Transcript for Episode 165 – Multi Media Artist, Tricia Wright (New York, USA)

Recorded March 18, 2021
Published April 20, 2021

Full recording here: https://wisefoolpod.com/multi-media-artist-tricia-wright-new-york-usa/

Transcribed by https://otter.ai

Matthew Dols 0:12
Could you please pronounce your name correctly for me?

Tricia Wright 0:14
Hi. Yes, it’s Trisha. Right.

Matthew Dols 0:16
And you’re currently in New York, but you’re not from New York?

Tricia Wright 0:20
No, I’m from England. I moved here in 1999, with my then husband and two small children. And it was quite a leap. I mean, it was an interesting development, really, my husband at the time, he had the opportunity to sort of head up with this New York office, he was in publishing. And he first put it to me, and I was saying, That’s crazy. Here, we can’t move to New York, we have two small children. And I just thought it was just kind of a crazy idea. And then I was really in a rut I had, as I say, two small children, the youngest was two. I hadn’t been making any of my own work for seven years, couldn’t afford childcare, it wasn’t like, the thing that I wanted to do was a paid job. So in which I could have afforded the childcare. So me to afford childcare, I would have had to do a job that I wasn’t particularly interested in, I still wouldn’t have been making any art. So I wasn’t making any art for seven years, really, in total, I really was in a rut. So after he sort of proposed this move to New York, and I really sort of shut it down initially, and he carried on as usual, it really took root in me. And in the end, I was the one who was really pushing for the move. And so we ended up moving as an as a whole family. And the reason, really, I think, I ended up in this country was due to an experience I had earlier when I was 26. And I won a travel award. Well, it wasn’t the travel award, it was an award, an artwork award, sponsored by a travel company. It was for a painting. It funded me basically to travel to Canada. And I didn’t really want to go to Canada. So I flew to Toronto on this award money, and drove and went straight down into New York, and spent four weeks traveling up and down the East Coast in all of the sort of New York cities where they had really good art collections. I spent four long consecutive days in the Met. And I was kind of exhausted after four weeks. And I ended up what in Philadelphia, and was in the house of a friend of a friend of a friend, and met this person, just casual conversation, who said he was going to be driving a car from Boston to Seattle. And after we’d been chatting for about an hour, he said, Why don’t you come with me? And I said, Okay, and drove across the country. It took about a week. I didn’t know how to drive. So I had, I just sat in the car for 12 hours a day, looking out the window at this incredible landscape, went through the Badlands, went through all these amazing desert landscapes, which for me was a revelation. Growing up in England, you know, a small, dark, crowded, grumpy Island being in the desert was like that Monty Python, sort of cartoon where the top of your head flips up, and the Endless Space. That was really the reason I ended up living in America by way of my husband’s job change. from London to New York.

Matthew Dols 3:50
I was raised in America, and I moved away. So I’m now an expat living in Europe. So it’s a fascinating sort of the expat lifestyle and the choices that we make on where we go and why. Yeah,

Tricia Wright 4:04
yeah, it’s a funny life, isn’t it? Once you’ve been doing it for a few years, it has its own culture, and it has its own advantages and disadvantages.

Matthew Dols 4:15
Absolutely. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. I when I, I had this very romanticized idea of being an expat thinking like, oh, I’ll come in and people think I’m the exotic foreigner, and they’ll be like, new and interesting. No, they don’t have a shit. No, I’m an outsider. And as far as they’re concerned, like, I’m transient, like so like, they expect me to come and then be tired of it or not like it and leave. And so they don’t really accept you very quickly. Because they’re not they don’t think you’re going to stay. So that’s an issue I’ve run into a number of times in my sort of transient lifestyle.

Tricia Wright 4:57
Yeah, it’s a hard one. One I mean, moving to New York, you’re blessed because what New York is one place where you don’t have that feeling. And it’s a wonderful feeling to be an outsider in a sense, because you do get to see your own culture more clearly. And you see the culture that you’ve moved into in, in a sort of outsider perspective. But not all cultures are as welcoming. I mean, I’m a daughter of an immigrant. And so I grew up in a country, which was not my mother’s country, and I’m very conscious of her being an outsider. And I had my mother passed away, and I bought a little cottage from we sold her house and split up. And I bought a tiny little cottage in Ireland, so that I could keep my connection to my Irish roots, which is, which are very strong. I’ve been spending my time in Ireland since I was a baby, you know, and I was more close to my mother’s side of the family, and that is the Irish side. But when I’m in Ireland today, my they hear my English accent, I will never be accepted. And that is my heritage. But I’m considered a blow in that’s the expression.

Matthew Dols 6:07
Yeah, there. Yeah. Blowing I like that.

Tricia Wright 6:09
Blowing. Yeah, I just accepted.

Matthew Dols 6:12
It’s a choice. It’s a lifestyle choice. Yeah. And, you know, I don’t really want to be in America right now, or I certainly have didn’t want to be there in the last four years, I still don’t really want to be there now. So I’m perfectly fine with my choices at this moment that you mentioned something about, like, the seven years of taking some time off to to raise children and stuff that this is a topic that’s come up with previous guests number of times. And so my question sort of for you would be like, how did the experience of a having that gap in your CV? And the experience of being coming apparent sort of changed your artistic career?

