Next to the mantelpiece in the main seating area of the cafe is a big drawing. It depicts a small, ramshackle house amongst some hills, rendered in small pencil marks, set in a grid. A Perspex frame covers the drawing and curves around the edge of the picture. A label next to the work tells you that the drawing is called Dolly Parton’s Childhood Home and the name of the artist is Joe Shone Hatchwell. I had first seen his work at the Slade degree show last year, which consisted of a huge inflatable hand, a music box on a Perspex plinth, a glass bell suspended from the ceiling, and a drawing of Whitney Houston’s plexiglass piano. I loved it, so I reached out to him, and he gave us the big drawing in question. I met Joe many months ago, in a cafe in Soho, to interview him. We went to the basement - where it was quiet until a family of tourists came in - ordered our drinks, and began talking.
“Tell me how you wanted to become an artist,” I said.
“I was thinking about that,” he said, having requested some of my questions over email in preparation. “It’s a good question. It’s also a difficult question. I think, to be honest, the British education system filters people, right? I didn’t have some profound story about a moment where I was like, Oh you know what, I have to become an artist. I was talking to my friend and she spoke about having a realisation as a child that she wanted to be an artist, but I never had that. So I did art GCSE, A Level, foundation, you make these little decisions at each stage. And my auntie offered for me to stay with her so I could do my foundation in Manchester, and that sounded like a fun option, to get a year in Manchester and do some babysitting for my auntie, amongst other fun things. So I did my foundation at the Manchester School of Art, and then came down to London. I think I knew that I wanted to apply to London, so I studied at Slade. I feel like I just sort of arrived there. I guess that’s what I’m saying, I never had a deeply meaningful journey to become an artist, I kind of ended up there. I feel very privileged that I did. Once I was at Slade I started to reflect on past experiences I’d had, emotional experiences that weren’t necessarily initially about making art or experiencing art, but I was able to pull them into being an artist.”
I asked what those things were.
“I always collected things. I was from a collectors household. My mum collects glass fish, she’s got a huge collection of over a hundred glass fish. I used to collect little things as a kid. I had this huge box, loads of little drawers full of… Some of it was trash from the street, some of it was little stones, but I think, the context of being on a fine art course allowed me to look back with a different lens on certain emotional and material experiences I’ve had. So I’ve picked some stuff out, collecting being one. As I pieced together my art practice, I looked towards music, as well. When I was a teenager, music became really important, almost to an obsessive level. I got really obsessed with certain artists, and that kind of provided a framework for me to build a little…” He bent down and pulled a notebook out of his bag. “I actually took some notes about music,” he said.
“Do you make music?” I asked, and referenced the little music box in his degree show.
“I’d say I made sound art,” he replied. “I’ve done a few things with music boxes, and done a couple of musical collaborations with friends. The music box actually my grandad gave me, he had one somewhere. They’re paper-feed tapes, he gave me one a few years ago. So, I suppose by music I actually mean musicology, which is the study of music. As opposed to music theory, it also includes other formal or aesthetic ideas surrounding music, and also the physiological experience. One quote, I’ve got a few quotes, but I’ll pick… There’s a music theorist called Philip Brett who wrote a text called Queering the Pitch, and he said that music and musicality are as separate as sex and sexuality, which I found interesting as a springboard through which to view things outside of music as musical, and build my own sensitivities towards ideas, materials, objects, in a way that is musical. And I started to build these relationships with materials through, I suppose, listening. Deep listening, it becomes emotional, similarly to how my mum might have felt about collecting glass fish, creating a rhythm with the objects around you. Something I became interested in was the idea of cover songs. And I started to build my own theory about the cover song. So I was reading a text, do you know Kae Tempest? They wrote a book called On Connection, it was really good.”
“I always see it in bookshops,” I said.
“I’ve got it,” Joe said, pulling it out of his bag. “I actually got it for free at London Pride in 2021, they did a free book giveaway, and this is the one that I chose. But they write really well. The thing that stood out to me, they did this whole thing about performing and the stage. But its about the idea of creative connection, and they wrote that ‘the connective circuit is triangular,’ and that there’s a relationship between writer, text, and reader, its a triangle. It’s easier if I draw it.”
Joe took out a piece of paper and drew a triangle on it, with a word annotating each point, with a blunt pencil. He drew as he spoke and apologised throughout.
