Figure to Ground: Felicity Allen Interviewed by Celia Lury

Abstract

In this interview, the artist Felicity Allen discusses her residency as part of the research project People Like You: Contemporary Figures of Personalisation, which included the making of the film Figure to Ground—A Site Losing Its System. The interview locates the film in relation to Allen’s ongoing practice of Dialogic Portraits and considers the notion of the figure in relation to three meanings of site: the site as in a specific site and its parallel ‘non-sites’ as elucidated by the US sculptor Robert Smithson; the site as the commonly foreshortened term for a website; and sight.

The artist Felicity Allen carried out a residency as part of the research project, People Like You: Contemporary Figures of Personalisation (https://peoplelikeyou.ac.uk/). As part of this residency, she developed a new series in her practice of Dialogic Portraits. This practice is a form that evolves in series. It generates a portraiture which recognises the labour and experience of the sitter as well as that of the artist, thinking together in the context of the painting that emerges from the sitting. Allen says,

In each series, I usually select and invite a number of people to come and sit for me, working a couple of days with each individual. As I paint them we talk and I make a minimum of two pictures. As people speak our faces constantly shift, and I often try to overlay hints of different expressions—the pictures are therefore frequently about time spent together, and the relational exchange. At the end of the sitting I invite sitters to sign the work alongside my own signature, in token recognition of their labour, although the work remains mine. Following this, I usually make a recorded discussion with each sitter, and use both recordings and pictures to produce a film or book.

For this residency, Allen invited her sitters to consider questions of traditional representation, including portraiture, as well as ideas of the digital self, and also made audio recordings with the sitters. The portraits and the recordings form the basis of a 12-minute film, Figure to Ground—a Site Losing its System (https://peoplelikeyou.ac.uk/portrait/ ). In this interview with Celia Lury, Allen addresses the significance of relations between figure and ground in her own and others’ art practice.

Celia Lury: The title of the film has all sorts of associations, relating to the understanding of a person as a figure, who stands out—or not—in relation to a ground, to who is visible and who is invisible. And, of course, it relates to perspective and projection in both visual arts and social sciences. How do you approach the notion of the figure?

Felicity Allen: Figures start off as human for me. What to do with human figures in pictures? As an ‘emerging’ artist in the 1980s there were considerable prohibitions on portraying figures—portraits were conservative; narrative painting represented an ‘English’ failed engagement with modernism, a failure to understand ‘painting’; expressionism was identified with macho self-heroicising; women’s bodies shouldn’t be portrayed because they would always be subsumed into patriarchal consumerism.

In addition to these dictates, the ‘new’ media of video and photography were seen as a liberation from the reactionary representations of people associated with painting. Not only was painting necessarily reactionary, watercolour was the wrong medium for portraiture: for years the annual open exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery excluded watercolour while permitting the use of new technologies as soon as they entered the market. Photography took on the language of ‘figure to ground’ as a composition technique in which a subject (a figure) is positioned in relation to a ground by way of camera apertures, although I was first introduced to the term when learning about Renaissance developments in perspective.

I now know that the ideas one engages with as a young person stay with one; however successfully they’ve been dispensed with, they’re never quite despatched. They still play into my thinking about the figure in relation to the ground—the ground as figurative background, and the ground as medium. In painting one might make a representation which has a background and speak of figure to ground, but ‘ground’ is also the sizing treatment and base colour on the canvas, for the picture itself. In this sense the picture itself is the figure. So I have been interested in the friction of juxtaposing media apparently in argument with each other—in the 1980s black and white photos beside oil paintings, now paintings as an integral picture-making part of a film. In this sense I’m interrogating the possibilities of portraying figures against or through different types of ground, unsettling the idea that a single ground might define a figure.

CL: I’m wondering about your mixed use of the mediums of watercolour and film—including the aperture of perception each affords you as the artist, as well as the way you mix up portrait and landscape ‘page’ orientations, a kind of layering of media, acknowledging their history and inter-dependence.

FA: I’d experimented with overlaying painted portraits over a film sequence in The Disoeuvre no 1, a film fragment I made two years ago, and knew I wanted to explore this way of working in Figure to Ground. I started to relate this idea to Piero della Francesca’s The Flagellation (late 1450s), which has haunted me for decades. Through extraordinarily detailed mathematical perspective, the picture is divided into two spaces which harmoniously hang together: to the right, the foreground, with three figures in contemporary dress as if in conversation and, to the left, a much deeper perspective, showing Pontius Pilate witnessing Christ’s flagellation, one and a half millennia earlier. Carlo Ginzburg’s book about the painting (The Enigma of Piero, 1985) shows how the architecture, including complex floor tiling, is portrayed with precise mathematical exactitude, securing the harmony.

