Interview With Laura Hollick for View Magazine . September 2006

LH.  How has your new home influenced the art you are making now?

Well I’ve always thought that making art is reacting to the place and time you find yourself in on this planet as your life unfolds. When I found myself living on the north shore of Lake Erie I found more of America that I ever expected; from the amount of waterfront controlled by Americans to being able to see America a few kilometres across the lake to being inundated with news of what America is up to again these days on the planet.
I can see America from my back door, too damn close!

LH.  When you reflect on your artistic career what do you notice?

I still like to do the things I first figured out how to do. Live sketching. Figuring out black & white prints.
Constructing paintings. Reacting to life and making a visual statement.

LH.  How would you describe “Too Close For Comfort”, you’re show at the Carnegie?

You’d better come to see it with an open mind and a sense of humour this isn’t the same old art. Up here in
southern Ontario over my life time we’ve been able to sit up here and observe America doing its thing, over & over again. When I was in Dundas, America was pretty well abstracted to news bites & their TV networks & Canadian print media
but up here on the east end of the Lake Erie shore and very close to Buffalo & Dunkirk, New York State, it’s right in your face in many ways ( including why Canadian sourced cell phones don’t work. The work in the Carnegie exhibition is my comments & observations as I find life unfolding in Wainfleet, Ontario on the east end of the Lake Erie north shore.
Did I mention I Iike to sketch landscape with oils and collect the debris of our culture that I find around me
as I move around the planet & mix it all up?

LH.  How does it feel doing a show at the Carnegie after working there for so long?

Yeah I ended up working there about 10 years and saw some awesome exhibitions parade through the doors
and I had a solo exhibition of wood cuts several years before I began working there. So I know the space intimately
which is an asset in its way. But I also know the nuances of the viewing public of the Gallery so all I can say is that
not everybody is gonna’ like the exhibit but it’ll drive some folks wild.

LH.  What inspires and influences your work?

The world itself. Its complexity. Its interactive-ness.
Where I find myself observing from. And of course the ongoing history of ideas.
To express myself visually I am attracted to the “I did it my way” artists of late 19th and early 20th Century
western European and North American art movements. In particular the work of Kurt Schwitters in the first place.

LH.  Tell me about your creative process.

Mostly I play. Coming across ideas and finding materials or being presented with an opportunity to sketch
creates the urge to do something with it. Doing something with it brings other elements around me into the creative process. Be it building a construction, painting a landscape or drawing a scene and turning it into a print.
Striving to think outside the mental box of mass education and the constant bombardment of shit we are supposed to believe in that assaults us in so many forms that emanates from our ”think like we tell you & buy what we tell you"
pop culture and its insistent marketing messages still makes me want to have something to say about it.

LH.  Is your art a way of working through thoughts, and things unfold/
Or do you have a clear picture and you make it?

“Is your art a way of working through thoughts, and things unfold” is exactly how it is for me.
I think I start with a clear picture of what I am going to do but as I start to work things change at their own insistence. Sometimes this happens right way in a sequence of events over a very limited time period and sometimes the seeds
are sown and things continue to grow at their own pace for how long it takes.

LH.  What is the most important element to your work?
Spontaneous use of cultural debris to comment upon the “world” in the context of creating “fine” art.

LH.  Where do you collect the objects for your collages?

Where ever life leads me but I do walk and ride a bicycle a lot and like to investigate new places.
For the past two years the Lake Erie north shore has ruled but before that the streets trails & waterfronts of the Hammer.

LH.  Can you think of anything that could help me understand you and your work?

Well I’ve been showing my artwork in and around the Hammer on a reasonably regular basis since 1972 culminating in
an exhibition I helped conceive and execute and created work for at the Art Gallery of Hamilton in 1999. Other than a year back in 1975 with Gordon Perrier at the Dundas Valley School of Art I have no formal art education in the sense of an art school or university degree. I come from a background of over 40 years playing early rock and roll and blues music as well as creating visual works. What I know I learned mostly on the streets and from books at the library and trying to get to interesting art exhibitions to see what other people were doing visually and talking to people of like mind. I have had no expectations art could be a career, it’s been about reacting to life on the planet and trying the pass along your version
of what you see from where you are of what’s going on for me in a visual format rather that as a song lyric
or a written story or a video etc…

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