Playing with Words: A three-way conversation between Natalie Bradbury, Laura Hopkinson and Darren Nixon

The exhibition ‘How it Started / How it’s going’, currently on show at PAPER Gallery in Manchester, has paired visual artists Darren Nixon and Laura Hopkinson with writer Natalie Bradbury as a three-way collaboration and conversation. It is one of a trio of exhibitions developed through an experimental project facilitated by PAPER and online critical writing platform the Fourdrinier. One of the aims of the project was to see how writers – who are used to working with words – would approach the curation of an exhibition, and work with artists using the medium of paper.

For Bradbury, a series of conversations with Nixon and Hopkinson have enabled her to experiment with new approaches to the familiar processes of writing and editing. In the final instalment of a two-part interview (read part one here), Bradbury, Nixon and Hopkinson reflect on their shared interests in words and language, and discuss the relation of writing and editing to their work.

Natalie: Laura, as a writer, I wanted to ask you about words. For this show you’ve produced a series of works based around text. What do words mean to you, and have you used text in your work before? How do you choose which words to use?

Laura: Words have always been the core of everything that I do. I've always collected words or found the nonsense in language. I used to let my phone write a lot using the word options given by iPhone predictive texting. I would have hours of conversations with myself only using those three words and just letting my phone speak to itself by using what it thinks it knows about me, which I've always found fascinating. I used that as source material for quite a while.

I like making notes on things that I think are funny, that the rest of the world probably doesn't think are that funny. I like to use a lot of the real world, or things that people might not notice, like conversations that I have, or things that I read that people have written in a real way rather than a fictional way.

With my video work, that's all written and scripted before I film, so a nonsense, absurd narrative is massively important to me. 

Natalie: There's a real impulse towards storytelling in your work. Whatever you do, or hear, it's immediately like you’ve created a narrative in your head about it. 

Laura: The drawings I've been doing with Amazon reviews are a good example. That’s the second time I've used Amazon reviews. The first time I wrote an entire song with reviews about aluminium foil trays and I think that's one of the best things I've ever written. It was golden. There were loads of wonderful reviews, so I barely had to edit it down. It was just finding the lines that rhymed and connected well. I've not tried another song yet because I do have an ambition to one day bring that out as an actual pop song. 

Natalie: I wanted to ask Laura about words, because I'm a writer. As a researcher and also an editor, I start with a mass of material and try to make sense of it. Darren, I wanted to talk about the process of editing in relation to your work – you’ve worked a lot in video up until now – and how you select and make choices and edit and juxtapose. 

Darren: Obviously with video work, editing is central. It’s a process that I find really interesting, but it's also awful, time-consuming and mind-numbing. Recently, when I was working in the Pink Room at YES in Manchester [during lockdown, when the venue was empty, Nixon was allowed access to create new work in response to the space], I was filming more self-consciously with potential edits in mind. I was trying to get multiple variations of every single piece that I had in there, so that I had materials ready to work with when I was done. It took about seven hours, just doing very small variations, and I was standing there thinking ‘Is this even a remotely creative process?’ What interests me is the idea that the work only comes together as a result of the process. I like the idea that in a way the work never happens in real life, it never happens in the space: there’s no performance that happens in the space, ever, that could be described as a thing.

Laura: It is a strange concept. I often think about this. When I have an initial idea, I can see the video as whole in my head and I can visualise it exactly. Then I have to go through a weird, jumpy process of play and different takes and then sometimes my video footage can literally sit there for weeks because I find going into the edit tremendously daunting and a little bit boring: I've done the fun, I had the idea, I played, and now I've got to do the grown-up stuff and actually put this together to remake the play.

In a way, it is purely for the viewers because I've already succeeded in playing and experienced the joy of making that. Now I'm just doing all this work so I can show you how I played and you can also enjoy it.

Darren: The editing process relates to the way I like to make work that never has a form, or doesn’t have a finished form. Some of that is a really obvious and basic reaction against the commodification of art objects: the thing I hate about the art world is it's become such a nonsense world. The high-end art world has just become a way for rich people to hide money. That sours my relationship with it so much that I made a really distinct effort to try and step away from making anything that could be for sale, so the idea of it never having a fixed form fits in with that. I realised that I just really enjoyed trying to think of different ways of making things not have fixed forms. 

