’s identity and territory. And it’s, I think, you know, obviously, that’s something that’s, I mean, twenty years ago people did not talk about identity,
And making work in the way that they do now. So that’s shifted massively. And I guess people take from it what they want, and things change in meaning, really. [Polly Staple] Interesting point, the series that, in relation to that, the series we were just,
Was just on the screen is actually the window frame. [Caragh Thuring] Oh yes. Yeah. [Polly Staple] Things that, which actually is nice in relation to what you were just saying because it’s about, although this lady’s good as well, but about people, how people, well you can say
What the relationship with was with those paintings of sort of window frames, right? [Caragh Thuring] Yes, I mean, that’s another thing I’ve never, I mean now we’re looking at this sort of person, which isn’t really a person, but I never painted people or faces, you know, literally.
So that’s why brick people occurred in the work. They became like buildings almost. And they were sort of generic, you can see the corner of one here, that’s a weaving. But they were generic sort of stereotypes of figures in a way. And then the window paintings
That you’re talking about were lateral, I considered them as lateral portraits. So they were from photographs I took in Holland, actually, in the Netherlands. And people, unlike here, love having big open windows, and displaying these sort of things along their windowsill in a way.
And again, you’ve got all these different spaces. You’ve got the viewer looking through the window, there’s the sort of territory or marker borderline, or the sort of like a dockside, basically, of this window ledge with all this information on it where the person inside is trying
To present to the outside world. So I always saw those as lateral portraits, really. So they were portraits of people that I didn’t know, but that would be in those houses, potentially, and their sort of projection to the world from inside.
[Polly Staple] And actually we’ve moved on. I think these images that we’re looking at now are the closeup pictures of the texture of your paintings. Because we see today on screen, we’re looking at a series of flat scrolling images, but in the book,
But also these images here, closeups, show the weave of the paintings. And I wondered, I mean we’ve talked quite a bit about the content, should we say, and I’d love us to speak a bit about the sort of form,
And the physicality of the painting as much as the content. And some of the installation shots which come up today show the scale of Caragh’s, I mean, you do make small paintings like this, but often they’re very large-scale and largely, often on primed linen.
But you’ve also woven your own linens, I was gonna say, maybe that’s the wrong word. Would you like to say a bit about the fabric of the paintings? Oh. [Caragh Thuring] Top right-hand side. And I am, I wanted to sort of build the work
Into the painting before I’d even started. So that’s why I made my own sort of canvas to paint on, in that sense. And that’s what these are, so they’re weavings of photographs or of my own paintings. These are sort of pictures of my wall in the studio.
That’s me sitting in front of the painting, just for scale. And that’s in the book. But yeah, it’s very much about building something from the back. So if you look at the back of them there, you can still see an image, but there’s nothing.
It’s not printing on them. It’s not sort of printing on fan material. It’s not screen printing. It’s just, it’s a physical object, and that’s the whole painting. So that’s where that came from. Those are, that’s just a picture of my studio wall,
And then I’ve painted on top of it, on top of the weaving. [Polly Staple] Hmm. And there’s a particular way that the paint sits on the . . . because your paintings are quite, you know, they’re not glossy, are they, you know, [both chuckling]
[Polly Staple] and the paint is quite thin. I was wondering about your kind of sparing use of paint as well, and if you wanted to say, ’cause when you see them physically, they, you know, you don’t also have the paint. It’s what? [Caragh Thuring] They’re quite dull
In that sense that, you know, there’s nothing, there’s no primer to reflect. And actually, my last show I painted on primer, and everyone was like, ‘Oh, the paintings look really different.’ And it’s because the paint’s not absorbed, and it’s just reflected back at you.
And most people do paint onto some sort of primer. And I, again, was sort of just not interested in that process of covering up this white surface. That was just a sort of rule of painting, which I just thought was inane to me, in a way.
And that’s why they look like they do. And the weavings, again. But I also recently, from doing that show, realized how hard it is to paint like this, [Polly Staple] Um-hmm. [Caragh Thuring] ’cause you can’t, everything you put down, you’re sort of dragging on the canvas.
So you know, there’s good reason to have a primed canvas to paint on because whatever you paint on it goes down as you wish it to, sort of thing. So that’s just a purely technical thing. But it’s, I sort of like the sort of subtlety of this,
That it was absorbed, and it wasn’t about the lusciousness of paint, it was more about the idea. I was more interested in the idea and what was coming across, not that you’re being seduced, because it’s nice, gooey paint or whatever.
