Artist Interview: Moyna Flannigan

By Susan Mansfield, 05.08.2024

Moyna Flannigan, Space Shuffle, Collective, 2024. Image Credit John McKenzie

As we talk, Moyna Flannigan (b. 1963) is looking out of the library window at Collective, down from Calton Hill towards Leith and the Firth of Forth. Really looking, with an artist’s eye. “Look at the amazing amount of light out there,” she says. “It’s incredible. I think a lot of people are walking about with their eyes shut.”

Her work is informed by a quality of looking. She talks about how she spent hours in the library at Edinburgh College of Art, where she was an undergraduate, working her way through the painting section, looking. How she learned to look critically as a postgraduate at Yale.

 

Her new exhibition, Space Shuffle, at Collective’s City Dome, part of the gallery’s fortieth anniversary celebrations and the Edinburgh Art Festival, is a product of looking and thinking. Nothing is there by chance: the collaged frieze; the paper sculptures suspended on wires like mobiles, almost weightless; the nods to outer space in a room which once held a vast telescope.

We talk about Piero della Francesca, a classical frieze at ECA (where Flannigan now teaches) which “most people ignore”, Hermann Minkowski’s theory of spacetime, Edwin Muir’s post-apocalyptic poem ‘The Horses’. Ideas that bounce off one another. Looking and thinking, looking and thinking.

Around eight years ago, Flannigan made a significant shift in her practice. She was known as a painter, a creator of fictional tableaux, imagined portraits, usually of women, inhabiting spaces of dream or memory. Among the generation of Scottish contemporary artists who came to the fore in the 1990s, she was one of very few painters. And, unbeknownst to many, by 2015, she was getting fed up of it. A new body of work shown in the NOW series at Modern One in late 2018 showed a practice transformed.

 

“It came out of a creative crisis, feeling that I’d been making paintings and I wasn’t enjoying it. In fact, I was hating using oil paint, the smell of it, everything about it, I was done with it. I think sometimes you can work against your own instincts because you’re getting carried along in the art world by things you’re expected to do.”

 

She points to the example of the North American painter Philip Guston, who switched in his fifties to figurative painting after 30 years as a leading abstractionist. “I felt my strength was always my drawing, and my ability to pull together information from lots of different reference points. I’m interested in millions of different things and I’d never found a way to bring them together in a single painting.”

“I started drawing at the end of 2015 and drew for three months, but I didn’t think any single drawing was really what I wanted to do, so I just ripped the head off a figure and stuck it on another drawing, and thought ‘Mm, that’s interesting’. Then all these drawings were torn up and reassembled.”

Collage, she found, gave her work a new fluidity, a way to play with perceptions in how images would be read. She has since begun painting again, working with paints she has made herself on Japanese paper and collaging the results, motivated in part by an active questioning of the virtue of endless productivity. “I mean, do we need all this stuff? In making this work I’ve been trying to use what’s effectively rubbish because I’m questioning the need for new stuff.”

“I’m much more interested in being an artist than I ever was,” she says. “Despite the fact I’m older, I feel younger, I feel that there are thousands of things still to do. Someone once called me a slow-burner. It opens people’s eyes to the fact that artists can evolve. Nowadays, everybody expects artists to be producing their best work at 26, and then you’ve got a lifetime of trying to repeat that thing you become known for. I feel I’ve quite a lot of freedom to keep rolling forward, discovering new things.”

The shift to collage has had the effect of making her work look and feel more contemporary. It was a key factor in her gaining representation with Edinburgh’s Ingleby Gallery. For Flannigan herself, it offers a greater freedom to play with ideas, to make work which comments, albeit obliquely, on how women are represented, and on social and political issues: “I don’t feel I can go to my studio and make art and ignore the world. I feel very affected by what’s happening round me.”

One discovery in the ECA library was the work of photographer Jo Spence, which is still a reference point, particularly the self portraits she made when she had breast cancer. “She was one of the first women I’d seen not prepared to look at herself through the lens of beauty. She was showing you strength, humour, resilience, sadness, lots of different complex emotions, but in a very straightforward way. I think what’s not been represented very much in painting in particular is the complexity of female experience.”

We come back to the transformative power of looking. “How a day’s walk can be transformed by seeing an enormous dragonfly or something like that. It’s not that I want to paint these things, but some of that visual excitement leads back into the work. So it doesn’t become like you’ve got your box of tricks and you just do that every time. There’s something about visual language: sometimes it’s the surprise of seeing something that you’ve seen a million times before but you see it in a new way. Art can make you see in a different way.”

 

Moyna Flannigan: Space Shuffle is at Collective until 15th September

 

 

National Galleries: Moyna Flannigan Profile