How have you immersed yourself in your art both mentally and physically?

I’ve never really known what it is not to be immersed in it in one way or another. There’s been an awareness of the need to create from as far back as my earliest memories. It’s like mammalian reflex; I feel very much the same impulsively now as I did when used to scribble all over my Mum’s cookbooks. Fundamentally it’s a development of the same act, and it’s all I’ve ever wanted to do. My hands have trouble keeping up with my head. There’s a huge backlog of ideas; they keep dripping in like Chinese water torture, visual perception is too ridiculously interesting for it to stop. If I didn’t bring any of them to life I think my brain would explode like some blood filled firework.

Seeing as your work has taken you many places (Berlin, Baracaldo, National Portrait Gallery) and has received considerable recognition (London Evening Standard, Times, Watermans), what has been the most rewarding outcome of your art?

I’ve never been to Spain, rather the work did. Same with the show in Shanghai. But I have been living in Berlin for the past 7 months, and it’s the most perfect collaboration since fish and chips. I don’t really make art for any kind of reward other than my mental health. But I get a great deal of pleasure seeing other people connecting with it and gaining something. We should never underestimate the importance of culture. I find contemporary pop culture so desperately disappointing, and so to do what is in my power to better this bloody common grievance and somehow open doors for other viewers and other artists – well – I couldn’t think of anything more rewarding than that.

What has been the most successful form of self-promotion?

Showing people my work.

The enrapturing, feverish, confident, and confrontational (among others) nature of your work is powerful. Where does this creativity originate? 

I’m thinking recently that the core of the work is just picking at my perception of reality; the amazing fact that none of us will ever really know what reality is. All we have is our illusions. And mark making, in all its forms, is a way of exploring, questioning, adding to, playing – and essentially dealing with – that fact. It’s a desire to touch the untouchable. All my images and acts, no matter how stretched apart by approach or medium, are united by this in one way or another.

It’s not for us to fully understand the origin of creativity. On the other hand, observational drawing practice has taught me a lot about the origin of ability.

When you learn to draw you learn to look, and in painting even more so. I think I was blind before I painted. No two limbs are ever the same. I find a huge part of observational drawing is to fully understand this. I’ve seen people struggle whilst drawing what they think a subject looks like not what it actually looks like, and quite innocently. The brain intentionally manifests visual shortcuts or ‘assumptions’ to speed up our rate of perception. It’s an essential part of daily survival. Of course, we see with our minds even more than our eyes. And I find myself, when in an observational state, pulling power back to the eyes - curbing this natural neurological reflex as much as I possibly can, and processing the information more through my hands and creative medium than my mind. That’s what the concentration in observational drawing is. It takes a little effort. Allowing the charcoal, brush – whatever, to become an extension of the body. It’s always come very naturally to me, partially because I have always lacked this aforementioned reflex from the start. And sometimes it’s fun to draw the assumptions also, play with what we think we know. But this is more imaginative than observational. And it is also just as valid. It’s what children tend to do. They map out their minds.

How would you like your work to evolve? What new shapes and forms will future works take on?

If I told you I would have to eat you. No, I prefer not to explain painting too much, rather discuss it once it’s actually in existence. I’m about to start on my first major multiple figure painting, a triptych. Me and the human form have unfinished business. My last painting transpired as a very intense examination of the skin, and I’m a little adverse to repetition, so it should be interesting to see how this new adventure takes shape. I’m also simultaneously working at that backlog of ideas; a series of kinetic and interactive paintings, which will at some point congregate as a London exhibition. As well as my studio practice in Berlin I’m going to be working with the writer Bianca Chisarau on an exhibition of combined texts and images. When I’m in London I will be continuing my Commuter Project and some other bits of Art Slave debauchery. And I have a show at the We Are Arts Gallery in Central Saint Martins on Southhampton Row in Spring 2011. Re-discovering etching! And there’s the Berlin painting collective I will be importing to my home town next year as well. I’m sure that’s not everything.

What one piece of advice would you offer a new graduate about to embark on the freelance adventure?

Tear up all the rules except one: only bother if you really believe in what you do.

http://www.elizabethhepworth.com/