So I almost, it is more almost sort of like a backwards seduction or something, you know, slow seduction, and you have to sort of work at that and find another way into it, in a way. [Polly Staple] So how do, I mean, what, how do you,
How do you start a painting? If that’s not too dumb a question. [Caragh Thuring] I don’t, I just, I sort of, I feel like I’ve become a projector at some point, and I then just decide.
I have my ideas, I have the things I want to throw into. And then it’s just about, you know, starting. I don’t ever do any preparatory drawings. I don’t lay it out on the canvas. So you know, it immediately goes wrong, of course, [chuckling] because you start painting,
And then something doesn’t fit on in the way you want it. So it’s just a process. It’s being, you know, you’re engaged in doing something at the time that you’re doing it. And that it’s doing, it’s being like a sort of,
I don’t know, doing an experiment or something and you just . . . [Polly Staple] Sorry, sorry, go on. [Caragh Thuring] No, no, no, you just, I just make the painting. I mean, I think I have something that gets me excited, and then I just do it.
This is another, a twin painting, for example. So I sometimes repeat things and you know, they become these sort of repetitive twins. There’s a few of those. [Polly Staple] So for example, we’re looking at a series of the sort of oil,
I call them the oil rig dock slash dock paintings. Would you start from something, you know, you wanted to paint the steelworks and then you, start again and then marks come? [Caragh Thuring] Yeah, I think it again. Sorry, say that again please.
[Polly Staple] Oh no, go, go. You start from there and then the marks come from the image? [Caragh Thuring] Yeah, the pattern. I can’t really explain it. I mean, sometimes I don’t know how I make a painting. I think, well how did I do that?
You know, I mean, obviously something like this that we’re looking at is very methodical, and that’s really relaxing to make a painting like that. You just sit there and fill in the bricks, and make sure one doesn’t look the same as the other,
And there’s a sort of process to. But other paintings just happen and they, you just sort of get in this gray area and make the work, really. [Polly Staple] Didn’t you say about these brick paintings, and I think there’s one coming up, which was based on,
You know, you collect images and it was an image that you held for a long time [Caragh Thuring] Yeah. [Polly Staple] and were attracted to, and then found a way to somehow represent it, is that? [Caragh Thuring] Well, these are all advertising images of these people,
Like the previous ones, David Gandy doing his M&S pants advert. This is a, some sort of shoot from a magazine. The previous one of the Herve Leger advert from the early ’90s. And I’ve used them again and again,
The same people, the same outlines, the same figures, particularly that Herve Leger, those two women with their arms around each other, that’s been used, I’ve used that since I was at college, you know, to make images from. So it gets recycled and recycled and recycled,
And there’s something uncanny about it. There’s one that will come up, I think, with four women, and it was a golf, an advert for golf, I can’t remember, I think it’s Ralph Lauren. And always the things that have intrigued me is the people,
You know, they’ve got their arms around each other, they’re attached, but they’re always looking completely independently from each other. They’re not attached to each other in being, you know, they’re just physically attached, they’re all looking at something else, doing, looking, thinking about something else.
And that’s always intrigued me, where it becomes very uncanny in a way, and sort of, and fractured, really. [Polly Staple] We, earlier on, I mean that leads me slightly to, ’cause I know we were talking before about money, and economy, and circulation,
And it somehow relates to those advertising images as well. And you’ve actually, and for me, I think I’m gonna say a few things, which I’m not sure there’s a question in there, but maybe you can, you know. You’ve often pictured coins,
We saw some coin paintings earlier, and money literally in your paintings. And also you’ve made paintings, you made a series about the, around the city of London, and you represented the names of the churches in the city of London.
