Getting an email from an artist who wants to put their work in the cafe always fills me with dread. I don’t want to let people down. After I’d made the announcement that I was running a new art initiative in the cafe, lots of people reached out to me. I didn’t see anything I liked, and didn’t have the heart to tell every artist that they hadn’t been successful. It’s like a horrible line I often read when I’m submitting ideas for articles or books to various organisations: “We endeavour to get back to everyone, but cannot guarantee a response.” Hearing nothing is horrendous. As you read this, I am certain an email titled ‘TOM GLOVER PITCH’ is gathering dust in the inbox of a disinterested editor. So it’s a strange feeling, being on the other side of the submission curtain.
Anyway, I was in France a few months ago - days before disaster struck - when my phone connected to some wi-fi and told me I’d received an email. It was a submission for art in the cafe from an artist called Laura Kate Sutton. The familiar dread set in. The email said she went to Chelsea School of Art and then the Royal Drawing School, and that she had lived near the park all her life. Please be good, I thought, as I opened the email.
To my relief, it was great. It was a little mixed media drawing called Plant Your Emotions Daily. It was sweet and strange. Someone watering plants, a lot had strange faces. the words plant your emotions daily on the t shirt of the person watering. I said yes immediately, and now the piece is by the tunnel in the main seating area - which we call the ‘Garden Room’.
I went to interview Sutton in her studio, which she shares with her boyfriend Cai, who offered to make us some coffee and turned on the filter machine. An exhibition she had co-curated, Funny Dread, had just finished. I asked what she showed and she gestured to some pieces around her. On the wall behind her was a large pen on canvas piece, comprised of many images - of people, chickens, eggs, plants, hats - framed by sunflowers. Next to it was a written list on a big length of paper. Above us was a clock with Oprah’s face on it. I asked Sutton to tell me about it.
“What I’d done is I’d done Oprah’s five steps to manifesting anything you desire, so these are my manifestations,” she said, pointing at the list, “they’re very tongue in cheek, and I’ve made it into a shrine-like object, trying to manifest my desires.”
Pointing at the eggs and chickens, she said, “So, I desired that I wanted to eat eggs and enjoy eggs. I don’t enjoy eggs, I wish I did. In some form I don’t mind them, in quiches, Spanish omelettes. I’m not fussy, but there’s things that I don’t like eating, or I have no desire to want to eat them. Eggs, they look so delicious and they look like they’re fairly healthy, but I’m always like, I wish I could eat them.”
Cai poured us some coffee and said, “She also hates baked beans. Breakfast places are a nightmare.”
“So you can’t have a full English then?” I said.
“Not with baked beans or eggs.” Sutton replied. “Baked beans I actually have a proper phobia of. Since I was a young child I’ve had a visceral reaction whenever I see them. My mum used to insist that we all eat dinner together, so she built this shield, a cardboard, baked bean shield, so I wouldn’t have to see my family eat them but could stay in their presence. I’ve never had a desire to eat baked beans, they don’t look appealing, but eggs do.” She looked at the two chickens on the canvas. “I had this idea that I would whisper all my fears and worries into the chickens’ ears and they would take all my fears and turn them into an egg that I would eat every morning.”
Sutton continued pointing at each image on the canvas and reading their corresponding manifested desire, first at four faces wearing big hats, their hair tied together. “I will not be jealous of anyone and I will wear extravagant hats regularly, I will wear them to any and every occasion and no one will accuse me of being overdressed. That’s one of my big desires.” Of an eyeball, a lamppost, a tree, and an arrow, she said, “Since I was a child, I feel bad if I don’t go left round trees and right round lamp posts, it’s a bit of an OCD thing, same as people have as stepping on grates. So, my desire is to walk freely and not be worried if I’m going left round trees and right round lamp posts.” About a long queue of people weeping over a book, she said, “This one, I want to write a novel so moving that the mere title would make everyone cry.” In the middle, by far the biggest image, is a man giving a woman a bouquet of flowers. “This is Cai giving me flowers, because, I’m digging him in it, he’s never got me flowers in our ten year relationship. And I’ve got him wearing one of my artworks on his shirt.” Then, in the bottom left, are two children. “This one is, I will have a boy and a girl who are healthy and lovely, the boy will play the trombone and the girl will write poetry for fun, she will have her hair split in a side ponytail and plait and they will both love and want to listen to my opinions and Stephen Sondheim musicals, and they will love everything I cook. They will not be scared of living.” Sutton looked up at the small clock, high on the wall, with Oprah’s face on it. “Then I had the Oprah clock looming above us. I had it made. It’s amazing what you can get made on eBay, so cheap as well. Everyone said, where did you find that? I just got it made. It would be a great present for someone. So yeah, that was my big piece.