Tricia Wright 6:55
Well, to answer the first question, it created a lag that have never been able to catch up on. And I think that’s probably fairly typical. And it was quite a long lag. I spent seven years when I moved to New York, one of my conditions was that I would have a studio and at that point, my youngest child was entering preschool. And I had exactly two hours and three quarters a day. And quite often, I would drop him off and get a phone call, literally, as I had arrived in the studio saying, will he cry for two and a half hours? And they say, yes, he probably will. And I’d have to go and get him. You know, it was even even after seven years, it was very truncated, it was very slow. And I was the primary caregiver, and not able to do the social networking. And that’s huge. It’s not just the time that you can spend in the studio, it’s the time you can spend connecting with other artists and pursuing opportunities, like residences. I never did a residency, my first residency was last year

Matthew Dols 8:08
at do DNA,

Tricia Wright 8:10
well, yes. And I also one after an actual residential residency that I did, just shortly after, but that wasn’t something that was possible so that it’s not a complaint, but it’s a reality I haven’t had the career I possibly would have had I have wasn’t been able to pursue a path that would have yielded different results. And that’s just a reality. It did change the work. That’s to answer the second question. Things germinate underground, percolate slowly, you don’t really conscious of them, but they come out differently. It did, my work did emerge. differently, there was a sense of urgency, and a desire for kind of, I don’t know, sensory pleasure, that wasn’t in the work before. And being embedded in the home so thoroughly, it was in inevitable I suppose that that became much of my subject matter. A lot of my work has been about the home and defending it as a place of dignity. And then and also using the materials of the home the fabric, the physical fabric of of the domestic sort of space, bringing that into the art space. That was changed.

Matthew Dols 9:33
Okay. Take a step back give the listener a little bit of a sense because the many of them have probably had don’t might not know your name, they might not know your works. Give us a little sense of sort of what is it did you currently let’s say currently produce

Tricia Wright 9:48
the work that I have been making I work in series form typically in my most recent series have really been about space domain. Space feminine space, or what is considered feminine space, literally and figuratively, I mean, I’d be making work that presents spaces in which things are unfolding like stage like spaces, or niches or inside Bell jars, enclosed spaces, spaces within a space to sort of metaphor, I suppose for what it’s like to be a woman’s experience within the larger

Matthew Dols 10:28
experience, globally, really, feel free to expand on that, because of it. I mean, keep in mind, for the listener, obviously, with my voice, I’m a man. And so like, I don’t know that feminine like, yeah, I’ve been thinking a lot about sort of like sexism in the arts and racism in the arts, and all kinds of these other things that keep coming up as topics that come up again, again, like so. Like, I guess the question would be sort of like, have you experienced any form of sexism is sort of, I would say, like, not like against you, but basically against you, in your career,

Tricia Wright 11:04
not in my career, not actively Not that I’m aware of, not overtly, I have experienced it in my life, I’ve certainly was shaped by sexist behavior. Growing up as a, as an adolescent in the community that I lived in, you know, it was definitely something that has shaped me part of who I am. for work. I’m really interested, mechanic mechanics of pictorial representation. So a lot of my work has been really looking at images from our history, and looking at texts about women, images of women, and texts about women and sort of re examining them, altering them, presenting them in a different light or presenting a new take on them. And offering an alternative or ask, inviting the viewer to look at them and consider their impact and how they, like classical narratives, for example, can endure and still be influencing cultural thinking today. So one of my series is Pandora’s Box takes an ancient text, the one that really has been handed down to us over time, the most familiar one was written by Hesiod. He said the Greek roughly 700 BC. And that story fascinates me. It really, it’s a precursor to Eve. It’s influenced crops up in Christian religion in Judaism in how women are kind of described. It’s the most incredible story I mean, in his world, he envisioned the world before women. Firstly, the world was originally populated only by men in his narrative, and it was a golden time. Pandora, the first woman was created out of bass clay as a punishment to men. And she was attributed entirely negative qualities entirely. Absolutely. There wasn’t one good thing about her except she had physical beauty because she, she caused desire in men, which was in itself a negative attribute, but the beauty was, was okay. That characterization of the woman being entirely negative, has really stayed with us ideas of beguile, weakness, deceitfulness, it, you see it in Adam and Eve, the story there, it’s literally taking the story of Pandora and moving it over to Eve. And so that’s an interesting story. That’s is the kind of narrative or creation fiction really, that I’m interested in looking at and sort of highlighting.

Matthew Dols 14:00
So would you define that as feminist art or art about feminism?

Tricia Wright 14:07
That’s a really good question. Because I think about that a lot. No, it’s it’s not feminist art. And I’m not an artivist either. Okay. It’s not um, I mean, I haven’t got an issue, obviously with that, but I think about it a lot. I’m interested in formal things. Primarily, this is my subject matter. I have a very strong desire to say something, communicate ideas, that is undeniable, but the things that really excite me on a day to day basis in the studio are things like, form, color, space, composition, this is the kind of vehicle for those things. But I am a feminist.

Matthew Dols 14:52
Lovely. Me too. All right. So these days, what’s your What’s your what’s your life? Like? So like? Are you 100%? Practicing artists? Do you have other tasks or jobs that you do also, like what’s your, uh, you know, sort of the like your income stream? So like, are you selling work exhibiting work doing public arts? Like, how are you sort of working this out?

Tricia Wright 15:19
Well, for years, I worked in sort of part time kinds of capacities in different things, I worked in publishing in England, and kept some of that going. So that’s still actually some income. royalties, small, but still going. And I’ve worked in sort of museum education type situations for years, always part time. But now, pretty much it’s a full time Studio COVID changed some of that, as it has done for many people, I decided to really focus on the studio and change other things accordingly. Yeah, I

Matthew Dols 16:05
was gonna say a lot of artists have basically taken this COVID time and made it said, okay, I’ve been forced to not be able to do anything else. So I have more time to devote to producing more work, like I have a belief that when the world opens back up, there’s going to be this glut of art that everybody has been creating in their isolation, that suddenly it’s like, I have an entire finish series all done, because I’ve had a year and however many months to work on it.