“So, if you have writer, text, and reader, that can become artist, song, and listener. And I would argue that when someone creates a cover song, you have the original artist, song, and listener, and then you have the cover version here.” He drew a dot at a higher point, and connected the three dots to it, so it looked like a pyramid. “Rather than making it a square, I would say it creates a three dimensional space. And actually adds this diagrammatical space, so this [the 3D pyramid] is the cover song, that I would say you can hear when listening to cover songs. The presence of this space is both empty and full and expanding the opportunities of what it means to listen. I wrote an essay where I argued that the cover song is inherently queer, and because of the space, because the music is an excess of this space that is created when you listen to a cover song. There’s a couple of quotes that I might mention, Sara Ahmed in Orientations: Toward a Queer Phenomenology wrote, ‘orientation is the point at which the world unfolds,’ which I thought was nice. So this orientation when a cover artist orientates themselves towards the original and then sees both versions there, kind of unfolds this space. And of course, Susan Sontag, Notes on ‘Camp’, said that, ‘camp sees everything in quotation marks,’ so cover songs are kind of a quotation… Maybe that’s enough about cover song theory.”
“So how does that kind of thing come into your work?” I asked.
“I would say its a way of thinking. The space between two things with a unique relationship, bringing up questions of original or cover, of taste and the way you experience objects and materials and the world. I was able to use that way of looking at things to see other things. Talking about the work in my degree show, I tried to create work that holds that space, or exists in that space between things. So the song in the music box was a cover version of I Will Always Love You by Dolly Parton/Whitney Houston, and the hanging glass bell is from a collection of fifty bells that I bought from eBay of different glass, ceramic, or metal bells, and the drawing of Whitney Huston’s plexiglass piano, all inhabit this space that I’m talking about, and also materially describe it’s fragility as well. I wanted everything to feel almost unreachable or indecipherable, or in the process of being reached or deciphered.”
“What about the one you gave us?” I said, referring to the big drawing of Parton’s house.
“So yeah, that drawing is actually an album cover. It’s the album My Tennessee Mountain Home from the early nineteen seventies. The album begins with an a cappella spoken word with a harmonica in the background, where she’s recounting a letter she wrote back to her parents in 1964, when she’d just moved to Nashville. And the album then kind of goes through… She talks about her upbringing and poverty in the Tennessee mountains, in a very… what’s the word… ambivalent way. She’s looking back, there’s a quote which is, “No amount of money could buy from me the memories that I have of them, no amount of money could pay me to go back and live through them again.” So she has this huge contrast, which I found… I just really like that album, it’s good music, I’m a Dolly Parton fan. Through drawing the album cover in quite a methodical way, through gridding it up like that, I wanted to spend time with the ideas in her album. I wanted to connect to Dolly Parton through the edges of musicology, but encompass the writer of the music or the artist as well as the music, look at things through a more expansive lens. So, I just really like how that image holds so many contrasting ideas: ambition contrasted with a lot of gentle, fond, retrospective thoughtfulness. And for me to be drawing that album is also adding another quotation of these ideas, you know? And the way that I drew it, so methodically, almost copying it directly from the photograph… It’s about adding layering to the work, which adds care, and positions me as the artist as a fan, or as someone who’s looking up to somebody. I would say the way that I have worked with different objects is similar, like the glass bell, I worked with it in a way that was respectful and trying to preserve the history of that object and the fact that its from a collection, from someone’s domestic setting, sort of brought together as this charged cornerstone of connectivity.”
I remembered the drawing was very specifically framed, because Joe had waited for the right frame to arrive before lending it to the cafe. I asked about that.
“Yeah, I wanted a Perspex frame. Thinking about glass ornaments and transparency as a material, it suggests ways in which ideas can become refracted and orientated, which shows in my choice of transparent materials for the works in the show. That brings me to the inflatable sculpture, the massive inflatable hand. I really wanted to make it out of a crystal clear material, and I found the only option was PVC. I didn’t want to make a sculpture that was big in the amount of space that it takes up, so to make it completely clear, it almost allows the audience some access to the space inside it as well, the space of the artwork is there and not there. And the gesture of the hand as well, I wanted it to be an orientation, half-pointing, half-reaching, both towards and away from somewhere else, it’s just this ephemeral slice of a gesture.”
“Where is it now,” I asked, “deflated?”
“It’s in my studio, it does pack up quite small as an inflatable.”
“What are you working on at the moment?” I asked, and said how hard it can be going from university into the real world.
“You really have to create your own structure. Structure and routine are so important. I have a studio, and I’m trying to be as diligent as possible. But I haven’t put too much pressure to rush anything, so I’ve been doing research. I met up with someone who is a music box repair specialist, who did some music box repairs for the British Museum. He very kindly met up with me. I had to track him down. Do you want to hear the story?”
I nodded.
