Lydia Blakeley — SHE PERFORMS

A little footnote right at the beginning of this studio visit: Some of you might already know that I have moved to Frankfurt last month. Before I left, I worked through my bucket list of studio visits in London: Lydia Blakeley and Kate Howard. And I did in fact visit both of them in April. If you have been following my studio visits, you know that I like to publish not more than 2 weeks after the visit happened. Mainly because I see the studio visit as a snapshot of a specific time and place within the artist’s practice and I even tell every artist I visit not to move things around and try to show me their whole oeuvre, but let me come to the studio and see it exactly the way they see it on that day. Now, because of the move and settling in a new city (don’t worry, I will use this excuse exactly once) this snapshot has gotten somewhat distorted. Since I’ve been to Lydia’s studio and we talked about her works for her Grad show and the small portraits of Snooker World Champion Ronnie O’Sullivan, so much has happened, including a solo show with the ‘Ronnie works’ at Plaza Plaza in London. This has all just been a really long way of saying: Studio visits are a specific snapshot of an artist’s practice and even though more time has gone by now, I will try to capture that one moment in Lydia’s studio in early April regardless of what has happened in the last few weeks. If you’re already put off, you might want to stop reading. But I can assure you that Lydia’s practice is well worth giving a few moments of your time to.

By now, we should all be familiar with that one studio building in Deptford, which houses the studios to some of our favourite London artists (Camilla Hanney, Anna Garrett and now Lydia). The Goldsmith’s MFA studios are a weird little complex but once you enter the big former gym hall in which Lydia’s little corner is located, everything is buzzing and busy. Have you ever been to the MFA studios? You should go. Now. Lydia shares her studio with SP artist Anna Garrett, who I have visited earlier this year and who was one of our amazing storytellers at our Tate Modern event in May. Lydia’s side is taken over by two massive canvases (1.80 x 1.50m). Works in progress for her Grad show at the end of June (like soon in real time!)

Lydia offers me a small beer and I am suddenly flashed back to every studio visit I’ve done in Berlin ever. So, beer in hand, Lydia starts telling me about her recent works and the ones in progress currently. I remembered seeing a series of five huge works on Instagram a while back and these were actually the reason Lydia made it on the bucket list. The working title of these works was ‘Land of Giants’, she tells me. Her works seem easily accessible at first glance. It’s the kind of imagery we are only to familiar and comfortable with, being fed it all the time online, on social media and in the news. And right now it might seem almost obsolete to duplicate these images through painting. But do we actually ever look at these images and recognize them for their worth when we encounter them briefly within an ocean of more of the same imagery? Lydia does and her work is a lot about painting this overlooked imagery. Mostly the image is blown up, requesting attention from the viewer and suddenly manifesting its place within the world (metaphorically AND physically). Through her interest and investigation into the painting process, Lydia takes these seemingly boring images that got lost in the ephemeral stream online.

The works currently on her studio walls (and this is still true in June) are for her grad show at the end of this month. The works that stand out the most are the two huge canvases, which at that moment in time were mostly the neon pink underpainting, commanding attention because of its flashiness and kitsch. But there are also a handful of smaller works. What fascinates me about Lydia’s practice is the way she deals with imagery and scale. When you look at her works - especially the current series - something seems different to what we are used to, but it takes a moment to realise what that is. And for me, this was to realise that the different sized canvases she uses do not influence what or how much of the image we are seeing. In other words, her small canvases are not just a detail of something bigger, but they are stand alone works, presenting an image on a smaller scale. While her big works show similar imagery but blown up beyond life sized. The titles for these works she takes from Rubens - taking it upon herself to confidently place herself among the great men of art history. Ikarus shows a very preppy dressed guy lying on the floor surrounded by a glowing color, reminiscent of the evening sun. The title suggests that he has flown too close to the sun and maybe in a way he did. “Only mad dogs and Englishmen stay out in the midday sun”.

The serie’s title National velvet is a social investigation of the traditions and idiosyncrasies of horse races in England, such as the Royal Ascot. In an almost ritualistic manner, people plan to attend these events for weeks. There’s a massive effort leading up to these events, then on the day everyone gets dressed up and then they get drunk. It seems almost as though the event is just a backdrop, an excuse to get hammered. And the paintings show the mess it is. They are chaotic and baroquesque and they are no longer true! This newest series is another step in the investigation of the properties and possibilities of painting. While earlier works used to show exactly the found image - what you saw was ‘true’ -, Lydia has now reintroduced the element of collaging into her work.

The final work we see now still looks like the found images and we believe Lydia that these images are true, that they happened exactly as she is showing them. But they didn’t. They are no longer true. Lydia called herself a Master appropriator, but I think with this final series of works for her MFA, she has found her language and has taken appropriating to a level where it is no longer about anyone else's work or voice, but her own as a painter, as well as an individual, showing us her little corner of the world and what speaks to her.