Los Angeles, May 2009:  I met Phoebe Unwin the afternoon before the opening of her exhibition at Honor Fraser in Los Angeles, Making An Outside Space Theirs (on view May 23 - July 3, 2009). We walked around the gallery and talked about her paintings, their unpretentiousness, and the strange, non-serial rhythm they create.

We conducted the below interview over email in the week following Phoebe's return to London. Phoebe discusses titles, bodies, and memory with thoughtful frankness.

-Catherine Wagley

Catherine Wagley: You said that hanging a show is like composing music. What was it like to see your finished composition, your whole show, hung at Honor Fraser?

Phoebe Unwin: It was fantastic to see the body of work I had been working on, out of the studio and on the wall at Honor Fraser-it is only at that moment I can really have a complete sense of what the show feels like.

I think all exhibitions, at one level, result in a kind of gesamtkunstwerk that will most probably never happen again. With this in mind, I can't help but see hanging the show as a very important opportunity for me to communicate the rhythms and relationships between works-keeping in mind aims I have had whilst making a body of paintings and remembering how one work might have led to the creation of the next.

CW: Do you listen to music when you work?

PU: I don't often listen to music when working but if I do it seems to be important to me it's without lyrics. Recently, I have been enjoying Minimalist music-Reich, Glass, etc.

CW: The show's title-Making An Outside Space Theirs-sounds pleasantly democratic. Where did it come from?

PU: With this title I was thinking about describing a relationship between the psychological and the physical: how paintings are made, how we look at them and the moment when we feel a painting takes on its own presence.

With all my show titles so far, I have consciously avoided any direct reference to colour or paint or a specific place or time-I am most interested in where a painting might take a viewer-looking at paintings is, to me, a physical, felt experience and, in a sense, always in the present.

CW: You talked about wanting your paintings to resonate with the visual world people live in. Is this part of the reason you reference bodies so often?

PU: Yes, I reference bodies in varying levels of directness-for example, sometimes an upper body is contained within the painting and other times human things or moments are hinted at: knees seen just creeping into a painting; a place setting, the inside of an empty refrigerator; sunglasses falling; a t-shirt being folded.

CW: Are your canvases ever proportionate to your own figure?

PU: My canvases are proportionate to my own figure in so far as they are human in scale- even the largest of my paintings are not truly monumental. I think this is a contributing factor in my work having a feel of being made by an individual rather than any kind of industrial team-scale.

Also, I often move my paintings. I sometimes work on the floor, other times I want to hide a painting from myself, responding to it at a later date, and I think that because of this very physical relationship I have with the paintings it feels natural to me that they correspond in some ways to my own size.

CW: Your paintings are rarely pure abstractions. Why does figuration matter to you?

PU: I think this relates very much to what I have said earlier about wanting the title of the show to be focused on where a painting takes you rather than paint or color in isolation.

I do make purely abstract images in my sketchbooks but I tend to use these as starting points-a kind of note taking of materials and marks. My paintings are never totally abstract. There is always a hint or link to something recognizable-I think this is important to me because my paintings are not purely about painting. I am interested in a moment when the paint is at once still itself (I never use it in an illusionary way) and just becoming something recognizable. Figuration matters to me because of the relationship and tension it creates with materials.

CW: The paintings you put together for this show seem like a strange family. Why didn't you make a tidier posse?

PU: My work is playful and curious about materials, subjects and painting itself-there are great differences between paintings, but I think a lot of similarities too. When selecting work for this show, it was important to use the differences to create a kind of rhythm - some of the paintings I would describe as noisy, others quiet.

CW: What sorts of visual memories move through your head as you paint?

PU: Memories are useful for painting because they are never just isolated images-they have strange specifics and large areas of vagueness. This works as an important editing tool for me-I find photographs too much visual information, often too rooted in a particular place or time. Many visual memories move through my head as I gather ideas but they actually tend to then be quite specific combinations once I have decided to use a memory or thought as the basis of a painting.

CW: When you said that painting doesn't have a sophisticated veneer, and that it is unforgiving, I thought it sounded like a metaphor for daily life. Do you think of painting as metaphoric?

PU: I don't think of painting as a metaphor for life, more that life inevitably appears in paintings-it is part of it. Painting is in a way an unforgiving medium-I find it such a curious thing that a painting could have extremely sophisticated ideas behind it but if its relationship to its materials or image is disjointed it can very easily fail.

CW: I was intrigued by our conversation about mood. Your work never seems apocalyptic or melodramatic. And, although you've used ordinary subjects like empty refrigerators, your work doesn't glory in triviality. Do you have any adjectives or nouns to describe that in-between space your paintings occupy?

PU: I really like what you say about the work not glorifying triviality. This is very much what I aim for. My everyday subjects are never intended to be dead-ends. For me, it's important that a painting resonates further than its subject or materials-I think that's the best way I can describe it. It's a feeling that I often find through the process of making the work, seeing what does and doesn't work, thinking about why, keeping the work at the in-between space you describe.

CW: Now that Making An Outside Space Theirs has opened and you're back in the UK, what are your plans?

PU: It was really wonderful to be in Los Angeles-the whole experience was incredibly energizing and I found it such an inspiring environment. Back in the studio here, I have started to work on paper, thinking about what form my new paintings might take.

Artslant would like to thank Phoebe Unwin and Honor Fraser for making this interview possible.

- Catherine Wagley