And I was also thinking after we last spoke about the economy of painting and the relationship between figuration and abstraction, and the abstract economies that order our lives. And as I say, I’m not sure there’s a question in here necessarily,
It was more what your paintings were making me think of, as well as paintings, of course, being kind of ultimate commodities. So I wonder what do you, what are your response to any of that, does that? [Caragh Thuring] I mean, the city of London, I painted
Because I wanted to map this very intense square mile that was sort of making a lot of money, and running the country, and still sort of does to some extent. And at the same time, within that, there’s 50 Wren churches that are squashed in
Amongst all these buildings, and they were built after the fire of London. And they’re sort of rebellious, these churches become untouchable within this sort of economy because you can’t get rid of them and everything’s squashed up against them. So that sort of fascinated me,
And the fact that it was also an industry, like a functioning industry, because a lot of the industries that I’ve painted don’t function anymore, or they’re sort of gone, or the sort of dreg ends of industry and we don’t have many physical industries left,
Really, in this country. So that became about that, and also about the sort of, how you can, how sort of something like a church, not that I’m particularly interested in churches, but how they, that they held this sort of radical space
Against this, these sort of financial institutions. And the paintings with the coins falling are from Zeus and Diana. Many people have done Diana paintings about history and the sort of myth of, it’s like an immaculate conception where Zeus rains down this golden shower of coins,
And then she has a son because she was locked up, because, and her, you know, anyway. His coins came through the window and she became pregnant. So I like the sort of, the sexual connotations of that, but also the sort of the ridiculous
Sort of immaculate conception connotations of it. And also within those coins, there were coins from all different eras painted, you know, so there’s bits coins, there’s ancient coins, there’s contemporary coins, and it’s just about that sort of ongoing need for economy of some sort.
And I mean, I never think about, I mean I don’t never think, but I don’t feel that I’m particularly in, I mean, obviously I live by making my work, but you know, I don’t have a huge economy around that,
But I can see where that operates, sort of thing. And I think, you know, but I mean that doesn’t come into the work in that sense. It’s something separate. [Polly Staple] Ah, it’s a nice place . . . [Caragh Thuring] Funny.
[Polly Staple] This is a picture of snooker player Ronnie O’Sullivan, [Caragh Thuring] Yeah. [Polly Staple] which we’ve, I know that, I mean it’s in the book, and we’ve spoken about, and maybe actually it’s a nice place to go after talking about economy. Tell me about your interest
In Ronnie O’Sullivan and snooker. [Caragh Thuring] Well, I mean I always, I grew up occasionally watching snooker, and I sort of, I like watching things on green backgrounds, like tennis or snooker, and that you can sort of see the overall, it’s like from look, you know,
You’ve got a view of everything. It’s a bit like arranging a painting, I suppose. You can see what’s going on, and even if you are not in control of that, you can guess where something might go, or a ball might go, or someone might run or move.
And I sort of, he is very interesting to watch as a player. You know, I mean everybody who’s ever watched him with slightly interested in snooker will know that. I mean, I’m not generally interested in snooker, but he, I like the way he moves around the table.
It’s almost, I felt it was similar to the way I made a painting, because you’re either on or you’re off. You can either be on it or you, or you just can’t do it sort of thing. [chuckling] And he is very erratic in that sense.
So he could be, you know, really just moving around this table, and hitting the balls in, and he is in a sort of gray zone, and he’s sort of untouchable at that point. And it’s fascinating to see how someone sort of concentrates and operates on that.
And it’s a bit like when, you know, you’re in a good mode of making work in the studio, and you have that sort of gray zone, and you just go, and you just go, and it goes and goes and goes.
Anyway, so that’s what it, I sort of liked about that. I always wanted to interview him ’cause I thought it’d be quite interesting to sort of talk to him. And he also spoke about mining. You know, he mines, like mining, playing a game of snooker.
And I always feel like making painting is a bit like mining, it’s sort of digging and digging and digging, trying to get somewhere. [Polly Staple] That’s very nice. We’re moving quickly, but I’ve got my eye on the time, and we’re gonna move to questions in a moment.
