Cowboys, Kazoos and Keira Knightley - An interview with Stuart Pearson Wright

Cowboys, Kazoos and Keira Knightley - An interview with Stuart Pearson Wright

13 April, 2010
by: Tom Jeffreys

Ahead of his May solo show at Riflemaker, contemporary artist Stuart Pearson Wright chats to Tom Jeffreys about kazoos, Keira Knightley and the fluidity of identity.

“I saw Rosamund Pike in Patrick Hamilton's Gaslight at the Old Vic a few years ago, and went to visit her afterwards to say hello – I'd painted her portrait before – and Keira Knightley was in there too. It's sort of every young man's dream – to be in a dressing room with Rosamund Pike and Keira Knightley! We ended up going for dinner all together – Rosamund suggested we go and get some food, so I said, 'yeah! I'm up for that!'. So I found myself sitting next to Keira Knightley having dinner...”

I'm in Fernandez & Wells, a lovely little cafe on Beak Street in Soho, listening to contemporary artist Stuart Pearson Wright explain how he managed to get Hollywood megastar Keira Knightley to appear in his film, Maze, part of his forthcoming solo show next door at Riflemaker. Whilst we talk, Stuart pauses periodically to tend to his grey whippet, Enid, whose restlessness implies she may have tired of hearing about Ms Knightley. I, however, am all ears.

After bumping into the actress again at a party (at which she and Kathy Burke joined in with Stuart and his cousin for an impromptu kazoo jam) he mentioned the idea of her appearing in Maze. Stuart later showed her his only previous film – a piece entitled Knight's Tale, in which the artist runs about Epping Forest dressed as a medieval knight – and, after he'd explained the concept of Maze, Keira said “yeah, I'd be for it”, much to the artist's evident surprise.

The film – set in the maze at Longleat – sees the two dressed up in full Elizabethan regalia, and demonstrates the latest manifestation of Stuart's desire to explore male and female archetypes in his work. Whilst he largely made his name painting unusually angled portraits of various famous types – particularly actors like Christopher Lee, John Hurt, JK Rowling and Daniel Radcliffe – Stuart hasn't really done portraiture for two or three years. Now he prefers to focus on the things that he finds more interesting, which, over the course of an hour-long chat, prove to be many and varied. I hadn't realised for example that it was he who was co-responsible for Five Hundred Dollars, the temporary exhibition space that popped up on Vyner Street last year (and, bizarrely, hosted an impromptu Rolf Harris gig).

Opening in May, the exhibition at Riflemaker features a range of different characters – largely heroic male figures from the 1950s. For the series entitled I Remember You, Stuart has taken the '50s B-movie western as a starting point and borrowed titles from various classic country and western songs by the likes of Slim Whitman. There's a strong vein of nostalgia to these paintings, and although Stuart admits that “the 1950s have obviously become quite popular now, which is timely”, this is not just an exercise in checked shirt pastiche. “I'm interested,” he explains, “in how people's identities are created and structured, in our identities as being a kind of performance. These paintings are all very obviously staged – they might as well have 'theatrical' written across them with a huge T!”

The issue of identity construction is not just a theoretical one for the artist. He was born in 1975 via artificial insemination so has never known his father, something which he admits caused “a lot of grief and heartache, pain, tears and everything over the years. And a bit of an identity crisis as well actually – I changed my name when I was at art school. I had a step-father's surname and it just felt it didn't belong to me. So I got rid of it and took on my mother's maiden name, which I felt I could own in some way.”

“Anyway,” Stuart continues, “that's all by the by – it's all quite dull in a way, unless you're a psychologist or a therapist or something...” By accepting that identity is indeed a fluid entity, Stuart has said to himself (one gets the impression, quite consciously): “OK so that's the case, but rather than bashing my head against a wall, let's see where can I go with this. Can I have any fun with this? And I've found I can have a lot of fun with it! I've become an Elizabethan courtier, I've become a knight, a cowboy, a sailor...”

“The funny thing,” Stuart notes “is that none of these are archetypes that I was actually interested in as a kid. I was into Star Wars and Indiana Jones and Back to the Future. But my father's generation would have been interested in these archteypes that I'm now exploring. So in playing a cowboy I'm not just playing a cowboy; I'm playing my father playing a cowboy.” 

Stuart Pearson Wright - I Remember You / Maze is at Riflemaker from 5th May to 26th June 2010.

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Tom Jeffreys