BB: Your reinterpretation of Eve in The Genesis Project transforms her from the source of humanity's fall into a figure of revelation, ‘the victor’. What possibilities does reinterpreting and transforming familiar stories open up for you as an artist?
EF: I’m very interested in the long-held relationship of painting to narrative storytelling and how it can be used as a tool. My greatest source of inspiration comes from the notion that painting offers us an unfixed window in spite of the fact that all marks on the surface stay as they are once the painting dries. The context that it is viewed in, the events in history that sit alongside it and the interpretation of the viewer continue to transform the painting long after the brush is put down. This is what keeps me endlessly engaged in the act of painting. Where you can travel through time and apply an agency to narratives that at one point you may have been written out of completely. There is possiblity in that like a path forward or a loop backward to pick up lost pieces and gain new understanding. That feels like some sort of agency, or an attempt at reclaiming it.
BB: You’ve discussed wanting the audience to be invited into your work rather than dictated its meaning. How do you balance this openness with your own intention?
EF: I view it as a conversation, and in any good conversation there is an exchange. I am not interested in making more statements than questions, but perhaps a balance of the two where I can. I try and offer elements that feel familiar enough to take root and run with. Repeated signs and symbols, recognizable features from everyday life, quotings from antiquity, or references to current events that create some sense of familiarity. I pair these elements with aspects of my lived experience that feel deeply personal to me. Like an offering of something vulnerable or truthful, an attempt at some form of authenticity. The part you give of yourself when asking others to do the same. Then there are the gaps that need filling or elements of text and mark that can be stitched together with one’s own mapping. I think far too often we are left feeling lost or like we don’t know enough to even look at let alone speak to what we know when viewing art. That feels like a failing to me. I hope to avoid that where possible.
BB: The surfaces of your work are often heavily mixed; encaustic, hessian, newsprint, charcoal, linen all in the same painting. Do you find each different material adds its own language and history to the painting?
EF: My family is made up of scientists, doctors, musicians and artists. We have always been encouraged to treat each medium the same way so my approach to painting feels at times scientific. I hypothesize about what chemicals will do, and then play and discovery come in when they are pushed. The ones that come back are the ones that feel like they stretch the reaches of all a painting can hold. So many associations, so many ways of conveying sensation. In the layering of all these acts of discovery I have begun to find a language that houses the meaning i’m wanting to share.
BB: Critics have compared your figures to Nancy Spero's and traced a line back through Gauguin and the Symbolists. Do you feel these references resonate with your style of making?
EF: I feel so greatful for these associations. Each one is a master in their making and I find deep resonance with various aspects of their practices. I hadn’t encountered Nancy Spero’s work prior to Harmon Siegel making the connection in their writings about my work. Once I did I couldn’t unsee it. I think this happens often where the chord you are playing sings the same tune as someone addressing similar conversations in their work. I think this also happens more frequently when you dabble in the shared arcana of collective consciousness and repeated symbology as I do.
BB: You have spoken about wanting viewers to enter into a dialogue with the work. Has there ever been an interpretation of one of your paintings that surprised You?
EF: I am always surprised about how much is shared even when my lived experience on paper feels so entirely different from others. There is a crossing of the aisle that art allows for that I think is both brilliant and vital, especially in our increasingly polarised society. It’s not to say that this creates homogeneity or that that is the goal, but rather it poses so many questions and allows space for a variety of sometimes very different answers.
BB: Is there something that feeds you creatively outside the studio, a place, habit, ritual or similar?
EF: Engaging with other thinkers. I wouldn’t even limit them to the category of artists although I think all of them are even if they are technically not in practice.
My partner Rebekah Banks is one of the greatest I know. For my last solo show she spent many hours with me in the studio analyzing texts sharing about what we’d read, researching related topics and asking such amazing questions. She was such a massive part of the making of that body of work. It felt like a big part of my journey coming out as a queer person, and the divinity of queerness itself. It is a joining into community with a depth of understanding that is both felt and shared with other queer people. This has deeply impacted my practice and feels like a big shift in the work marked by this show. I am incredibly lucky for this. Ideas are exactly like energy. They are infinite, and ever expanding when shared. That plays well with ritual. I love learning about the rituals of others (something we do together often) and expanding my own.
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