Art on Poetry - an interview with Meghana Bisineer

Art on Poetry - an interview with Meghana Bisineer

04 August, 2011
by: Tom Jeffreys

From the bedroom to the Royal Festival Hall: Meghana Bisineer tells Tom Jeffreys about her residency at the Saison Poetry Library.

The idea of creating something ground-breaking in your own bedroom is not one usually associated with the visual arts. Indie music of the 1980s and '90s was all about the bedsit poets – from Morrissey to Brett Anderson – whilst the recent rise of dubstep can in part be attributed to the swathes of teenagers churning out beats from the bedroom computers. But visual art? Surely it's just impractical?

Well yes, but that doesn't seem to have stopped contemporary artist Meghana Bisineer, who's just completed a month-long residency at the Saison Poetry Library as part of a four-month series of exhibitions curated by Kaleid Editions, the artist's books gallery. Over the course of the month, Meg painted and drew her way across the massive windows in the library's foyer, high up on the 5th floor of the Royal Festival Hall, in order to create a frame-by-frame drawn animation, which is now on show there until the end of August.

Like many of the best ideas, this unusual technique was borne simply out of necessity. As Meg tells me during an entertaining chat upstairs in the members' bar at the Southbank Centre, “I graduated from the RCA in 2006, I didn't have a studio, I really wasn't equipped and I was quite broke. But I was just really desperate to produce work.” Meg was interested in the effects of scale on her drawing – “I  wanted to draw big!” she laughs, despite the fact that her tiny box bedroom was already piled high with side tables (acting as a tripod) and printmaking rollers lying about. Obviously drawing all over her bedroom walls wouldn't exactly have delighted the landlord. So the windows it had to be.   

But it's quite a big step from the privacy of one's own bedroom to the very public space that is the Royal Festival Hall. “I expected it to be more weird than it was. I was really sceptical,” Meg admits, “and I couldn't imagine how it would work. I kept saying, 'I'm not a performance artist, I can't be this monkey in the window that people come and watch.'”

But Victoria Browne of Kaleid Editions, curator of the whole series, was extremely encouraging, and once the project got under way, Meg was fine: “There's something about the process of drawing quite large – it's so physical it consumes me enough to just run with it, and it's amazing how it can become a retreat even in a very public place. Headphones were also a massive help!”

Through out the residency, Meg really got to know the Library, meeting a range of interesting people who use it, and she credits the librarians Chris McCabe and Miriam Valencia for their help in pointing her to specific books as part of the research process. She's also quick to credit Akhila Krishnan, who graduated from the RCA this year, and helped with the brilliantly evocative soundtrack to the film, as well as with the binding of the artist book that was produced as part of the Kaleid-curated residency, and and Aneez, her husband for "his solid, unwavering support throughout".

Interestingly, Meg was also given 24-hour access to the Royal Festival Hall, and talks of how, late at night, “it takes on another life.” And of course, at night, the viewing process reverses: “I'm looking out constantly, but when the light changes, I'm the one being observed and I become part of the piece if I want to.”

The result is that hazy silhouettes of the artist flit in and out of the resulting film. Entitled, aptly, Light Water Glass, it's a shimmering, multi-layered and nuanced work that's somehow both ominous and playful. A diver is drawn upon a page, but dives free, out into or onto the surface of the window, changing medium as he does so. He is a motif who continually returns, throughout this complex but engrossing journey across layers of presentation and representation.

Distant rumbles and gurgles punctuate the piece as it judders along with nervous confidence – rain, thunder, a nervous rustling, a sonorous vibration. Consistency comes in the form of the Southbank Centre – its brutalist structures rising beyond the watery panes of glassy waves. It's beautiful and intriguing and short but headlong dive from the art of a bedroom window.

Art on Poetry is at the Saison Poetry Library on the 5th floor of the Southbank Centre from 10th April to 25th September 2011.

Meghana Bisineer - Light Water Glass is on display alongside works by Katherine Jones and GOTO10 until 28th August 2011.

www.kaleideditions.com
www.poetrylibrary.org.uk

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Tom Jeffreys