In this thoughtful exchange, artist Erin Lawlor talks to Diana Copperwhite about the role of intuition and emotion in their work, their love of music, and their mutual interest in painter Howard Hodgkin. Copperwhite’s paintings will be on view alongside Hodgkin’s work at day01 Gallery the Auckland Art Fair from May 1-4, and Lawlor ‘s solo “Divining” opens at the Highlanes Municipal Gallery in Drogheda, Ireland on April 26.
Erin Lawlor: Tell me about your exhibition in Sydney; I believe it was called ‘Born in the echoes’?
Diana Copperwhite: I worked for the show in Sydney thinking about how my work might dialogue with Howard Hodgkin. The show included some new small anti-portrait paintings on linen with two larger pieces called ‘Born in the echoes’ and ‘Architecture of Sound’ The larger painting Born in the Echoes is an iconographic image that acts like a portal, an echo of the personal, and the headphones become both a framing device but also a bending limb, a shaft of light. There are always ideas around the body, the disembodied. I am always playing with ideas of how to translate a sense of the disembodied with the audible. For me sound becomes visual and the painting space is a way with rhythm and the sonic to visualize it. It’s a lot more than headphones; it’s about looking at sound, atmosphere and personal space. It’s a soundscape, how to deal with a space visually that is both rhythmic and sonic. The other piece is called ‘The Architecture of Sound’. There is a disparity to the work, but it’s all connected by language. Sound is a very important part of that.
EL: I believe it’s a Chemical Brothers title; you have suggested that that was subliminal, which is interesting to me; and that music in particular – I remember the effect of hearing it for the first time, back in the nineties – there’s an oddness to it, a sense of it actually creating a subliminal space. Music and sound are a very important part of your work.
DC: I loved minimalist classical music; trance and minimal classical are closely linked. I was interested in how listening to it helped me hold tonality in painting – the tones, there tend to be a lot of mid-tones. The trance-like state from the music helped me hold the space in the painting, to keep tones in place. There are a lot of midtones and then distinct jumps to a higher key tonality. The thought of minimalism as being very minimal is two-fold for me, as I want to distill but I see so much complexity in simplicity, I always hear much more in it. I could make anything complicated. It comes from looking for complications within something simple: the actual complexity is already there.
EL: Both of us have referred to painting being a language outside of language – you and I have each referred to ‘onomatopoeia’, the sense of painting being a language that transmits – and transmits through – a range of senses. There is an intense chromatic range in your work. You have also said you use the bars in your paintings as a way to break up the rhythm?
DC: The chromatic range made me think of bars in music: visually, blocks that systemize and represent. It’s a way to break up the rhythm, and to create a logic within the painting which is what it does in music as well; it’s interesting as a way of transposing that information. I always wanted to be a composer.
I never think of the work as abstract or figurative – both have a degree of representation for me, the way I think anyway. I use elements of both: I’m far more interested in that tension. It’s the tension, I think, of the iconic – I need the iconic in order to hold a particular space. It becomes almost like a symbol. I need the tension between the iconographic and the painting process; the process of layering, obliterating, and redefining again.
EL: Was this the first time you had seen your work exhibited in direct dialogue with Howard Hodgkin?
DC: Yes it was the first time my work has been in dialogue with Howard Hodgkin. It’s interesting to see something that was very much part of my formative process in dialogue with my work. There are similarities, and then the concerns are very different.
EL: I know your work was more overtly figurative in the earlier years, we have that in common. At what point in that evolution did you become aware of Hodgkins’ work? I’m curious as to what – and even whether – it had an immediate effect on you, and/or your work? Either in terms of recognition or on the contrary as a shock or upheaval? I know he had a show at IMMA, I think it was in 2006.
DC: I remember looking in books so I was always aware of his work as a student in Limerick very early on, but I had no sense of scale or application. The idea of the interiority of them struck me as a student as well, at that point I was painting fairly straightforward interior spaces.
I remember that show at IMMA so well, it was curated by Enrique Juncosa. I hadn’t seen much of the work in reality, definitely not the larger works until that point. It stayed with me, the autonomous brush marks, bright orange hues and a particular blue are etched in my memory.
It was a sense of a felt physicality that resonated and seemed to have the means to talk about the world now or then. .
