Artist Story: Stephen Palmer

Please give an introduction to yourself as an artist.

Growing up, I didn’t know that it was possible to be an artist. I assumed it was something people had done in the past, not something anyone did as a career now.

I don’t come from a particularly ‘cultured’ background, although I guess both my parents were ‘makers’ in one way or another. My dad was an artificial limb maker at a time when it was a highly skilled job involving crafting bespoke limbs from bits of sheet metal, rivets, leather, and various other materials, and my mum is one of those people who can knit a jumper whilst watching TV and holding a conversation all at the same time. So maybe if I thought about it at all, I thought I would be someone who makes things, probably a woodworker, and I still have a bit of a yearning to re-train as a furniture maker to this day.

I did A levels in Art, and Design and Technology, but the latter seemed to be a lot of designing and not so much making, whereas with art you could kind of do the making and the designing all at the same time, so that was the route I took. Although I still didn’t really think about it as a career even as an undergrad at art school.

It was probably when I did an MA a few years later that I really started to think that I could be an artist. But part of me still struggles to believe it’s something a grown up should be doing.

You moved to Newcastle when Vane was in its infancy. Why did you relocate to the north east at that time?

Following graduation from Winchester School of Art in 1990 I lived in London and worked as a picture framer to support myself, framing contemporary work for commercial London galleries. Most of it was ‘blue chip’ stuff, but the YBAs and artist-led galleries such as City Racing and BANK were just emerging, and occasionally we’d frame work by some of these younger artists who were starting to make a name for themselves. So, I became more aware that art was a job that people were really doing, and that it was possible to survive and make a living as an artist. I continued to make work in a bedroom studio kind of way but struggled a bit with the work-life balance thing in London, and although I went to lots of shows and attended previews, I didn’t really feel part of what was happening there. So, I applied for a couple of MAs outside the capital and got a place at Northumbria University in Newcastle in 1998.

David Dye was the MA course leader at the time and his influence was really important to me. David was a great teacher both in terms of his knowledge of the contemporary art world and in that he had a really supportive and nurturing approach. I think I’d really struggled to believe in my work up to this point, but David always gave such positive support and criticism, latching on to things that you were only half aware of in your work. He also invited some great artists to come along as visiting lecturers too. Oddly, I think I started to feel more connected to what was happening in London than I ever had when I was living there.

Do you have any particular memories of Vane during that time?

I first became aware of Vane soon after moving to the city – maybe even before I started on the MA course. Having only just moved, I was amazed at how easy it was to meet other artists and to quickly get immersed in the city’s (and wider north-east region’s) art scene. I’m no doubt seeing things through black and white striped tinted spectacles, but it seemed like there was always something going on: gallery previews to attend, coach trips to see shows across the region or further afield, someone giving a talk about a forthcoming project. And Vane was part – and probably one of the drivers – of much of this activity.

Whilst Vane’s main remit at the time was to facilitate an annual open participation festival, my first experience was attending the regular Vane meetings that took place in the basement bar of a city centre pub. Ostensibly these were about planning the annual festival, but they were so much more than that. Comradeships were formed, beers were supped, ideas were exchanged, and guest speakers came from far and wide to tell us about their own artist-led projects and experiences. For Vane directors Paul and Chris, and their codirectors at the time, William Heard and Laurence Ward, connecting with and being part of a wider network of artist-led projects – both in the UK and beyond – was really important I think. They knew that if Newcastle was to be a city where artists could live and work and to build their careers, and somewhere students wanted to stay after graduation, then it needed to have that connection with the wider art world beyond the city and the region.

Of those early Vane projects, is there one that stands out in terms of the development of your work?

The series I made under the heading Sack for Vane’s 2002 ‘Capital’ project is probably the work that most resonates with what I’ve been making since. These were the first works I made about objects that I had been collecting, essentially an archive of plastic bags that I’d been picking up on my travels over the preceding few years, rendered in either paint, or screen printed, or produced as photographs. I really liked the idea of a souvenir or memento that was free and kind of throw away and turning these objects into paintings and artworks was a way of both celebrating them and curing my need to collect them.

This in turn led to the series of paintings I exhibited at Vane’s first permanent gallery space in 2007 titled ‘Worthless little tokens’. By this time, I was focussing more on painting, having spent a few years working in a variety of media. The objects depicted – matchboxes, sugar sachets, pens bearing the names of charities or credit card companies – were again ‘free’ objects that I’d collected, some as aid memoirs of places visited, others just because of their prevalence at the time (I remember receiving an awful lot of junk mail pens, presumably hoping such an offering would entice me to sign up for whatever credit card was named on the pen, or give money to this or that charity).