Tricia Wright 16:38
So it’s been a very strange journey. For many people. It’s been like devastation of loss, and people losing work that they really want. For other people, there have been opportunities or permissions, even is a better word to stop doing things that you don’t want to do, or start doing things that you really want to do. My brother’s an artist too, and he’s a few years older than me. And he has spent his entire working life teaching and raised five children or had five children. Time has always been a premium in his in his life. And he, for the first time, had this time where he couldn’t work, and he couldn’t see anyone. And he was almost giddy. With the sort of joy of it. I actually had the opposite experience, in a way because of COVID. I went to Ireland in March last year, before it had really kicked off. It being discussed, and I went with my son. And we remember being in the airport saying, Look, just be careful. We weren’t wearing masks or anything like that. And we went to Ireland for what was to be a 10 day trip. About, I think seven days into the trip, I got a panicked phone call at 3am my time from my husband saying you have to come home or they won’t let you come back. It had just escalated while I was there. So I sent my son back because he was graduating from his master’s program and wanted to be back. And I decided to stay and ended up staying for seven months. What was a 10 day 10 day trip ended up being a seven month long experience.

Matthew Dols 18:25
I went back because of a death in my family to visit my family in the United States where it was supposed to be a three week trip ended up being a three month trip because of flights between Europe and the United States got stopped. So yeah, I totally understand that.

Tricia Wright 18:42
It was very odd because I was in a very tiny little cottage with hardly any furniture, because we had only really just got it. And I had no car. And we had a very strict lockdown, but you could only walk for two kilometers a day, then it went to five. So I was completely isolated, no materials just what I had. In my suitcase. I didn’t even have a table I was balancing planks that I found in the shed on top of buckets and cans of beans and things like this. It was very odd and totally isolated. I was alone for three months. And I would just walk in these loops around the lanes up and down the lanes along the water in the fields in the woods and it was just me and the cows and me in the grass and me in the water for three months. It was like there’s some weird retreat. And I couldn’t work at all when it really threw me. My context was gone. It made me think about what I was making new york it made absolutely no sense in Ireland and it. It really upended my whole process on my whole practice, I suppose.

Matthew Dols 19:52
For many people, this entire pandemic has been very life changing in your perspective of how you approach whatever you’re doing. So whether it like, I know a lot of people who have, during this time said, Well, I hate my job. And if I’m going to, you know, potentially get a life threatening illness just by going to the grocery store, I want to enjoy my life and my job. And so a lot of people are changing careers, getting into relationships, or out of relationships, or whatever, you know, to try and read, because there’s a lot of sort of, I want to be happy in my life, you know, whatever that means. And so I want to be in like, the case of what we’re talking about right now is like, I want to be making the work that I want to be making, not something that I think I should be making.

Tricia Wright 20:41
Now, exactly, I felt being away from my home, which is when New York for so long, I started to feel like I have gone very, very far down this rabbit hole that’s politically driven. It’s so much about the kind of culture that I’m living in, and being in a very different culture, not that it doesn’t have its own problems, but there are different ones. I really felt like I needed to focus on something else, which is emerging, but not fully formed. Still.

Matthew Dols 21:16
There, you keep saying New York, are you in New York City or New York State,

Tricia Wright 21:21
bit of both. My husband has an apartment in Brooklyn, and he works purely in the city. And I have a house with a studio, which is where I spend most of my time in Kingston, Upstate. So we both go back and forth. But actually, that’s changing again, because of COVID. We decided to basically join forces and move to a single place and we’re in the process of trying to do that.

Matthew Dols 21:45
probably a good time to buy I would imagine, hopefully, not a good time to sell. Good Time to Bob. All right. Now, so your works. Are you represented by galleries right now? No. Have you ever been represented by galleries?

Tricia Wright 22:02
Yes, yeah.

Matthew Dols 22:04
Do you have any interesting stories about gallery representations?

Tricia Wright 22:09
Not really, I hold on to this, I think, probably outdated idea that I would really love a relationship with a gallery. It’s something that feels like it would be so straightforward. I think that as an idea has gone and the whole gallery relationship is changed. But that’s something I, I still would really love to have that idea of a relationship, a supportive kind of relationship with the provided an avenue for showing the work.

Matthew Dols 22:40
That idea of us having a support network, whether that’s a group of friends, peers, or whether that’s gallery, or even some curators that somehow support you is of the utmost importance to your sanity as an artist, because otherwise you’re just making work in a vacuum and you have no idea if it’s any good, or if anybody’s gonna connect with it or whatever.

Tricia Wright 23:03
Yeah, absolutely. And I have never taught Why have taught that’s not true. I’ve done sabbaticals for people I’ve covered for people, and I, you know, stepped in and done the odd semester here and the odd semester there. But it’s not something I really, really wanted to do. But I do know, my brother likes it. My brother’s been teaching for hundreds of years, it feels like and he been in this environment. That is, by its nature, validating your pursuit, as an artist eliminated is a support network just by its existence. And to be a studio artist, you’re very much on your own in that way. And you have to be very self sustaining. which is I think, why, for me work moving into public art has been so hugely satisfying, because I feel like there is a straightforward relationship between the work I make and where it goes, you know, it has a function.

Matthew Dols 23:57
Okay, so public art, let’s get into that. I’ve been, I actually used to run a public sculpture program, and I’ve been on committees for public art and all kinds of different stuff throughout my career. It can be either really, really magnificent and beautiful and fabulous, or it can be the biggest pain in the ass, because it ends up being like work made by committee and like all this kind of bullshit. And so what were your experiences because they could go either way. So like, what did you do like an RFP? And then you went through a jurying process or was the like, you know, how did it come about?

