Studio visit: Anna Chapman Parker

One of the many beautiful moments in Anna Chapman Parker’s Understorey sees the artist describe, in her precise prose style, the subtle physicality of drawing from life. Early October, in a triangle of waste ground beside a council playpark, Parker recalls the coldness of the paper and the numbness of her foot. Moving her body shifts her perspective and the drawing too must shift. Drawing from life, she writes, “will always register a struggle of this kind; an effort above all to connect.”

This combination of drawing, writing, body and place runs through much of Chapman Parker’s work. From marginalia in official historical records (took delight, 2010) to snippets drawn from the diaries of literary figures (I sat till I could see no longer, 2019), it is often the less celebrated corners of creative practices, towards which her attention turns. Weeds are therefore a natural subject.

As well as the book’s crisply site-responsive evocations, Understorey offers observations at multiple levels – not only of weeds but also of the scattered moments needed to observe them (while children are playing or the dinner cooks) and of observation as itself a practice worthy of attention. The drawings themselves are lovingly scratchy portraits of knapweed or sowthistle. In one fascinating passage, Parker analyses her particular difficulties drawing toadflax. “Waist deep in honesty,” she writes at another point, and it feels like a microcosm.

What brought you to live and work near the Tweed? What holds you here?

I’ve lived in Berwick for eight years. I studied in Edinburgh and lived there on and off afterwards. We moved here partly in order to have a garden. I used to love the anonymity of being in a city but I love small town life now. Especially when you work independently by yourself, it’s great to have a community around you of people you see in the street or at the bakery. Having kids here, they can be a bit more free, walk down to the beach by themselves…

I used to make more urban work, using material I found in the street. So it’s interesting to see how a place can impact your work when you move there. I’m not sure if the drawing practice that led to Understorey would have happened elsewhere. There are more spaces here in Berwick – spaces in the day but also spaces in the town for the plants to find a way through.

When we moved here walking became a big part of my life, but in a low-key way. When you have a young family, that’s what you do – you walk, not always from A to B, but meandering. Somebody wants to be fed, has a meltdown, is curious about something in the street, so you stop. It’s a different way of moving around. There is a beautiful and maddening urgency that children have around play – and that affects the rhythms of walking, and your relationship to time and place.

How has your proximity to the River Tweed fed into your work?

Lots of the book was written down by the Tweed. Especially just by the river at the end of Bridge Street in Berwick. There’s a tarmac path along the river towards the railway bridge. It’s surprisingly species-rich. The river is there, there are birds feeding on seeds and excreting them – it contributes to an amazing area for biodiversity. I spend a lot of time going along that path and seeing what’s coming up. It is almost like a feverish feeling – all that life crammed into the cracks.

There is a tendency to talk about and represent plants as individuals or distinct species, but what you actually experience is a mad intersection – one clump of something, some grass growing through, then another weed is sending down a tap root. There are some plants that stand upright, some that need to cling on, using the others almost like vertebrae. Other plants bringing in the insect life. It’s all much more interwoven than we think and I find that really exciting.

There is a dominant narrative of plants competing, which fits within a capitalist framework. But when you stare right up close, there’s a lot more interrelation going on. More and more research is coming out in this area, especially around fungal networks and plant life in forests. I don’t quite want to say that plants “collaborate” but we are definitely finding different models of how communities of plants live together.

A lot of the plants I write about are so disparaged because they are the villain of the piece if you’re thinking about nature in terms of competition for space and resources. So I’m interested in how we can reframe or nuance these attitudes.

In my own garden, since writing the book I’m taking stock, thinking about how I might do things differently and seeing what the plants decide. For example, an ox eye daisy recently landed nearby and has been flowering happily. Contrast that to buying bedding plants, and all the plastic that comes with that. My plan is to start with what’s happening without me doing anything.

In the book, I discuss pavement plants and the use of pesticides, which is just completely unnecessary in our towns and cities, and has already been banned in several countries including France. Where weeds do need to be controlled there are equally effective chemical-free alternatives. But I didn’t want the book to become a manifesto. I’m always thinking about how things land and I wanted to create space for the reader. Other people will have their own questions, priorities and parameters. I didn’t want to write a book telling people what to do.

If you’re drawing, you’re still for a long time and all of that experience and noticing comes into the work. All the drawings I made outside, and that embodied knowledge is important. I’m thinking of the textures you can feel where you sit down or the sound of seedpods shaking.