Laura: I enjoy that idea of video work as pretty much unsellable. It takes away that pressure to think ‘if you want to be a full-time artist, you must think of a way to make a sale’. For me, it’s going back to the childhood mindset. When a kid plays, they don’t think: ‘I need to make money from this.’ I don't ever want to hate doing what I'm doing because there's a financial fear behind it. I'm not saying that you shouldn't make money from your art – everyone would love to be able to make a living from it – but I feel it takes a lot of the pressure away if you don't have to think ‘how much should I price this, what if I don't sell it, I need to sell this before I can make the next thing’.

I don't really edit at all when I'm planning. If I'm writing a script or a plan of what the video is going to be I very much free write and that tends to be the final product. I don't mull over it or go back and edit it down. It’s the idea that's just come into my head. I’ll write it all down and then go and film.

Darren: It does really show. That was one thing that I find interesting about working together. I have collaborated with different people now and it's always different. As soon as Laura and I started talking and working together it felt quite easy and effortless. What we’re trying to do, and what I enjoyed, was trying to deliberately step away from being too involved in the decision-making process or thinking about it too much. It feels like you work that way anyway: almost trying to sit above the process, and just watching it happen, rather than trying to nudge it too distinctly in one direction or the other.

Laura: I think that’s an important way of working and I try and do that with anything I ever make. I go into this mindset of what I call ‘open zone’: I will do nothing but think about that concept or that idea or that piece that I'm doing. If my mind wanders, I'll always bring it back and then somehow an idea comes. But that can mean mulling for weeks. I enjoy having a deadline but I don't really feel a time pressure nerve anymore: I feel very comfortable to just let things marinate until I get to that point. It's very much, ‘this will work, and to make it work I've got to let my brain just float on through every day and I'll watch it happen and things will come out of it’. 

Natalie: What do you think the relation of writing is to your work, either my writing or writing by other people? What does writing add and why bring a writer into this process? 

Laura: It makes sense of the visual. You don't often get that in a show. You might get a biography from the artist or brief bit of writing but it’s nice to be analysed by a writer over a long period of time: I'm very curious what words you're going to share. It gives a fresh concept and viewers will see our little worlds via your eyes. I don't think anyone's ever seen my work from that perspective or as intently as you have, which interests me, regardless of what the viewers think. I don’t really enjoy talking about my work. I just want to make stuff and for people to watch it and take what they take from it. You two are probably the two people in the world now who know my art from my perspective best, which is quite strange, because it's changed so dramatically over the past year. You two know my art secrets more than anyone else.

Darren: When I knew that you were involved, the initial reason I said yes to the project was in large part because I knew that you were the writer that I was going to be working with. That was as much down to that I found you interesting as a person rather than the idea of working with a writer. It was seeing the stuff that you write about and the stuff that you're interested in, and that combination. 

The idea of people writing about your work is like a pressure-free version: getting to hear your work talked about. If I write or speak about my work, it feels like I'm shutting things down and limiting what it can be by defining it, but if someone else does it it's not the same, because it's just their opinion. I was really pleased with the first piece that you wrote when we met, for The Fourdrinier. It felt like you really got aspects of my work that I wasn't sure came across clearly, so it was a nice validation to know that somebody had looked at it and that stuff had been evident to them. I read that piece and I thought, ‘okay, so that is in my work’. I've always wondered if it is in my work, because you can say what's in your work but it doesn't mean it's necessarily there. It's just what you think you're putting into it, so having someone else see that clearly is reassuring.

Natalie: As part of our discussions during this project, we did an exercise where I sorted Darren’s recent collages – over 300 in total – into groupings and tried to pair them up with Laura’s text works. Your reaction to this was really interesting, Darren. I got the sense that what I'd done was at the different end of the scale to how you would have grouped your work together. My approach, and the pathway that I found through it, was really different.

Darren: Definitely. It was really words- and language-based, the way you pulled the work together. I would go a completely different way. It's not a better way, just the way that I would instinctively go is more about how things feel when they're in proximity to each other. I would literally just sit pieces of mine and pieces of Laura side-by-side, and keep moving them around until I felt resonance between things – not like a spiritualist medium vibe, but more obvious triggers of shapes and echoes.

‘How it Started / How it’s going’ is at PAPER Gallery, Manchester until Saturday 7 August. The exhibition is open Saturdays, 11am-5pm, and is free to visit.