Tricia Wright 24:41
It was through submitting, you know, previous work. This was for the MTA Metropolitan Transit Authority for New York, that I had submitted work to them a number of times, they had work of mine in their files, and I was asked to put forward an RF p A proposal, which I did, and mine was selected, and I had an actually a wonderful experience. They are very supportive of the artists, I work with Dr. Lin Chen, she was the manager of the project that I was working on and extremely supportive of the artists vision, and the artists ideas really and their work. It was challenging, though, to say it was quite a grueling experience in many ways, because things changed engineering specs, dimensions, literal dimensions will change. And you redesign and you redesign. It’s quite stressful. And mine was in two materials. So it was almost like two projects. In one it was in glass, which involved a glass fabricator, and a whole set of conditions. And then it was in metal, they’re involved of metal fabricator and a whole other set of conditions. Simultaneously, it was challenging to say the least. Oh, it

Matthew Dols 26:03
absolutely can be. I mean, I’ve been on committees where like, they literally would say, like, I love what you’ve proposed, but can you make it a little bit more blue?

Tricia Wright 26:14
We’re going to lower the ceiling by a foot and a half. Oh, is

Matthew Dols 26:17
that when you ran into that?

Tricia Wright 26:21
Yeah. And it’s, I mean, it happens.

Matthew Dols 26:24
It takes a certain kind of artists to be willing to, and then also to be able to successfully do public art projects. Because a, your subject matter is, you know, depending on what you’re doing, like if you’re a landscape painter, you’re not probably going to do a public art thing. You know, you do figurative work, probably not going to a public art thing. Like so, a your subject matter already has to be somewhat appropriate, let’s say to like the masses, and public, non confrontational, non, you know, not causing any kerfuffle, in the news, and all this kind of stuff. So, it takes a certain kind of artist. And then of course, there’s the whole like dealing with the bureaucracy, because I mean, there’s a lot involved in that. I mean, this is what people don’t understand. Like, I’ve been part of this. So like, the sheer volume of work and time of like, writing text proposals getting close. And again, receipts, like all that kind of crap is immense. Yeah, it How long did your process so like from RFP submission until completed? How many years? did that take?

Tricia Wright 27:39
A year and a half? I suppose.

Matthew Dols 27:42
It’s very fast,

Tricia Wright 27:43
maybe bit more year and three quarters.

Matthew Dols 27:46
Yeah. And everything went smoothly.

Tricia Wright 27:50
There were there were moments of genuine panic, where, you know, your body temperature just escalates and you just panic measurements and but ultimately went smoothly, it all fit. My biggest fear was that it things wouldn’t fit. Mathematics is not my forte. And there’s a lot of maths in, in this stuff, you know, 14, stainless steel panels and six glass panels, and changing specifications and sort of moving targets.

Matthew Dols 28:26
Yeah. Okay, wait now. So based on that idea, I want to go back a little bit. So like, I was introduced to you through do DNA. And then you now are talking about working class, you were talking about working in fat household fabrics. You seem to be floating between mediums throughout your career. I mean, like, so like, Where Where did you start and sort of how many different mediums did you go through? But then the rigor part of that is like, is that was that probably beneficial or detrimental? Because the the old saying is like, you know, do one thing and master it and sort of stay with it and be known for that thing. But you seem to have sort of evolved through different materials. And so like, has that been to your advantage or to your detriment?

Tricia Wright 29:18
I imagine it’s been to my detriment. I can pinpoint a certain thread that goes through all of the work, but it’s not necessarily visible on the surface. And I have a willfulness, I suppose, to adopt and not want things to be necessarily visible on the surface to. To go back to the first part of the question. I actually, I chose to go to a college that had a very strong figurative tradition of Camberwell. And I was very interested in sort of the Lucien Freud and that sort of that whole lineage of painting. So I was painting porch traits and figures for years. I don’t think that that was necessarily the right college for me, I come from a working class family, my brother and I were the first to go to college in our family. He, as I mentioned him, he’s older than me, he went to college to art school. So he was really the only role model I had. In that sense, I sort of followed along in that kind of art sphere, probably should have gone to somewhere like the Slade, which has a whole other lineage of pictorials of language, but sort of that’s neither here nor there. But it was kind of a long journey. It’s a slow journey, I have used all these different materials, which started off as painting from life. It just got slowly further on way further and further away from painting from life to sort of into abstraction, fully into abstraction, where I was pouring, and no imagery at all. And there was a great sense of liberation with that happened when I started painting again, after I had had my long break with, you know, young children, that feeling of senseless pleasure. But that wasn’t really sustaining. For me, I mentioned before, I have a strong desire to make my point to say something to communicate ideas. And abstraction was frustrating to me that there was too much implying, I kept trying to imply things through the material. And obviously, I needed to be more overt and make a statement. So I started then, in making work that actually has felt like a really natural fit for me is to to have image, but it to be rendered in a schematic or stylized way. So it’s something that just stands for the thing rather than subscribes the thing, and I’ve worked in variations of that, in a way ever since it whether it’s in textiles, or using objects, or in painting, and bringing photography or photographic elements into my paintings. There’s something that I think of a lot. And it goes back, I believe, to coming from a working class background and not coming from an environment in which art or education on that level played much of a part that I didn’t grow up, knowing how things worked with an innate sense of style, or taste in with regard to the arts, as children are famous artists do, you know, I make my work sort of outside of that.

Matthew Dols 32:32
There are very few of us that come from children of famous artists.

Tricia Wright 32:36
But you see, there’s a there’s a different path.

Matthew Dols 32:39
Well, it’s funny, like my, I have an older brother, I had an older brother, he recently died. But I had an older brother, and he and I, my brother, my father is a very creative painter and all kinds of different things. He’s also a priest, but he does paint and he does, and my mother’s an interior decorator. And so I come from a household of aesthetics, you know, everything looking beautiful. So like I was raising, my brother was raised in the same household, but he just rebelled against it, that he owed no end. So it’s very interesting, like the nature versus nurture of like, how much of that because like, we were brought up in the same household, I picked up on my parents sort of aesthetic and style, and I have a very similar taste to them. Whereas my brother had a very opposing taste to them. And so I’m often wondering, like, how much of that was instilled by them? And how much it was our acceptance of it or or appreciate our choice to appreciate it?

