Outside, mainly: New works by Jonathan McCree

Sim Smith - You draw outside mainly and have spoken about the idea of recording physical rather than visual memories when drawing. Are the drawings about memories and being somewhere at a point in time?

Jonathan McCree - These drawings are my reference points, where a process begins. They are done away from my studio, made without the pressure of expectation. The drawings in this exhibition are taken from my drawing books, which I take with me whenever I spend time away with my family or visit friends; holidays and trips. As such they are made out of moments of relaxed intimacy. They are personal because they are also emotional. They emerge from a relaxed and playful connection with my wife, son and friends. They are emotional moments in time rather than records of place. Their making will often be interrupted by the calls of a physically exuberant young boy, by the rhythms of things around and outside of me as much as by that which is within. This interrupted rhythm, being forced to stop and start again is part of what the drawings are, and I don't mind because I'm not trying to resolve a record of place. The drawings are part of my physical memories.

Sim - It's the first time you have made the wall sculptures. They are made from off-cuts from the freestanding works, can you talk a bit more about them?

Jonathan - As a record of sensation, atmosphere and emotion, I don't feel compelled to honour the 2D'ness of the drawings. In fact, it feels more obvious to me to flesh them out into 3 dimensions, in which I can acknowledge the emotion of a colour and the playfulness of a form.

Sim - The freestanding sculptures are also evolving, bending, intertwining, and sometimes seemingly crumbling. They make me think of the collaborations you have done in the past with dancers, what are you exploring in these new pieces?

Jonathan - Looking at a painting always makes me aware of my body. Whether something is 2D or 3D I need to move my body to experience it. When I work in 3 dimensions, I am wanting to move the work closer to the viewer, to share a space.

I am interested in how the surface of a form, if you like the skin of a sculpture, interfaces with the viewer. I want them to be felt with our senses rather than viewed from a distance. In order to break the distance between viewer and an object, I felt that I needed to break into the space of the object, crack the skin. Working with a dancer was a way to explore this idea and some part of each of the free-standing sculptures has been used in a performance or film with a dancer, as part of the process of making. The dents and rips are a part of this history. I then repaint and re- arrange the objects into small groups.

Sim - The sculptures have always been an invitation to play and to explore. Do you enjoy making them and do they ignite your sense of performance and play?

Jonathan - Yes, I really enjoy making them and imagining future possibilities. Each sculpture has a slightly provisional quality, it is 'this' now, but it could be 'that' later on. It is exciting to imagine the trajectory. At the moment some of the sculptures, which I have exhibited in gallery shows are hanging from the branches of a large tree in Sussex. I wanted to place them high up and see them from below, constantly moved by the breeze. Over time they will fall to the ground like the leaves, they will soften in the rain, sag and collapse. My plan is to document these transitions over the course of the coming months.

Sim - Can you tell us a bit about Outside, mainly?

Jonathan - Outside, mainly is a body of work curated around a group of drawings. This is the first time that I have shown the drawings alongside the sculpture and paintings.
I think of my practice as a timeline, reaching back to my influences and historical time and then forward into the future. The present is a moment of making, which uses the past to instigate the potential held by the future. My challenge is to imagine a future based on a present, which doesn't exist quite yet. This isn't a utopian vision of the future, but a way to foreground playfully, alternative ways of being, behaving and thinking.

Sim - Do you work on the drawings, paintings and sculptures simultaneously?

Jonathan - I don’t but that is perhaps down to limits on the space available to me. However, in my imagination everything exists in a constant state of conversation and exchange. I am always seeing the potential for taking marks, forms and colours in other directions and across media. I will often interrupt something if an idea is strong enough, to pursue a tangent. My practice is in a large part driven by the challenges thrown up by materials.

Sim - Looking to your larger paintings, are they an extension of the drawings or do they afford you a different opportunity in their making?

Jonathan - In a sense they continue the visual language of the drawings; the marks and colours. However, the larger paintings are made in the studio over an extended period of time and I think they hold a very different energy as a result. They contain a lot of revisions and are more thought through, more specifically resolved and less emotional. In the larger paintings for this show I also used the cut-out shapes from the freestanding sculptures as templates and stencils, so as a timeline it would be better to say drawing, then sculpture, then painting.

Sim - The drawings are such an integral part, as you say, they come first but they have always been kept in the background until now. Do you think they are becoming more important now that you are also making sculptures?

Jonathan - Yes, the drawings are something that I almost hid from myself. I would make a drawing quickly in a book and then turn the page, only occasionally looking back perhaps to borrow a form or mark. I would fill whole books this way and then put them on a shelf in my studio and not look at them again for sometimes a year or more. I felt that they were important as a way of inscribing a set of memories into my body, which I knew I would reference.

The recent sculptural work has definitely created a more interesting context to see the drawings. I was aware of looking at them more in the studio, leaving the books open so that I could see them when working. I think that they are directly relevant to how the sculpture developed, as a kind of filling out of emotional spaces and coloured memories.