But I feel like we could stay talking about Ronnie O’Sullivan and snooker for a very long time. But I realize we’re on the sequence of images which are from the project that you did with 6a architects. And I wondered if you could say a few things
About this project, which is you, I mean, it’s actually nice going from sort of thinking about the structure of a painting to actually working with architects on the creation of a whole new building. [Caragh Thuring] Yeah, well this, I mean, initially,
This was supposed to be a facade situation where, you know, you get asked to make a facade of a building. And I’ve always been slightly wary of the idea of sort of planting something on the surface, a bit like, you know, you have to weave the canvas,
Not plant sort of a print on the top necessarily. So I sort of, I was interested. It was going to be a ceramic facade to a building, but it was in a very narrow, sort of oblique alleyway. And I thought, well that’s gonna be very overbearing,
And possibly, you know, not very successful. But in the end, so many complications happened with the building process, the planning and everything, that it ended up changing completely. And two years later, we came back to it, and it ended up being a situation
Where it had to be a glass facade and I could only work with the propriety materials of the architecture. And so that I found interesting in itself because suddenly I could work with a whole space, and it was for a community center in Holden,
Which is actually very deprived, even though it looks, on the surface, not to be. So I was interested in that, too, because I don’t think many new community centers get commissioned these days. So I just used, very simply, the materials of the building,
And the front became bricks, which is ironic. [chuckling] I mean, the whole area’s very brick heavy, this sort of, but through from like Georgian era to ’30s to now, there’s a whole sort of history of bricks in that area. So that was convenient.
So I just traced a lot of the bonds, the brick bonds around the area, and then etched those onto the front of the building. And then the frogs that are the stamps that usually I have the name of the brick builder in,
Or the brick maker, in the center of the brick, they became words that were basically things that people had said to me that used the center of research that I’d done around the area, or about Colburn about, you know, because a lot has happened there, actually,
And a lot culturally as well. And people really loved this community center and used it, so I sort of put that into the surface of the building. And then you can see through it, and here is just to make,
I mean, this is sound baffling stuff in the gym. I can’t think of the name for it, but usually it’s horrible plastic sort of material. And I just said, ‘I really don’t want that.’ I sort of thought of this space almost like a cathedral.
It’s very, it’s half underground and very sort of grand in a way when you were standing in the space. So I wanted something that was almost stone-like, and I just used the material that I’d woven years ago,
And got them to just do it in a different colorway so that they could cheaply make something a bit more interesting, and sort of soft and pleasant to be with. But anyway, I really enjoyed working, you know, with mainly Steph.
And today it’s at 6a, it was really an interest, you know, different way of applying work and thinking. It was a long process, but something I enjoyed, actually. [Polly Staple] I’m looking at the time, I have a few more questions,
But I actually think I’m gonna try and do this. Audience bear with me because I’m technically . . . I’m looking at some of the questions, and I’m gonna go to some of those, if that’s all right, Caragh, and we can keep scrolling the images.
Oh, and this is a, maybe a good one. So could you talk about the grid in some of your work, what sort of location you want it to symbolize? [Caragh Thuring] Well, I’m not really interested in the grid in the sense,
You know, it just happens to be there because it is there, and I’m not really interested in the theory around that, or ideas around the grid. I mean, obviously, you know, I’m interested in the way that the town is laid out or there’s this sort of geographical,
Economic sort of interest, but not in any way beyond that. The grid exists just because it does, you know, and it has a function in the painting as well. I mean, just purely it, sometimes it’s very, you know, a lot of my paintings have frames
And grid interruptions, I suppose, and they’re architectural as well, you know, and they’re also devices. I mean, you know, we are making paintings, at the end of the day, and they have sort of, they engage in those things, you know,
And it’s a sort of process of working around that. But yeah, I mean, it doesn’t really answer it. [chuckling] But it’s very, it’s sort of practical from my perspective, and depending on what I’m interested in working on. [Polly Staples] Linda, are you able to start scrolling the images again?
’cause we could, in this last bit of the talk, we could also have the images rolling again in the background. I think this is maybe the end of the cycle, but let’s see what magic Linda might be able to work behind the scenes. Oh, brilliant. OK.
So actually there’s a couple of good questions here, which I’m gonna blend, but I’m gonna save because they relate to one of mine. I’m gonna ask you, who are the artists, historical or contemporary, you most admire and why?
[Caragh Thuring] Hmm. I mean, those things change all the time. I guess I look at so many different things. I used to, you know, when I was at college, there would be very particular artists that I would look to. Now I look more to specific works,
But I look at a lot of old master paintings I’ve always looked at just because, or medieval things for example, whether they’re sculptures, or carvings, or paintings, there’s always this sort of slippage, there’s always some humor involved. They’re never what you want them to be.
They’re never fully satisfying, or correct, or finished. There’s always something off about them. So I always love that, something that sort of doesn’t give you what, in a sense. And I like bits of paintings. I think Rene Daniel, for example, is a very good painter.