“For a long time at the Drawing School, my work turned mostly into drawing, but for me it’s always been that tension between language and image, which always comes out. I never feel a piece is complete without the writing.”
“Has that always been the case?” I asked.
“Always been the case.” Sutton said. “When I went to Chelsea, I was mostly doing installations. I would be making fake… I’d be creating artists. So for my degree show I invented this artist called Roger Rote, and I made the whole room look like you’d walked into the final room of a retrospective exhibition about him. I had him as a character who tried to live fully existentially and fully authentically. I’d look at the idea of authenticity quite a bit in my work and how humorous that idea is, if anything can truly be authentic or not. But then Roger becomes obsessed with existential living and tries to make the most authentic artwork possible, which turns out to be just a circle with lines. He becomes obsessed with reading a novel that was meant to be from 1944 that was set in the middle of Hieronymous Bosch’s Haywain Triptych, about a load of characters that are stuck pushing this big ball of hay. And I wrote the story as part of my dissertation. It’s all these literary and biblical figures that are stuck, that you can see in Bosch’s painting, doing the same thing again and again. I write a lot of stories, a lot of my artwork is based on this kind of thing, always Kafkaesque, purgatory-like, cyclical narratives.”
Sutton picked up a book that was resting on a stool nearby.
“I did a little book of my prints at the end of the Drawing Year, when I was trying to bring my texts back into drawing, I had a set of ten prints, and I pretended I found these in a charity shop. It’s an allegory about ageing, I think. Even though I’m not old, I’m finding ageing very difficult. What’s bound to come is very looming and stressful. It’s the way a lot of older people discuss it themselves, that’s what scares me the most, ‘cause you think, ‘oh, you know’. It’s a funny thing in the art world, or doing anything creative, you go from being, ‘oh you’re still young, it’s fine,’ and then you get to the age where, ‘oh you’re not young anymore,’ and you can’t have that young success. But I feel like, society-wise, we do tend to listen to younger voices, which I don’t know how I feel about. Older people are ignored a lot. But, [the book is] a tale of a baby that’s found in the forest, and a group of people are trying to escape the forest and they haven’t seen a baby for years, so they become transfixed by the baby’s purity and they decide they’re going to take everything the baby says or does as a sign of where to go in the forest to leave and escape. So they follow everything that the baby does. It was a nice way of combining the drawings. Then basically as the baby gets older, the less they pay attention. And then in the end he climbs some tree and he does find the way out of the forest, which I purposefully said was a lost image, and then they find another baby. All my stories are very cyclical, Sisyphus pushing that rock up and down again. I think I found existentialism at a typical time when a lot of people look into it, late teens, early twenties, I did find it a very helpful philosophy.”
“In what way?”
“I think it’s a lot more hopeful than people think. As someone who… I don’t think I know anything. The core values of it, which are: don’t hurt anyone, perhaps try not to worry too much about what it all means, because if you come from a place that doesn’t mean anything, and you just have to live every day doing things that feel important. You make your own purpose, but then it also is quite relieving when things don’t go your way because it doesn’t matter in the long run. I also like it ‘cause none of the figureheads actually agree that they’re existentialists, which is funny. They’re all like, who is an existentialist? Not me.
“Also as someone who is highly anxious… I mean, that’s why I started drawing. I was doing my text stuff before, and I enjoyed it, but I struggled to have just the text there. If I only had my piece that was just text, I’d want something else there. I had that lingering thing of, is it enough though? Is it enough just to have the text? So yeah, I did that and then in lockdown I had a massive health anxiety breakdown, where I was having panic attacks all the time and I was really ill. Everyone was like, was it related to Covid? But I think it was just, I got tonsillitis a lot and I saw something in my tonsils and I convinced myself it was cancer, it was one of those things that I couldn’t get out of my head, and my parents have heart conditions, so every time I had a panic attack I’d be like, that’s it, I’m dying. They put me on a certain medication for it and it gave me insomnia, and the only thing I could do was draw. It was quite a peaceful thing. It was very different from anything else I was doing before, which was all very thought through, narratives, lots of integrated little bits of literature, stuff I really enjoyed doing, but drawing was fun, because I was not thinking about it. I was just completely doing it with no thought to show it to anyone. I think I still see drawing that way, I find it very therapeutic, and the Drawing Year was odd, it was amazing, it was the best thing I’ve ever done, but it was a really strange thing. I felt like I was so behind everyone else, in terms of a visual language, and then showing it to everyone was really bizarre, because it was such a private thing. All my drawings and my stories, they’re all linked. I see my drawings as humorous displays of the human condition. They’re all depictions of alienation, hopefully often in a funny way, not too sad.”
I nodded and said, “Do you wanna talk about the piece that you gave the cafe?”