I also find it useful to hear somebody thinking something through as they write or speak – not a perfectly sewn-up parcel of knowledge but more open or vulnerable. I think that kind of work is more likely to resonate.

Understorey includes your responses to a number of other artists – from a sixth century manuscript drawing to Albrecht Dürer in the sixteenth century, Anna Atkins in the nineteenth, and right up to some brilliant contemporary artists like Simryn Gill and Maria Thereza Alves. Can you say a little about the role that other artists have played in informing your own work?

Something that really inspired me was the sense of plants as connective tissue across time and place. I’ve been focusing on common, prolific, adaptable plants, so by definition they’re found very widely across geography and history. That means they’ve also found their way into images – from manuscript marginalia to the dusty foregrounds of paintings of more officially important things.

The book starts with della Francesca’s painting, The Baptism of Christ, which is in National Gallery in London. In the foreground are little clusters of small parched weeds. I feel that they create a sense of connection – it’s not an intellectual meaning, but a continuity you can experience that is really wonderful. Throughout the book I felt it was really important to pull these moments in and see how other artists had treated the same plants. They’re like opportunities for time travel through images.

Your work often combines image and text in imaginative and fruitful ways. What drew you to the book form for this project rather than, say, an exhibition? And what drew you to this particular kind of “mainstream” book, rather than going down the artist book route, for example?

I felt that this project was too much for an artist’s book. I’m interested in finding different ways for people to experience work beyond the exhibition format. Exhibitions are beautiful but with a lot of limitations, not least because an exhibition is so brief – both in its duration and in the time visitors will spend there. As you mention, I’ve also done a lot of visual work that uses text. This is a book with images. An important point is that the images are not illustrations of the text; the text was actually prompted by creating the images. It’s playing with the supremacy of text or images, a push and pull between them.

The book’s structure is quite distinctive, with lots of short sections coming together month by month to form a whole year. Could you also say a bit about that approach?

I wanted the book to be quite open in terms of its piecemealness. In the last couple of years, there has been a lot written about artist-parents, but I’ve seen less about caring responsibilities more generally. Most artists have multiple jobs or income streams, and I didn’t want to make an artwork that eschews that but that exists openly among all of those factors. A lot of the writing and drawing was done in the gaps, in the interstitial bits of time between other things. The messiness around the edges is often really informative. Hopefully, it feels generous in allowing different bits to speak to different people.

It was also a pragmatic decision, because if you’re working and have young children, your parameters are shifting all the time. I would take a sketchbook out and plan to make drawings, but you don’t know how long they’re going to be playing and therefore how long you can work for. You might plan to do one thing but another thing happens. That creates a sense of urgency, responsiveness, and aliveness – you have to really seize on any moment you get. And drawing outside is often uncomfortable or inconvenient, so a sense of urgency can also help to lend you that focus, rather than falling back on the usual questions of drawing.

I’m always interested in walking as part of an art practice. It feels like that’s a significant part of your process too?

Yes, I wanted Understorey to come out of the super-ordinary. One key aspect of that is the routine walk – not a big hike to a picturesque spot but the walk to the station, to school, to the shops… I’m thinking about the walks you do all the time, not always noticing what’s happening. I’m interested in thinking about newness within those frameworks of the everyday – tapping into that kind of awareness and what you might notice. Things like the plants that are coming through the seams – especially at regular landmarks like a bus shelter or a bin or an empty bit of space. When you take some time to look, it’s an ever-changing scene going on. One time it’s flowering; the next, it’s setting seed. There are always things to check in on or attend to.

Is this something that emerged during the pandemic? I feel a lot of people had some similar feelings, especially when movement was constrained during the lockdowns.

For me, it started before the pandemic, but yes, it became supercharged in that time. It created a need to feel you’re there.

My next project will also be a walk-based work. I’m looking at how we represent plants, for example though framing. I’m thinking about art work being rectangular now, with so much seen through a screen. It’s really hard to step back from that and see the ways it’s limiting how we see.

Anna Chapman Parker is discussing Understorey at Maltings Cinema on Friday 11th October as part of Berwick Literary Festival.

You can buy Understorey via The Wedale Bookshop, Stow.

www.annachapman.co.uk
@annachapmanparker