He’s sort of irreverent, he’s cheeky, he’s humorous, but he also knows how to paint in this purely crack, you know, he just has a good mark, and is interesting, I think, you know. And I guess I look for humor
And things that are not giving you what you need, really, in anything, you know, I could be looking at photograph, I could be looking at a person, or a film, or you know, a building. But yeah, I guess I look less and less.
I go, I mean, if I go to an exhibition, I’d scan whatever it is, I scan the room, and anything that pulls me, I just go to it immediately. You know, I want to, I like sort of just receiving something quite immediately
And seeing them going to investigate it further. [Polly Staple] We’ve got, I’ve got questions coming in, which I think we’re building on what you’re saying. Do you push back against the formality of a particular style? Do you intent, question mark, and then,
Do you intentionally change your technique, approach, process to avoid attachment to one comfortable scenario of performance? Does that resonate? [Caragh Thuring] No, I think, I think I just use the language that I can manage myself [chuckling] to do what I want to do.
So I mean, I don’t have any loyalty to any way of making a mark or to, you know, I just think, oh, that needs to be like this, you know. I mean, I don’t have a sort of, I don’t have a loyalty to any of it.
I just want, I just think this needs to be like this, you know, this bit has to be like this, so it’s gonna be like this and this in relation to this. I mean this painting for example’s got sand glued on it,
You know, I don’t know why, but that point, [chuckling] that’s what went on there. But it’s, I’m self-conscious, but in myself in that sense, you know. I’m not, I don’t care, really, what anyone else thinks about it.
It’s about how I have to do it to get some sort of result, or get to something that I’m interested in that enables me to get onto the next one. And of course I want people to, you know, they can receive it as they wish,
And they’ll have many different opinions about it, but it’s more just about getting the thing done, really, for me. [Polly Staple] And actually there’s a flow of questions which are all in the same kind of area, so I’ll start,
Which relates to what you were just saying in a way, which is someone saying, ‘Caragh, thank you for a wonderful presentation. ‘Why did you decide to become an artist?’ [both chuckling] [Polly Staple] It relates to you just saying that it’s about, anyway.
[Caragh Thuring] We were just talking about that. Well, I didn’t actually, I mean, I stopped, I went to art college, and then we were saying about the fact I did various jobs, lots of awful jobs, then ran an art gallery for a few years
Before deciding to go back to making work. And I never made work, apart from that one painting, that volcano painting which I talked about, that was the only thing I made during that period. And I just thought, you either make work or you don’t,
You can’t hover about doing various things. And I felt like I’d wasted ten years. So I just, I don’t know, I just thought I had to, I didn’t know how to do it when I left college. I actually felt incapable of making work,
So I did not make it, I just stopped immediately the minute I left college. And then I decided that I wanted to again. [chuckling] I just sort of felt I was intrigued, and I would have these sort of ideas in my head,
And I thought, I’ve got to get them down onto something. And it was just a sort of necessity really. It wasn’t really, I guess it was a decision to just, yeah, start trying to do something again. [Polly Staple] And I mean, there’s actually a parallel question,
But there’s something in the question which actually goes a bit deeper into that, which was someone asking, ‘I would like to ask what you were doing ‘in the ten years you describe ‘as not making work,’ ‘which you sort of spoke, ‘before the first volcano painting.
‘And I’m interested in this ‘in relation to female artistic practices, ‘what they consider as not working.’ So yeah, it sort of expands on the question before a little bit. I wonder if you’ve got anything more to say about that?
[Caragh Thuring] I mean, what do you mean about not working? Not working in what sense? [Polly Staple] Well, I think they’re saying, because you talked about, I think they’re referring to the fact that you said, ‘not making work,’ they’ve put it in quotes.
And maybe you, I mean, you literally stopped working, stop making work, didn’t you? [Caragh Thuring] I stopped making any artwork completely, and did work. I mean, I’ve had so many jobs. I was trying to write a list the other day, you know,
The ridiculous jobs that were, some were so depressing, others were more interesting, I don’t know how I got them. And you know, it was a whole range of things. And I remember thinking when I started again, every single thing I’ve done, however depressing it was,
Or however futile it seemed, is all been useful in some way. And you know, I think you learn a lot about people, you learn a lot about how people behave, and then you can, it gave me, I don’t know, it gave me a sort of freedom
In a sense to just get on and make these works. And I didn’t really care what anyone thought about them, because at college I’d be crippled. I couldn’t, you know, I couldn’t put things up in a space, I’d be so embarrassed, or what might someone think, or what.