The screenprints from the Sack series were created using layers of transparent white to build up the tonal detail of the plastic bags, and I’ve used this layering technique – but with white gouache – in more recent paintings of folded and screwed up A4 paper.

Drawing has become an important strand of your work. How did this come about?

Since around 2010, my practice has been split between periods spent drawing and periods when I will be exclusively working on paintings, with equal importance given to each. For instance, I’ve just started working on a new series of paintings, and this was preceded by about 18 months when I was working on drawings.

I started making drawings as works in their own right back in 2008 as a result of Paul and Chris asking me to make some work for inclusion in a lithographic print portfolio Vane was producing at the time. I made a series of three pencil drawings – rendered on a type of polyester film used for transferring images to litho plates – based on some catalogue leaflets for 1970s office furniture that I’d found in the building where I had my studio at the time. The building had formerly been occupied by a company that produced this functional and no doubt reasonably priced furniture, which had the feel of more expensive modernist ‘pieces’. And I’d furnished my own flat in Byker Wall with some of this very furniture – a set of three chairs which pushed together to make a rather stylish sofa. So, I was very attracted to these leaflets, with their basic and functional design style which mirrored that of the furniture, and to the fact that they were part of the history of the building I was working in.

Between 2010-13 I made a series of drawings based on newspaper cuttings. It was a time when it felt like printed newspapers had had their day, like we’d reached a tipping point whereby online news sites would be the main deliverer of our daily news fix. Whilst I wanted to celebrate the objectness of printed news while it was still a thing, I also liked the seeming impossibility of reproducing all that text.

There’s a bit of a challenge for the viewer too, whether to read all that text or just to see the thing as an overall image – so part of the idea was to think how much the narrative of the story affects your reading of the work.

The series was concluded by some paintings of screwed up newspaper cuttings made over the next couple of years. I think the best of these were three screwed up obituaries of some of the pioneers of computer technology – people who had seemingly played a part in the decline of printed media. I liked the idea that their lives were being celebrated in the very media that in one way or another they had worked to supersede.

Do you think you have a tendency to over complicate things?

I certainly think I’m attracted to making things that might initially be beyond my skill set. Of course, part of what attracts me to drawing is its simplicity – that you just need a pencil and a piece of paper, and maybe an eraser, and you’re off. But for some reason I then need to complicate matters by making it as difficult as I can.

Back in 2016 I remember making a conscious decision to really strip things back and simplify things. I think most of us will agree that 2016 was a pretty rubbish year in terms of what was happening politically in the UK and elsewhere (it’s not really improved since) and on a broader cultural level (we lost David Bowie among many others). It was pretty shit on a personal level too. As I say I made the decision to simplify things, to ditch any obvious narrative references from the work and to start making things that could perhaps seem empty, but with the hope that that ‘emptiness’ would be pretty loaded.

I started making objects – models for paintings and drawings – by folding, screwing up, ripping, and cutting pieces of A4 paper. These were then flattened out as if an had been made to once again make them good. I made a series of drawings of these objects in pencil, also on A4 paper. I like the idea that A4 is the most ubiquitous paper size.

Since then these have developed into paintings and drawings based on models that have become more complex over time – they generally now include scribbled biro or coloured pencil lines and are created from several pieces of paper that have been cut up or ripped and stuck back together. I’ve tried to keep the A4 format in terms of making the models, although many of the works are now slightly bigger.

Are you a perfectionist?

A failed one if so! Part of what these recent A4 works is about is trying to bring some messiness and chaos into the mix. Although it’s probably a very neat and ordered form of chaos that I’m creating.

The biro scribbles were an attempt to free things up a bit – to make marks that are free flowing and less planned. Of course, by then rendering these in paint, I’m kind of taking back that control again.

Do you have any particular memories of your experience of working with Vane?

Having moved away from Newcastle in 2012 I’m now viewing Vane’s work from a distance but it feels like – in its Commercial Union House iteration over the past decade and now in its relocation to Gateshead – supporting the artist community in the city and the region has once again been at the forefront of Vane’s activities, certainly in an arms-length way through its support of artist’s workspace via the Orbis Community. And having a larger gallery space during that time has enabled it to support so many more artists in a direct way too through exhibitions, and to enable those artists to exhibit beyond the city via art fairs and other opportunities.

I’ve been really lucky in my career to work with a few people who truly believe in and value artists, Paul and Chris among them. I think their advocacy and support stems from the fact that they really do believe in the power of artists to make a difference, made stronger perhaps because – although I’m not sure if they think of themselves as artists anymore – they are at heart really good artists themselves.

And, of course, Vane’s work over the past 25 years has inspired countless other artists to set up their own projects big and small, it's a legacy that probably can’t easily be measured but a vital one.