Tricia Wright 33:39
Yeah,

Matthew Dols 33:40
I could be wrong.

Tricia Wright 33:44
I can’t remember why I wanted to say this. Now. I’ve lost my thread.

Matthew Dols 33:48
Sorry, interrupted.

Tricia Wright 33:50
No, No, you didn’t. The trouble is the questions. They’re always sort of for answers. And it’s trying to figure out which bit to go with first.

Matthew Dols 34:00
Go with all of them. It’s fine. We got time.

Tricia Wright 34:03
It’s materials. You talked about my work, not having a singular sort of style. Say, that’s what it is. That’s what that was the answer I wanted to have. It’s about style, style. For me. It’s inextricably bound up with taste. And I’m suspicious of that. And I think taste comes from background and class. So I have wanted to use materials that work against those ideas, like using materials that are considered trivial or crass. But I’ve also wanted to make a work that doesn’t have a singular style, because I want to point to the fact that it is a matter of taste often I’m very interested in an art that breaks those kinds of logics that works against the idea of uniformity and style, as a way of highlighting that this is just choices. It’s not a given. That makes sense.

Matthew Dols 35:03
It does. I mean, because I come from a photography, background and more in photography, they always talk about having a style, like a signature style thing that sort of iconically says this was made by so and so photographer because, you know, like, you could recognize a Richard Avedon you could recognize, you know, different different artists, there are different photographers throughout the century, because they had their unique style. But these days, I feel like that need for an iconic style has sort of gone away a little bit like it, it feels like we can, as long as we have a conceptual thread through our stuff. So like, we can change topics, we can even change techniques and all this kind of stuff like you’ve done through your career, as long as there’s sort of a thing that still says like it was done with the same intention, or the same purpose, or the same concept underlying it, which was not true, even 30 years ago. But now, it seems okay.

Tricia Wright 36:08
Yeah, I think that’s got to be connected to the change in from the physical, to the sort of limitless nature of the art world, you know, you had before the internet, you have this tiny art world, and they’re very regional, you know, New York artists thought that New York was the center of the world, London artists thought London was the center of the world, and they’re provincial, it’s a provincial way of thinking, even though New York would never think of itself as a provincial place, right. But it is a provincial way of thinking. And that’s really the last time there was any kind of sense of movement, you know, abstract expressionism, or pop out of this, the last sort of coherent things where people can sort of look at it as a package. With globalization and then and the internet, you’ve got a completely exploded art world where you’ve got many, many, many, many, many small parts and much more sort of equalizing situation and the rise of the art fair, the global Art Fair says you can’t get a sense of dominant movement say it’s, it’s a tiny little part. So I think it does open up a space for that.

Matthew Dols 37:13
But that whole sense of movements has been something that I’ve been wondering about, because I’m getting older, and I’m starting to look back going like, okay, was I part of a movement like, was my style that I did 20 years ago, part of a thing. And I started noticing that a lot of those, like, if I was part of a movement, so I’m not going to be arrogant enough to say, like, I was part of a movement, but if I was part of a movement, it was still going to be a regional movement, it was going to be I was in the San Francisco Bay Area, in the arts, and so it’s going to be of that location. And that time, in a way that, like, there was, you know, like, everything pre post modernized, to me, like postmodern is pretty much the end of, quote, unquote, movements, like there’s nothing else past that, because then, on the one hand, it became globalized. So therefore, there wasn’t that provincial sort of regional thing, because they, even the postmodern like, is different in America than it was in Europe than it was in you know, a different parts of the world. So like, all of those kinds of things like movements are have always been provincial, whether the person enjoys just the UK or just Paris, or just like New York, or Europe or America, like they’re going to be still different, even if they’re supposedly under the same movement. And so like, I often look back, and I’m like, I wonder if I’m going to be able to be said to be part of a movement. I wonder what they’re going to call that movement.

Tricia Wright 38:46
Yeah, I wondered the same thing. Surely. Do you think you were part of a movement?

Matthew Dols 38:52
Sadly, I don’t. If I was, it would have been Washington, DC in the late 1990s. There was I went to a school that had a very distinct outcome. So like, almost anybody that left that school, it was very much Oh, you went to that school? Like, literally by the style of your work, they knew who you learned from and that you had gone to that school and they could even probably tell which Professor What’s your favorite professor guy? Exactly. But even that, that’s very provincial thing like that, you know, they The only people gonna know that are the people that either lived in or studied the washington dc art scene. So like, it’s really hard because now we’re so globalized. And so like, how do you find that those connections? You know, I mean, I have difficulty with it. I’m, you know, I’m an expat in the Czech Republic. I don’t speak the language as well as I should and and it’s difficult for me to connect into you try to do it virtually, but it’s never quite as good as reality. So like, it’s it’s a really tough Time with the V, sort of the, the expansiveness of the artwork that also also encourages the provincial or the sort of localization of the artwork as well. It’s difficult, like, where do you spend your time? Like, is it more important to go to an art opening and socialize and create those networks and communities? Or is it more as important to put your time into internet based thing, social media and making those Global Connections? I have no idea what the right answer is. But I know I’m doing it wrong.

Tricia Wright 40:34
Well, it just makes me feel deeply wary. The idea of spending my time trying to make a mark in this massive, global, shapeless thing, I guess, that so much discussion about community that you you know, that sort of in the air, there’s like guys, really is community now, I guess, is a is a response to that a need. But in terms of making art, I feel like I make art in isolation, really, and always have, it’s a solitary pursuit, you have your people that you kind of look back at, I’m very interested in art history. So I spend a lot of time looking at that work. And I’m interested in the sort of long communication of ideas not so much be connecting to something that try to find something that is mine now, like some community of mine now,

Matthew Dols 41:35
what the other part of that that affects me, I don’t know if it affects other people, but affects me is the speed of the art world seems to me increased exponentially, they seem to be wanting you to make more and more work more content, whether it’s for social media or for you new things, or at least just put update your website or whatever it is, like there’s this incessant desire for us to be producing more and faster. And then then, of course, higher quality, because now we’re being compared to everybody in the world versus just the people in our own community. Do you feel that?