The idea of the interiority of them struck me as a student earlier. I had a book on the school of London I think? And he was part of a painterly evolution catalogued at that moment. I was also looking intently at Auerbach from the same book, his work carved out space in colored mud and it’s there in the middle between both influences early on that I feel my work fell.
I was gradually finding my own voice and moving away from topography to more of an autonomous exploration of space in a subliminal way. The figure has curiously never left my work; it has just become fragmented and subsumed in the painting process.
EL: ‘Born in the echoes’ as a title is interesting, as that is in some way what abstraction is: we are at a remove from things, it’s a sort of distancing from things. You and I each use things in our work that both refer to the real world but also that are at a remove from it; that’s what abstraction is, that distancing of the painting.
DC: It’s very easy to start out with ideas about memory and perception; that’s what I would have started out with: they are conducive to painting. They are still very prevalent and are all still there.
Obviously Howard Hodgkin is a wonderful painter, his work seemed purely abstract, but as time went on I saw it was rooted in those same concerns – memory, emotion, and looking at how space is defined in western art history. He had a great collection of Indian miniatures, and you can see that eastern way of approaching space and the figure/ground. You see where it might come from, from a different influence, which modulated a much flatter way of reading space.
EL: I hadn’t realized until I saw the show at the National Portrait gallery just how many portraits there actually are in Howard Hodgkin’s work – for a long time I also saw it as purely abstract, it took me a long time to understand how intrinsically his paintings are about people, emotion, landscape; in his work color and form seem so important. But it’s a synthesis of things, a synthetic way of working – synthetic in terms of emotions, bringing elements together. Synthetic, as in synthetic cubism, in terms of bringing in elements to create a new reality.
DC: For me I look at how paintings were constructed in order to distill something from them for myself in the 21C. I distill it for myself into a language that for me works now, bringing in other elements that interest me at any given moment to create a new reality, looking at a configuration of space so that you have this new thing which is your own language.
It’s the first time there is that dialogue with Howard Hodgkin; it’s the first time my work has been in dialogue with another painter quite like that.
EL: Back to music again – it’s interesting – you have such a strong musical tradition in Ireland and, and you have such musicality in your work. For example, looking to Irish modernism, and the relationship to Orphism and Cubism – one of the big differences between those two movements was that in Orphism there was that relationship to music, and at the same time a freedom of chromatic range, even an openness to real, pure pleasure in the chromatic range, that was absent from Cubism. It was always interesting to me that Jellett and Hone, two of the early Irish modernists, were Orphists rather than Cubists, particularly in view of that innate Irish relationship to music. Is it something you have been specifically aware of?
DC: I had never really thought about it in that way. Or that’s not a deliberate thing.
When I think about early references to Irish music, I think about composers like Sean O Riada and what he tried to do with music. It was very nationalistic and part of the Free State identity, the drive to create a very Irish identity. There is a connection there to Limerick where I’m from. I loved The Chieftains’, amazing Irish musicians that I would have grown up with. They did amazing stuff with Sinead O’Connor and collaborated with contemporary artists. That was interesting for me growing up as Ireland was expanding. All children who went to music classes as kids in Ireland got the same education as everyone else. We all had this snippet of Germany, Austria, and Russia amongst other European composers through our books. I had a leaning towards European orchestral music because of that in one way, but I genuinely like it. I heard a lot of it as a child and it seemed to be part of my emotional fabric growing up. My education was more ‘I like’, rather than ‘I know’. It’s not very linear.
It was the structure, the structural elements, if that’s the correct way to refer to the orchestra, that appealed to me. That hugely helped me with painting: exits and entry of different instruments and their different vibrations, tones, timbre and rhythm, a layering of tone and texture to create an audible but visual canvas.
It’s amazing that something so mathematical has such an emotional impact. It’s very interesting if you can stop just hearing the melody and listen to how it’s put together.
EL: It’s interesting that you like Germanic music. I would have suspected something more joyous.
DC: I tend to go towards the melancholic. But not always! I like a broad spectrum of things. Underneath the bright surface there are often darker moodier layers; the layering of dark on light and light on dark creates a stranger tension.
EL: Your work I think sometimes finds its sense of place through the light in your work. The perception from the rest of the world is that Ireland is quite bleak, misty and grey…but you have said you have a high-pitched chromatic range. There is a sense of place, of a wonderful and magical place, a projection of place. Is that choice of chromatic range also partly a gendered response?