“So it’s called Plant Your Emotions Daily. It’s probably one of my most joyful ones. When I went to the Royal Drawing School I started printmaking, which I really got into. I mixed printmaking with drawing, and that was the first piece I ever did it on. So I would print faces, and then I would draw around it, not thinking. It’s kind of like a drawing game, you put the faces in and then draw the background. But yeah, that was based on a piece about Tony Robbins. He’s massive in America, he’s a huge self-help guru. He did this very famous book called Awaken The Giant Within, I think in the 1990s, everyone read it. Throughout my life I’ve had a lot of therapy and things to help you, and I got suggested to read Awaken The Giant Within and when I read it it really irritated me. I just thought, what a twat. He has this section in it called ‘language swaps’, which I found very funny. At the moment I’m working on a piece about a theatre critic who has a breakdown and has to write nice reviews by using these language swaps, they would be changing ‘terrible’ to ‘slightly below par’, something really ridiculous. I get that it’s trying to change the way you speak to yourself in your head, that’s the thing, but Tony Robbins suggests you change any negative thought. I did a piece where I got all these plants and wrote all these words on them, taking it as a literal thing, planting some positivity. Plant Your Emotions Daily is a drawing of it, planting joy and good vibes and hoping to see it grow, but I think the plants are maybe biting back a bit.”
Beginning to round off the interview, I asked Rounding off the interview, I asked how Sutton became an artist.
“My dad was an artist. He’s retired now, so he’s living his best life, painting away in his shed. He’s always shared that passion with me and I’ve always really enjoyed it. Growing up I really wanted to be a director. I loved writing, I loved English, acting, I think they’re heavily interlinked. I wanted to be a director ‘cause I thought I could write my own films and direct them and that would be amazing. And funnily enough what put me off was I did work experience as a runner and I hated it. I remember this woman said to me - I used to go when I was 13 or 14 - and she was like, oh yeah I’ve been running for six years, and in my head, I was like, six years? That’s a lifetime. I hated it so much, I found it stressful, and I was like, that’s it, I’m not gonna be a director. And to be honest, I went to foundation not really sure if I was gonna carry on with art. It was something I loved, that I enjoyed doing, but I really enjoyed English and writing. The more I studied it the more I realised that the great thing about art is you can just do exactly what you want and make it your practice, and have complete freedom with that, which you don’t have if you’re a writer or a director or an actor. So it’s really nice. That’s why I like finding a way to put my writing and stuff together. Although I think my dream is to write a book.”
“I was gonna ask about that,” I said. Looking towards the book about the baby in the wood, I said, “would it be something like that?”
“Probably not,” she said. “Because of the way my work is, I’ve had a lot of people suggest a graphic narrative would be really good. It’s something I’m definitely tempted by. And I suppose this piece here that I did for my show is the most personal piece I’ve ever done, and it was because… I sort of had a choice, I was like, do I do this from a character’s perspective, which is what I normally do, or do I just make an honest thing of it?”
“Was that more or less enjoyable than making a character?”
“Definitely wasn’t more… I probably enjoy making a character more. I was so in the headspace that I just did it, and then after I felt a bit of anxiety from it, I had a lot of people say, it’s quite sad isn’t it? I didn’t think it was very sad, but my dad and quite a few people close to me were like, it’s quite sad. I suppose I’ve got some things in there like ‘they will not be scared of living.’ I think maybe it’s because they know I’m scared of living! That’s the assumption, they’re like, that’s sad.
“I did have a bit of a sudden... I asked Cai if he was okay that I drew him. He didn’t mind, but I think it was the first time he’d read the text. He was a bit like, Oh. But yes, I found it interesting. I did a graphic narratives course at the Royal Drawing School, and we got taught by an artist who really got me into graphic novels, which I hadn’t done before. She showed me lots of people who use a mix of real life and narrative as a way to produce these quite amazing books. It’s a great way to put something personal and slightly fictional into something, so I’ve had an urge to do that, but, I think really I’d just like to write a novel without drawings. It’s one of my actual life goals. I kind of have no expectation for it. But by doing it, you’ve left a little piece of your soul there for someone. Even if you do it for yourself, print off a copy yourself, I like the idea of it being lost to the ether of the world, maybe to be thrown in a bin, but, someone might read it somewhere. Yeah, I think that’s the beauty of creating anything, that’s why people do it, I guess, despite the cons.”
I thought that sounded like enough, leaned towards my phone, and stopped the recording. I thanked Sutton for her time, but not before she and Cai asked if I wanted to get lunch with them. I said I would be delighted, and we went to a deli down the road and ate focaccia sandwiches.
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You can see Laura Kate Sutton’s (b. 1996, London) artwork ‘Plant Your Emotions Daily’ 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. Please don’t be put off by the opening paragraph of this article.