Tricia Wright 42:15
Yeah, okay. Yeah. And I cannot do it. You know, post every other day, I can’t. There’s an old I have great discomfort with the whole social media thing anyway, you know, that feeling I was raised to be reserved in that way I reserved are the authors behind the canvas or whatever, I don’t really respond to sort of gestural work, you know, where it’s all see the evidence behind all of this stuff. So I’m very uncomfortable with that, you know, opening my private world, making it public on a daily or every other day basis is just doesn’t fit with who I am.

Matthew Dols 42:58
I totally think it’s a generational thing. Yes, I have zero interest in letting people into my, like my studio practice, even at all, because, like, my thing is, like, when I’m in the studio, let’s say I’ll be working on like, five different things out of those five things. Maybe if I’m lucky, one of them will be successful. But I don’t want everybody in the world to see the four failures. Like as I’m failing at them, because that’s horribly embarrassing. I, you know, I’m still of the generation that I believe that the only things I should put out into the world are my absolutely perfect, successful works, and nobody should see my failures.

Tricia Wright 43:41
You know, I often joke about this, but I went to a convent, grammar school, I wore a uniform, from my whole childhood. And we had it really instilled in us that how you present yourself to the world matters. And you are representing the school. This is a long time ago, but I mean, my God, those things stay with you. I can’t really, I can’t undo that. It’s too tied up. But it was interesting, though, about exposing your failures, the residency experience that do you donnay was scary for me in that way. Because I wasn’t able to prepare and make all my mistakes in you know, in the comfort of my own studio, it was in front of people. And everything that I did was sort of visible that was really quite an experience.

Matthew Dols 44:35
I’ve learned to embrace it a little bit, not a lot. I’ll do like, Instagram stories, like I’m fine with showing failures for one day. But I’m not leaving them on the internet in the future, but they can see my potential failures for one day. That’s all they get. That’s my increments. All right, you mentioned something about like, well, I heard something about like stating like statements and like talking about the work and things like this. I’m always fascinated about creating writing artist statements because like, you’re doing, you’ve done. You’ve got a Pollock, Krasner, you’ve done a do today. And then and you’re also doing public arts, all of those things involve writing eloquently about your work. So how are you finding that process of needing to write artist statements and or sort of some text descriptions of your works?

Tricia Wright 45:39
I don’t like it, I have to say. But actually, I have always really taken from texts, I mean, that texts have been part of my work, like poetic texts, even anti text, like he see it’s texts from 700 BC. There are things that are really in the work. I’ve been making work that come directly out of poems, and so there’s a sort of word component to them. And I have found that in writing statements, it helps me understand the work better. I enjoy words, I like writing, but I mean, I don’t enjoy the statement to you know, to the sort of must not exceed 3000 characters in the little box. It’s hard. It is, but it does. It is useful.

Matthew Dols 46:34
Yeah, it does get easier, the more you do it, for sure. But it’s one of those things that like, if if any given day where I have a choice of I can sit down and write new artist statement, or I can go in the studio and make new work, I’m always going to choose to make new work.

Tricia Wright 46:47
When I was in Ireland, as I said before, it really threw me for a loop. I decided where I’d write my experiences, because I couldn’t make art. And I couldn’t even conceive of what art I would make if I had materials. So I was walking in these loops. And I would come home and I would write down everything that I saw and thought and felt that was kind of interesting, because it was like it was like writing a statement. Without the work. It was the kind of encapsulation of the ideas without any physical object involved. Just the just the experience. All right.

Matthew Dols 47:27
I also mentioned that on your CV it says you did a I’m not even sure what exactly what is Pollock Krasner, and then it says, and art made Hudson grantee. So those are separate grants.

Tricia Wright 47:40
yet. They said no, it was Pollock Krasner provided funds for the art mid Hudson to present an award.

Matthew Dols 47:48
Okay, so it’s not a Pollock Krasner, but it’s funded by Pollock Krasner.

Tricia Wright 47:52
Yeah, it’s a covariation I guess. All right.

Matthew Dols 47:56
So grant, what what kind of, I’m always interesting, because for the first time, in my adult career, I got recently got a grant for this podcast, which you’ll hear in the beginning, where we’re sponsored by or supported by a grant from the so like, I’m fascinated by the whole granting system. So like, what what did you apply for? What did you receive a grant for?

Tricia Wright 48:19
I submitted artworks and was rewarded for the quality of the artworks in a monetary way,

Matthew Dols 48:30
basically. Okay. So it’s just a straight up cash award.

Tricia Wright 48:34
J cash award.

Matthew Dols 48:36
Yeah. Lovely. I wish more countries would do that kind of stuff. America’s not really known for just giving cash awards.

Tricia Wright 48:43
No, no, and or subsidizing that was something that was a shock to me when I moved here from London, because there are lots of subsidies in Europe for art spaces. And yeah, there was none of that. None of that.

Matthew Dols 48:58
Yeah, it was a shock to me, when I moved to Europe that there was all these subsidies are made. Well, it’s interesting, because what happened was, okay, so I come from America, and America, it’s very much a, you produce a product, you put that product on exhibition, you sell that product, you take the money from that sale, to reinvest to make more artworks, like that’s the capitalistic way of America. In Europe, it’s you cut it seems like that maybe I’m wrong on this, but it seems like it’s like you come up with a really great idea. And then you pitch that idea through a grant or residency or something like this. And then it’s funded in its creation, so that the actual reality of exhibiting it and or selling it is totally irrelevant because the process of creation has already been paid for. I love that idea.