DC: My way of working around those concerns would be to take up space in a meaningful way, and to sustain that you have to be honest. I can handle a painting being strong and deliberate, and there is probably a gender thing from my own perspective as a woman, but I think my palette is a mixture of a ‘felt’ environment and of observation of the ordinary in the world: signs, symbols, weeds, music… that prismic breakthrough that happens all the time in Ireland, and lets you see the spectrum in the grey and then the ever present shifting of light. The everyday barrage of color and associations.
There are always bright spring wildflowers; something I did as a child was to look closely at the perfect geometry of flowers, particularly wildflowers – they were usually referred to as weeds, so not precious. That idea around hierarchy of value is always there. And then there is also the online world, the surreal nature of a hyper-virtual world that you can’t ignore…
EL: There is so much light in your work from a multiplicity of environments; the light from the west of Ireland where you grew up, but also spend time still. But you have also been clear about the importance of travel, and traveling online, and through the digital?
DC: One of my favorite things to do is travel online with YouTube. That idea of reality and a removed reality came from very early on looking at paintings in books, wondering about how they were in reality as opposed to production values creating a third space.
Also the space of the studio, and how you can use that space in the studio to travel endlessly; a type of travel that nothing else can do. In the space of time travel you disappear into these paintings, spaces that don’t exist anywhere else. The real point of them is to create these spaces; I was influenced in one way by how Rothko painted space, flat but endless; space that was not topography.
EL: Aboriginal art also fascinated me when I understood how much it is about mapping, that relationship, both literal and otherwise, to the ground.
DC: They drew on the sand for a very long time. It’s so interesting how they see space and pattern and narrative.
EL: Apart from the two larger pieces in the exhibition, you also showed some of the anti-portraits? Hodgkin, as I mentioned earlier, also worked specifically around portraiture.
DC: I am aware more recently of his portraits. I have always painted people and as my work evolved didn’t want to let that go; or rather it wouldn’t let go of me. It seems important as the space in the larger paintings always have some semblance of human presence. The vanishing apertures series are also portraits. The idea of a portal opening, and the central point a vanishing point, the idea of the eye and vision. They also require a zen-like calm concentration to make them flow and balance; they are very succinct. They created a link between the solidity of the anti-portraits and the folding shafts of light that appear in the larger works. They curl up and bend into a head-like shape, it’s almost calligraphic. There has to be a certain rhythm to something, there is that element as they are very simple.I needed to empty things out and it was somewhere to empty out. The vanishing apertures on paper came out of two oil paintings…
They are very resolute.
I do switch medium, and when painting I really let go and anything can happen; but then I need to recognize the work when it happens
It’s a sensory thing the touch of the different medium
EL: I believe the Howard Hodgkin works in the exhibition were early prints? Printmaking requires what is almost a reverse technique, and a huge amount of restraint. Hodgkin managed to achieve an extraordinarily painterly quality in his prints, and so do you. Can you talk about how you approach that process of printmaking?
DC: The Howard Hodgkin prints are early prints, yes. I liked the rawness of them. There is a real beauty to the simplicity of the mark making in them and the color balance.
In making prints, working with other people is good. Trying to find something that’s fleeting, you keep going and then you lose it. With printmaking there are moments of control and then chaos. But the printmaking process keeps it under control. It’s a collaboration and it forces me to slow down.
I currently work with Stoney Road Press in Ireland and they have a real understanding of my practice. I wanted to make prints that had the same painterly rhythm and complexity of color as the paintings and using carborundum is the process that really suits this. It’s interesting working in reverse but it has its own spontaneity that is similar yet different to painting on canvas. I haven’t actually shown my prints with Howard Hodgkin’s prints but would love to at some stage.
Upcoming:
“Diana Copperwhite,” day01 Gallery, Auckland Art Fair, Aotearoa Art Fair,189 Crown Street, Sydney, Australia. May 1 through 4, 2025.
“Erin Lawlor: Divining,” Highlanes Municipal Gallery, 36 St Laurence St, Moneymore, Drogheda, Co. Louth, Ireland. April 26 through June 15, 2025.
“Erin Lawlor: inscape,” Vigo Gallery, London, 7/8, Mason’s Yard, Street, James, London. Opens May 1, 2025.
Incredible blend of creativity and passion. Your artwork leaves a lasting impression on the heart and mind!