The pandemic, and the consequent gallery closures, has reinforced the way in which our engagement with pictures and image-making is increasingly mediated through several digital layers—photography or film and then computers. In making Figure to Ground, I thought a lot about the way a painting is reproduced through digital media. I wanted to reveal the sense of the tactile and haptic one achieves through paint on paper, as well as the frustrations of the digital proxy: there are three digital processes between the viewer and the original picture (photography, film editing software, and digital projection or display). It was a difficult decision to include any directly filmed images of people at all in the film as I wanted to counter the assumption that film (or photography) is the real, or the true, as opposed to the subjective nature of paint. If most of the representation of people is through digitised versions of paintings, while the background—traces of a hoverport that no longer exists—is made visible in digital film, are the people real, or is the landscape? I complicate this question with the use of multiple voices along with the diegetic sounds of wind and sea as part of a composed soundscape.

I watched Black Audio Film Collective’s 1986 Handsworth Songs again recently and was intrigued at how prescient it was in its mix of different types of image-making through film: including film of statues, a creepy model of a clown, archive documentary film footage, and projections of black and white still photography as if hanging in a room-like space which transforms into a series of flat images overlapping each other on the diagonal. That representation of photography was very deliberately questioning truth and presentation. In the period they were making that I made a deconstructive installation of the statues in the Victoria Memorial alongside colonial tea and coffee ephemera picturing black people as servants or agricultural labourers, and I think our generation was very conscious of arguments about picture-making, public space, and visual culture. Mostly these ideas were pursued by photographers and film-makers rather than painters, but I just couldn’t get along with the implements of the technology: I needed to work with the wetness of paint.

CL: The film Figure to Ground—a Site Losing its System seems to have a doubled approach to ground. It both locates the portraits in relation to a specific place—Ramsgate, a port in Kent that has a long history as a significant point of entry and departure to England—and suggests that the ground for our lives is disappearing, maybe even being destroyed. Is this doubled approach also a way of thinking about the changing conditions for site specificity?

FA: This is a great and perplexing question and a simple answer is, yes.

When I decided to pick up the US sculptor Robert Smithson’s phrase ‘a site losing its system’ I was thinking of three types of sites: the site, as in a specific site and their parallel ‘non-sites’ elucidated by Smithson (https://holtsmithsonfoundation.org/provisional-theory-nonsites); the site as the commonly foreshortened term for a website; and sight.

The film was made throughout the first year of the Covid pandemic and, for me, virtually a year of lockdown. It was a year in which four global issues were highlighted in British politics: the treaty to take the UK out of the European Union, climate heating with the destruction of species, habitats and ecologies (implicitly connected with the global pandemic), Black Lives Matter as a global movement and the government’s military response to people seeking UK asylum. For the film I had thought I would be focussing on questions of the face, including facial recognition, but the Hong Kong demonstrations for democracy, and the use of face masks as resistance, followed by the use of face masks as protection against Covid, made this seem too topical to work with. I needed to pause in order to think, to find a way to introduce duration, if not narrative or history, into the film. The hoverport represented the fact that technologies come and go. Things do change. Nature comes back. As well as the ground shown here being a site of entry and exit, there is potential for hope in the figures the film makes visible. Perhaps it’s worth looking as precisely at individual sites as at individual faces, in order to think about what you’ve called the changing conditions of site specificity.

All images in this chapter are film stills from Felicity Allen, Figure to Ground—A Site Losing Its System, Digital Film, 2021.

Sitters from Felicity Allen’s Dialogic Portraits included in her film Figure to Ground—a Site Losing its System for People Like You: Contemporary Figures of Personalisation: Rashid Adam, Ego Ahaiwe Sowinski, Stanley Allen, Jemima Brown, Ayaan Bulale, Janice Cheddie, Abi Cooper, Luke Eastop, Jason Evans, Yael Gerson, Raga Gibreel, Althea Greenan, John Hall, Ollie Harrop, David Herd, Huang Jing-Yuan, Fiona Johnstone, Sue Jones, Sophia Lee, Zoe Lee, Lunatraktors (Clair le Couteur, Carli Jefferson), Antoine Marinot, Ruth Novaczek, Amarnah Osajivbe-Amuludun, Betsy Porritt, Kamsan Sivakumar, Salih Osman, Simon Smith, Dan Scott, Trish Scott, Gerrie van Noord, and Will Viney.