Tricia Wright 49:51
Well, that values, the activity itself, as opposed to just the product like there is a saying in Iceland that there’s a statue to the only person who’s never written a poem. Because that so art and poetry and literature is so embedded in the culture.

Matthew Dols 50:09
Oh, yeah. What the grant that we received for this podcast is from Iceland, Norway and Liechtenstein. So and I get to I’m going to be going to visit Iceland for two times to do interviews with people a nice on Norway as well. So quite excited about that.

Tricia Wright 50:25
Yeah, it’s amazing. It’s an amazing place,

Matthew Dols 50:28
as long as COVID breaks, and we can actually travel but yeah.

Tricia Wright 50:32
Will you be going to Liechtenstein? That’s an interesting place.

Matthew Dols 50:38
It’s not on the it’s it was not part of the grant. No. So I mean, I’m sure I could, but I wasn’t part of the plan. Alright, is there anything any topics you want to talk about that I haven’t brought up? Or things that you’d like to expand on that we didn’t, that I didn’t give you a chance to interrupt you?

Tricia Wright 50:59
I think going back to your question about different manifestations. And I’m interested in pictures, not so much in having a chosen way of making. And I think that a lot of people do adhere to a kind of group, one or another. There’s this sort of, you know, the geometric abstraction people or those the people who believe gesture is equal to authenticity. And I really have such an aversion to those sorts of ways of identifying, like, what’s true, and what’s real. And what’s, like, you know, is abstraction, like the period that comes at the end of the sentence is like, the most logical thing and it’s finished, it’s done all of that. I’m really interested in just pictures, how they come together is sort of, not exactly by the by, but it’s a secondary issue, I will make pictures or paintings that are a combination of painting by hand, using an airbrush, having a photographic sort of sighted image printed onto the canvas first painting over a bit of that, making it unclear as to whether which is the photograph on, which is a sort of photo realist bit of painting next to a kind of an area where you can see it’s painted by hand, it really to just to draw attention to the fact that it is an artificial construct that we’re looking at. And that’s, that’s one of the things that sort of drives the work is they asking people to sort of see that these images should be questioned the images and the sort of narratives, text and picture wise that we live with our constructs. And so that’s, that’s why the work looks the way it does so much of the time, sort of drawing attention to the fact that these are artificial constructs.

Matthew Dols 52:46
All right, actually, something I was glancing over at your about you on your website, you said that you had the worst in collections and corporations and museums and things like this. Do you sell on a regular basis?

Tricia Wright 53:02
Not especially okay.

Matthew Dols 53:04
It’s nice to hear that because neither do I. Yeah. Just looking for a little bonding of like, No,

Tricia Wright 53:15
no, I don’t know what else to say. That’s just, it’s been a long career of working and you just work for yourself, and you want the work to go out there. And I have an audience in my mind that I’m communicating to, but the sales is a separate issue.

Matthew Dols 53:32
It’s a target that, to me, that’s the like, I’m not sure if, again, going back to like the European granting sponsorship kind of thing versus the American way. Like, in America, I was born and raised in the idea of like, usually what you want to sell, like, that’s what qualifies you as a quality artist is, the more sales you have. But now that I’m in Europe, I’m like, now like, you can just be really good at ideas. And you can make really interesting stuff and have it supported through things like your arts made Hudson grant. And, and the the grants that I’m getting here in the EAA and this kind of stuff like it, the the need to sell doesn’t shouldn’t necessarily be the thing that sort of, is your ego that says, like, I’m worthy. I’m making good work because I’m selling but unfortunately, that is a very prominent thing in America.

Tricia Wright 54:29
It is, and in the art world, too. I mean, I was really grateful to have this opportunity to talk about ideas I have found and it’s something I found coming from England, that I have, for many years been surprised by other artists in opening say, not really wanting to talk about the work and trying to and not really getting very far and I don’t know whether it’s a cold Choosing, do you find that where you are that people are interested in talking about the ideas, and talking about each ideas to each other about the work as opposed to talking about what shows you’ve got coming up or those things?

Matthew Dols 55:15
Absolutely, I actually had an experience where I went to an exhibition of this lady that whose work I really love, not gonna say her name, because this is not a great story. So this lady who I really love, and I wanted, I was like, I would love to buy a piece. And I went up to her because I knew her and I said, Hey, I love this piece, how much does it cost? And she turns to me, she goes, Oh, I don’t talk about such things. I was just like, all right, that that’s a cultural difference. Yet, like, we’re at an exhibition, I’m literally asking you, how much does this cost? Cuz I’m willing to buy it. And you don’t want to talk about it? I’m like, Alright, that, yeah, that’s a change. But yeah, that I mean, they, they absolutely, there’s there does seem to be a strong sense of concept being very important, specifically in comparison to sales, like much more so. Like, artists seem like they’re more revered and respected. If they are, if they almost if they live into that romanticized, like, they toiled away in their studio for days and months on end and do and never sell their whole lives. Like that’s actually well respected, more so than artists who almost they say they would see it as like, almost too commercial. They see that as decorative and commercial. And a lot of people seem to look down on those people here.

Tricia Wright 56:55
I had that actually that real that experience at college in London, though, and especially given that school that I went to the idea that word commercial has no traction today, really, but it was frowned upon. It should be something that was vocational, purely vocational, and then to talk about money was absolutely, you know, bad taste. And it meant that you weren’t serious, and like trivial, decorative, that fact that decorative was considered bad. And commercial, there was a sort of absolute separation between the fine arts and the commercial arts, and all of that was sort of gone away, which is good. But we were never given any, it was never discussed how to actually make a life make a living, unless you went into teaching. And it was, again, a kind of purely vocational thing. That’s the other extreme to him. And I would like to be able to just talk about ideas in openings, not have to focus on sort of practicalities of life as an artist, which is like, you know, the jobs, the openings, the exhibition sort of opportunities. It’s almost like it’s taboo.

