In the studio with….Mir Jansen
June 2021
5 generations from At Your Service, 2018
As an artist how do you keep up with what is happening in the art world?
I used to be really good at keeping up with what was happening in the ‘art world’. I graduated with an MA in contemporary art from Manchester Metropolitan University in 1996 and for a long period of my professional life I worked on the other side of art production, by managing an artist-in-residence programme, co-curating art festivals and providing a professional development service for early and mid-career artists. I have worked with artists who have international reputations, gallery representation, whose work is collected. When I returned to my own practice, six years ago, I knew I had to swallow all the advice I had been giving other artists but realised soon that, for me, the art world isn’t disconnected from my other worlds – I work part time as an arts coordinator in the NHS, engaging people with life changing injuries or long term health conditions in creative activities to support their sense of wellbeing. I also work as a volunteer with refugees. I have shown my work in museums, galleries, and outdoor public spaces but there is definitely a connection between what I create as an artist and what I do and hear in my other roles. These traditional spaces for art are not the only spaces for the art experience. Especially now, when there is so much emphasis on who and what has been excluded from those spaces and what is excluded from the cannon of contemporary (Western) art. There is a new excitement around spaces that challenge that view of an ‘art world’. I follow particular artists on social media whose work may never be experienced in an actual gallery space. Having said that, I still love going into gallery spaces and discovering work (old or new) that blow my mind. That still happens.
What is your favourite work of art and why?
That’s way too difficult to specify because every era has its gems. I suppose I will always be drawn to narrative painting. So, let’s say Benozzo Gozzoli’s Journey of the Magi in the Palazzo Medici Riccardi in Florence – if not my favourite then definitely in my top ten of favourite paintings. It is incredibly rich in detail, almost kitsch in colour and patterns, it is flamboyant and three-dimensional so it surrounds you completely and I have had the luxury of being in that space all by myself to take it in. Also, I love the fact that the Renaissance period has so many examples of the ‘selfie’. It was probably the period when artists started to want to be recognised and crave to be famous.
It is also a narrative, literally a journey but you can’t see the end, you just see it midway (although you know where they are going). The Renaissance is such an interesting time in history and this painting reflects that. All that wealth, power, pomposity – Bonozzi used real gold leaf to make it shine even more brightly – he wasn’t just a painter, he was a craftsman. The work resembles a tapestry and I really love that connection between art and craft. This is something that I feel is under-appreciated at the moment. Most importantly, it remains a work that still feels relevant, a reflection on our own time.
What is your favourite art book?
The most recent art book I read, although it is a few years old now, is The Lonely City by Olivia Laing. My partner bought it for me and when I tried reading it for the first time, I just couldn’t get past the first chapter. It made me so sad. Laing basically describes her experience of feeling desperately lonely during her time in New York and relates it to the work and lives of artists like Warhol, Hopper, Nan Golding, and others. She describes their work with such an inconsolable clarity, it completely changed the way I had looked at those artists and their work. An amazing writer. The last book I read that really inspired me was The book of Trespass by Nick Hayes who is an artist (illustrator, printmaker) but also a journalist. His own beautiful lino prints feature in the book that is crafted so well and explains in great detail the history of land ownership (property) in England and the effect it had on the people who once had access to it.
What are you currently on and what inspired you to make this work?
I was really lucky in that, after my last exhibition (At your Service) and before the pandemic, I was asked to be part of a year-long international learning programme for creatives. It was organised by Relais Culture Europe, it took me to Sicily, Paris, and Izmir where I learned a lot about the complex European relationships and regulations around migration to and from The Mediterranean.
I am very interested in this cycle of journey, displacement, trauma, adaptation, belonging. Over the last year during the pandemic I have been working as a volunteer to support asylum seekers who are often traumatised by the journeys they had to make to get to the UK, and when they arrive here they are locked down, waiting for their Home Office interview in the hope to get a Right to Remain decision. And if they are turned down this lockdown situation can last for years and years. I am currently supporting a single mum with a toddler - it is incredibly hard for her.
I moved house just before the first lockdown in March 2020, from an inner city, very diverse community in Sheffield to the edge of the Peak District National Park. There are two nature reserves nearby that are managed by Derbyshire Wildlife Trust and I have permission to take natural materials from the reserves and use this to use it in my work. So, I am now experimenting with making paper and vessels from hay, dead bracken, plants, and leaves. This will hold the new work I am making. A lot of my previous work has been painted on different surfaces (planks made from an oak tree coppiced at Ruskinland (an oak woodland named after John Ruskin), different types of wood veneer, found objects such as wooden sculptural masks). I am not sure where it will lead but I feel there is ongoing investigation between destructive and restorative systems, cultural man-made and natural eco-systems maybe. It is something that has featured in past work that I’m revisiting (what you do, where you’re from, who you know – exhibited at Museums Sheffield in 2016).
I am also working with the Ranger Service in the Peak District National Park to see how we can collaboratively welcome people from more diverse communities into our national parks and how we can support those communities to create their own activities and experiences. I am hoping that this will lead to a ‘resource’ created by them for more people from their communities. I’m in a supporting rather than producing role.
What would you like a collector to look at and know about your work?
This is the hardest question. In the last year I have begun to think a lot about why we, human beings, crave recognition for what we do. In the creative arts especially, there seems to be this need to always be actively creating something that will be ground-breaking; is this something specific to our species, is it a by-product of our survival-of-fittest instinct? What is the purpose of it? Is it in our nature or in our culture?
The exhibiting phase of art, the ‘making public’, always feels so alien. It feels like something ending and is the opposite of the process of experimenting and creating something in the studio or engaging others in a creative experience. As long as I’m in the process of making it matters, and as soon as it is made it just exists. And also, I don’t just want to make for the sake of it. I don’t want to add stuff to our growing heap of stuff, so I am thinking more and more about production processes that are nature friendly and materials that are re-absorbable without leaving a toxic trace.
Don’t get me wrong, I do like talking to people about the work I have made or ideas that I want to explore. If a collector likes what I am doing, wants to buy my work, it would allow me to invest in something that is important to me. For example, I could buy a gym membership for someone in the asylum system because it will give them a place to go, keeps them active and take their minds of the situation they are in and have no control over. So rather than just buying what I make, they are also investing in something I want to invest in.