You know, is it good enough? And, you know, of course I think all those things still, but I just do it, and I have to just not, you know, I’m not trying to sort of be any particular thing. I just have to try and make the work,
And make it, it becomes your sort of best friend in a way. [Polly Staple] I was listening to, there’s a really great interview on BBC Radio 4 with Frank Auerbach, who is 92 years old, [Caragh Thuring] Mm-hmm.
[Polly Staples] and he’s just about to open a show here in London at the Courtauld of his head drawings, and there’s a really nice interview with him, which I was listening to last week. And he was asked, ‘What keeps you going?’
And he was just saying, I mean, he says it in a very beautiful way that I don’t have a note of, but it was like, you know, ‘I just find it so exciting ‘when you start making a painting ‘and it just, you know, it’s,
‘I never know what’s gonna happen.’ It’s very, would you, does that ring true for you? [Caragh Thuring] Well, it does, I mean, the excitement bubbles up to where you are ready, like I was saying earlier about projecting something.
And I mean, we are talking here a lot about process, but everything that goes into these works is everything that I experience around me, you know, and I’m quite, you know, sort of, there’s a lot, it’s a bit magpie-ish in a sense. There’s sort of collages
And arrangements of all these situations, in a sense, and they also represent those. But it’s that sort of bubbling up of all that stuff around you, and then it comes into some sort of moment where, yeah, right, I’m gonna go for it.
And then, yeah, it becomes exciting. It’s a very strange mixture of being utterly excited and utterly sort of just working. Like you could be, you know, putting things through the till at a supermarket, you know, you’ve just got to keep plodding through it,
And then you get somewhere, and then it’s really exciting again. It’s just this constant sort of maneuver between all those different things, I think. [Polly Staple] That leads into a penultimate question, which is, ‘Who are the artists,’ I’m reading this from the one,
‘who are the,’ sorry I’ve done that question. Sorry. Forgive me. ‘What advice do you have ‘for artists just beginning their careers?’ [Caragh Thuring] [chuckling] Um, well, I just think, think about, concentrate on the work. Think about what’s in front of you and why you’re doing it,
And care about it, and be excited about it, and don’t worry about what’s around you, or any other sort of external pressures as much as possible. I mean, I think it’s very different when I started making work again, we lived in a very different world,
And I think now there’s so much pressure to sort of perform in all sorts of different ways. And I mean, I remember teaching a little bit, well, a number of years ago, and people would be sort of worried about their CVs at that time.
And this was a new thing for artists because, you know, all I knew artists ever cared about was their work, and having fun, and sort of, you know, music, or what. You know, there wasn’t this sort of pressure because there wasn’t any art world
Where you could make money, I guess, in a way. And I guess that goes back to what you were saying earlier, the money has really come into it in a way that did not exist. Of course, there’s always been money,
There’s always people that have been successful or sold and people that haven’t. But there was a lot more freedom, I think. And I think it’s about allowing yourself that space. It’s really important, I think. And it’s very hard,
And you know, it’s also much harder to survive and make work at the same time, you know, than it was twenty years ago. So I think, basically, just keep your eyes on what’s in front of you really. [Polly Staple] So the final question, which is from one
Of our audience online, which I think is a great question ’cause it brings us from, back down to, they say, ‘Fabulous work. Do you use ‘acrylics or house paint or what?’ [Caragh Thuring] [chuckling] Generally, oil paint mostly. Sometimes a bit of anything, you know,
Pigment, acrylic, pencil, whatever it needs. But generally, I paint in oil paints. [Polly Staple] Well, I thought it would be nice to bring it down to the material at the end. [both chuckling] [Polly Staple] And that feels like, I think I ran through most of the questions,
And people saying thank you online, and appreciating the talk very much. And that feels, I think just before 6 o’clock in London, and 1 PM in the US, I think that feels like a good place to end. [Caragh Thuring] And I’d like to say thanks, Polly,
And thanks to Jane and Linda, and to everyone for tuning in. [Polly Staple] Thank you. [Caragh Thuring] Thank you. [Polly Staple] We’re gonna wrap up now and say bye. Thanks everyone for joining us. [Caragh Thuring] Thank you.