I use my fascination with popular culture as the basis for producing work. In 2000, whilst a visiting student at Goldsmiths, I invented a rock star character, Marisa Starwell, and created an assortment of visual and biographical material related to her - basically everything but the music. I then moved on to search for sightings of this alter-ego in mediated culture, no longer using images of myself. I assembled scrapbooks of found images spanning several decades, made badges featuring these images as well as hand-drawn logos, and invited graphic design students (not knowing that she was fictional) to create gig flyers for a Starwell tour.
When I returned to London in 2002, I moved beyond Marisa Starwell to look at the details surrounding other rock-and-roll imagery. An essential component of the Starwell work was nostalgia for bygone pop eras, and this aspect became the focus of my work for a number of years. I first made an extensive series of drawings of my pop heroes, who were anything but heartthrobs - they were not the leaders of the band, but rather the ugly drummers and the uncool sidekicks who were not supposed to be anyone's favourites. I used pencil to finely render the small drawings - a method that references the common modes of homage in teen fan culture - and my fascination with the geeky world of record collectors dictated my use of ephemeral text: dates, quotes, LP pressing numbers, codes and other obscure information. These portraits led to, among other things, a related series of drawings of objects, packaging and advertisements, some of which examined the aesthetics of femininity in 1960s mass media - false eyelashes, wigs, contraceptive pill packs, TV dinners and other 'new' products aimed at women.
Recently, I have turned to the mythologies of Southern California in an ongoing series of works based on found images. Most of Southern California was not developed until the mid-20th Century, making it a place today teeming with retro aesthetics. But more interesting is the profound melancholy and darkness that is at the core of the myth of Los Angeles. In this series of works, I have reflected on many things: the lost optimism of the California dream; the faded glamour; the abandonment of Utopian modernity; the decline of the recording industry and its hangers-on, accompanied by the demise of the vinyl record and record store. Recurring motifs, including the palm tree and the swimming pool, serve as visual signifiers of Los Angeles as oasis or paradise, but also point to the artificiality of suburban California.
Returning to the sort of fictional autobiography I employed in earlier works, I adopted the narrative of Joan Didion’s life (cultural critic, 1960s observer, native Californian) for my own in Berkeley, 1956. Didion employs Yeats in describing the empty ideals of both California and of the 1960s: ‘things fall apart; the centre cannot hold.’ I was arrested in Los Angeles (Leslie) appropriates an image of a Manson family member as self-portrait. The Manson murders are often taken to be the symbolic end of the 1960s, and by extension, Los Angeles represents both the dream and the death of the decade. The city is the living embodiment of popular culture and America at its most extreme, both wondrous and frightening. It is the geographic ‘end’ of the country; uninhabitable and unnatural; and yet a symbol of Utopian paradise and the ultimate in ‘cool’.
Based almost entirely on mediated imagery and myth, my romanticised idea of Los Angeles is that much more wistful when viewed from my life in London, a place far removed from LA in so many ways. I have progressed from merely looking to a faraway time to also looking at a faraway place. There is something profoundly melancholic about longing for that which no longer exists; not least because that which is being yearned for is unlikely to ever have existed outside of mediated culture. I want to question why I have such obsessions with such ultimately unfulfilling, unattainable subjects. When growing up in the US, I was an anglophile; after settling in England I now look to the furthest coast of America. I continue to distance myself even further from my subject: the layers of time, place, memory, dreams and mediated culture growing increasingly thick.
Though the intimacy of drawing has been important to me, I have recently begun to explore other approaches within a broader context of ‘painting’, including moving image and photo-collage. In my newest work – a series of photo-collages of swimming pools, palm trees and other Californian motifs inserted into scenes of East London – I have started to experiment with what happens when I juxtapose my idealised Los Angeles world with the reality of my daily London surroundings. Though still somewhat unresolved, in these works I am moving towards trying new things and digging deeper into my ongoing interests, including the broader question of how to meaningfully confront the complicated position of nostalgia in contemporary culture.