Matthew Dols 58:08
See, it’s funny, I feel like it’s the other way around. Like, I can’t find enough, I find far too many people that are talking concepts, and not enough people who are telling me like, this is the way to actually make a living doing this. Like, like, if I but I think part of it is probably like, if I was making a living, then I would be like, Okay, great. And I don’t need to talk about how to make a living, because I know how to do that. But since that’s the part I don’t know how to do. That’s the thing I want to know the most about. However, on the flip side of it, like, I do know how to make art. So I don’t feel like I need to talk about that. Because I know how to do that. I have no questions really about that. But when I go to art openings, yeah, I would love to more to talk to artists about like, you know, the why, you know, why did they choose to make this like, I love the question Why? It used to be my parents just always make fun of me because my question to everything was always why. Yeah, whatever. They hated me for it, whatever.

Tricia Wright 59:15
Alright,

Matthew Dols 59:16
so my last two questions, as you already know, are, could you give me three people that you find noteworthy.

Tricia Wright 59:27
I am actually very attracted to sculpture, even though I’m a pictures person. Oftentimes it’s sculpture that I look at. So there are two artists who make sculptural work. One of them is Rachel white read an English sculptor, installation artist. She was very one very sort of notable piece of hers was a house that she cast from the inside out effectively so that and then pulled the rest of the house away and what you’re left with is all of the air And all of the objects that were inside the house made visible, and it was called Memorial, I think, and it was just down the road from where I lived in London to so it was an amazing thing to be able to go past but she said wonderful artists. And another one I like in a similar way really is Dora Sal sido Colombian artist. And her work was sort of was really shaped by this violence of the culture that she was living in, and she merged domestic materials with concrete. So she sort of fill up the middle of a wardrobe say, and there’ll be some little shreds of bone may be embedded in the concrete and put little bits of fabric and then sort of real, bringing together domestic and, and sort of political and the both of those artists, those are sort of poetic quality that I really respond to as well, I think that’s one of the reasons why I’m so interested in that sort of sculptural work, the force of the presence of objects. Another artists, who are really looked at from my own work is Patrick Caulfield, and who is not known very much in America at all, as far as I can make out. He’s the same generation as they Hockney and Howard Hodgkins, a painter, very interesting painter where he does that thing that I like very much where he breaks the logic of a painting, he would have elements of almost photo realist work, tiny little quotations, almost within a painting that’s almost abstract sort of flat. So deadpan humor, very elegant, saturated color, very clear, not emotional, the emotional is embedded in the imagery. It’s not on the surface, you know, I really, really think he’s a wonderful artist.

Matthew Dols 1:01:50
Alright. And then my last question is advice for anybody through things you’ve learned through your career positive or negative, that you’ve experienced that you can try to help the next generation navigate their path to success a little bit easier.

Tricia Wright 1:02:07
I think this generation in terms of parenting, this generation, it’s a different world. Not that it’s going to be easy, but I think it is, like a more set up and more understanding of what it is like to be a primary caregiver, that you’re not lacking in rigor, and intellect, because you stay at home, which was a prejudice. I think that the main thing is, though, to whatever you do, you have to make your work for yourself. And you have to be self sustaining, is if you make it for someone else, and they don’t like it, you’ve really got nothing. So if you make your work for yourself, you can actually have a sustaining life. And it’s rich and rewarding, has to be done for yourself. Which is pretty hard in in the context of what you were talking about that the pressure on people to be producing, building a kind of brand and getting your image out there. And, and you know, your presence, your social media presence, if we are the day finding something different to say about your work. And, you know, aside of all of that just sustaining yourself.

Matthew Dols 1:03:28
Yes, I’m looking forward to where my wife and I are planning on having a child in the next couple of years. And I’m going to be the stay at home dad. And she’s going to go to work because she works as an accountant. And she has a nine to five job and I’m a creative and so I have a much more flexible hours and stuff. So I’m very interested in sort of input on how what I should be expecting when I choose to be a stay at home caregiver and an artist at the same time.

Tricia Wright 1:03:59
Good luck.

Matthew Dols 1:04:02
I think I’ll be fine.

Tricia Wright 1:04:05
It does do things to the mind, though you It’s a surprise. You don’t know how it will affect you. But it shifts things.

Matthew Dols 1:04:11
Yeah, that didn’t give me any confidence. But okay.

Tricia Wright 1:04:16
shift things in interesting way. Let’s

Matthew Dols 1:04:17
hope so. Yeah, yes. Okay. All right. Well, thank you very much.

Tricia Wright 1:04:22
Thank you. Pleasure.

Matthew Dols 1:04:27
Thank you for listening all the way to the end. I have a great favor to ask of you, which is that as you all know from previous conversations, I have a great disdain for the algorithm that rules our lives. But one thing that I have learned is that when it comes to podcasts, the biggest thing to help us to gain more attention and more listeners and everything like this is that for you all to write reviews, and to give star ratings in your podcast feed So Apple podcasts, Google Play etc If you could write a review, and or at least give like a nice rating five stars greatly appreciated. That would help us immensely. And so I don’t often ask for help, but I’d like your help. So thank you.

The Wise Fool is produced by Fifty14. I am your host Matthew Dols – http://www.matthewdols.com And the audio for this episode was edited by Jakub Černý. The Wise Fool is supported in part by an EEA grant from Iceland, Liechtenstein and Norway in an effort to work together for a green competitive and inclusive Europe. We would also like to thank our partners Hunt Kastner – http://huntkastner.com in Prague, Czech Republic and Kunstsentrene i Norge – https://www.kunstsentrene.no in Norway. Links to EEA grants and our partner organizations are available in the show notes or on our website https://wisefoolpod.com