“So, I found out that music boxes work very similarly to clocks, and often clock makers will make music boxes. So I found myself standing outside a tiny little clock shop in Walthamstow, knocked on the door and got let in, and I said, Oh do you know anything about music boxes, can you teach me? He was like, No I don’t, I’m busy, go away. I think I said, Oh okay no worries, is that it? And he was like, There’s a bloke who does something to do with music boxes down the road but I don’t know his name, so goodbye. Then I was like, Right I’m gonna find this guy. At the end of an extensive Google search for music box man in Walthamstow, I found this article that had an address on it, so I went there but it was all bricked up. I found his name on the label, he’s called Alan Godier, and tried ringing him but no answer. So I ended up going into the cafe next door, and asking, Do you know Alan Godier? And they said, Yeah he comes to my yoga class. They very kindly let me give him a call from their phone, and he was willing to meet up. So I met with him and he brought a collection of Victorian music boxes, one of which was in a tobacco box, and spent some time explaining how the repairs process works. He did say that the only place that music boxes are made new in the world is in Switzerland, so there’s not exactly a warehouse I could go to to ask for parts, but that’s something I’m working on, longer term, looking into that.”
“What do you think that’s going to become?”
“I think probably more kinetic sculpture that also produces music. Yeah, that’s something that I’ve got my heart set on. Something else I’m looking into is inflatables using slightly different materials. I don’t know if you remember that the inflatable sculpture was stitched through the middle of the hand, I’ve been looking at experimenting with using eyelets and different stitching tensions within inflatables. It’s another intervention, the idea of space within a sculpture. I’m doing a bit of experimenting, trying to experiment with surface tension for more image-based works as well. So, yeah, I’ve got a few things that I’m tinkering with at the moment.”
The time had come for one of my questions-I-might-ask-everyone-I-interview.
“What is an artist?” I asked.
“I’m probably gonna answer this annoyingly for you,” Joe replied. “I think an artist can be many things, including… no I wont go too far. But there is not one definition. I would say an artist’s job is to have a feeling and then convey that feeling to an audience, and endeavour to create that feeling in someone else, through an artwork. Or more broadly, to allow someone to have an emotional experience with an artwork.
“I’ll tell you about two times that I cried looking at art. The most recent time, I was standing in front of a painting of a torso of a muscular guy wearing some tight underwear. It’s an oil painting, very simple, but then the artist had made a stamp in the shape of a butterfly and just stamped it onto the painting, and it’s called Nude with Tattoo. I saw it last year. The painting is from the seventies, by this gay artist called Joe Brainard, who’s work I really like. I think he has a very unique way of looking at paints, that fits into a queer aesthetic, as well. Or a queer phenomenology. He does these paintings of pansies as well, they fill the page, really bright. This painting… A word that I haven’t said in the interview so far is ‘desire’, it’s so overused when talking about art but I think its a good one, it’s maybe what makes me emotional, desiring something or seeing an artist desiring something. So, he just made this very simple painting of a torso and stamped this butterfly onto it, it felt like such a poignant gesture, this stamp, and he died in the nineties from Aids, and seeing it last year was really emotional.
“I also saw, do you know the work of Adam Farah-Saad? They won the Frieze Emerging Artist Prize last year, and they had an exhibition at the Camden Art Centre in 2021, which I visited a couple of times. I was just standing in front of an image printed on A1 paper and placed into a poster, flickable, rack, and it was the lyrics of a Mariah Carey song but hand-written on a piece of paper that had been crumpled and then scanned. I think it was written with glittery gel pen, but I just, I just cried. I think its something about desire as well. And all of that desire is an orientation towards something, but not an unserious interest in something, you’re kind of devoting yourself to something with desire. I think that gives the work an emotional intensity and charge, and you can feel that bouncing back at you, which is again that triangular space between artist, art, and viewer… Yeah, that was an anecdotal answer.”
The interview was winding down, the family eating lunch were about to leave, and I asked whether there was anything that Joe wanted to say before we parted ways.
He looked through his notebook and said, “Yeah, maybe this could be added in somewhere, to be a bit more explicit about why I’m making this work. This is in quite simple words, but to relate it to being gay or queerness in general, I wrote: Growing up gay in a small town, music was so important to making a sense of some sort of identity that felt like it was outside of myself. I had a desire for the excess of the space I felt I was in, and the work in my degree show is simultaneously trying to create and destroy spaces both within and outside of itself, to reach towards and away from. Yeah. I suppose that makes it a bit more personal to me.”
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You can see Joe Shone Hatchwell’s (b. 2001 Whitby) artwork ‘Dolly Parton’s Childhood Home’ at the Mansion Bar and Cafe, Beckenham Place Park, south east London. If you want to get involved with the art in the cafe, message me.