Cooking with ashes,

An interview with Rae Hicks

Rae, thank you for welcoming me into your studio, it’s a joy to visit, and a long time coming.  

It’s great to finally have you here! Is this apparent culture of studio visits a real thing? It seems on instagram as though people are living this revolving door Warhol factory, but I’ve probably had less than five ‘professional’, or other, visits in as many years. I think it’s why I don’t have any of those decent studio portraits that I’m sometimes asked for. I’m often uncomfortable in other peoples studios. It’s a bit like getting into someone’s bed. What impression is mine creating? 

If it’s not a real thing, we should endeavor to make it so. I try to visit as many artists studios as possible, there are definitely many I have planned to visit and not followed through on yet, so this is a timely reminder. It feels good to be here, as far as beds go, it’s a pleasant experience so far, comfortable and full of wonder. It’s great to see a range of work at varying stages of completion. My first impression is, monuments and monolithic forms seem to be wrestling one another in the imagery, there’s a definite sense of the possibility of things appearing, disappearing, reappearing, construction and demolition seem to be perpetually dancing. Which leads me to my first question: Can you tell me a little about the beginning of your career and practice as an artist?

It was a way to show off as a kid, everyone gasped at a ‘good drawing’ and it had a special romance attached. Then one day in year five I drew a good Crash Bandicoot and that was it. It got handed round the class so much that when it made its way back to me it was half destroyed. That was the tone of things until art school.

I loved that kind of attention but I don’t anymore.

I am desperate to see the crash bandicoot drawing! Do you still have it?

Nope!! We’re talking potentially more than 25 years ago!

That’s a shame! What have been some of your most prominent influences over the years?

Lots of generations have made a big thing about being raised by TV and that was certainly true of us who were little kids in the 90s. But it was probably the half-sophistication of late 90s early 2000s computer games that most directly influenced the part of me that makes paintings and objects. ‘Clipping out’ of rooms and hallways, the accidental atmosphere of very idiosyncratic programming which seems to have been ironed out now. The POV or HUD (heads up display) is analogous to a feeling of slightly solipsistic dissociation.

Then there are all the inscrutable, placeholder objects dotted about. All of this has an almost comical echo of the ‘metaphysical’ landscapes of early 20thC painting which would be a later revelation.

At Goldsmiths, everybody was fretting about the impossibility of painting, its passivity and pomposity. Around this time we were being playful with its status - leaning it on the wall, or dangling it from the ceiling. That’s if anyone was painting at all,

But eventually it seemed that the most interesting thing was to do the most counter-intuitive, try to make this little recessed window of fantasy work. 

Treading completely infertile ground which has been farmed into oblivion would be like juicing a stone, making something out of nothing. Cooking with ashes. Which I’ve always found really exciting prospect. And that’s how I treat painting now. 

I can really see the presence of games and early graphics present in your work, there was such a strange floating sensation accompanying the blocky nature of the fixtures, the tonal qualities also feel like a consideration, jumping from neutral to intense, almost extreme high notes. The approach or revelation of early 20c painting is something I can relate to acutely. I felt as though these representations of space were really there for us to inhabit as painters, corny as that is, a way of stepping into Cezannes boots, feeling the handling of light and matter with the same pressing urgency.

The impossibility of painting was certainly a conversation in full flow in Edinburgh in 2010. I remember feeling pretty badgered about the whole thing, I certainly hadn’t been briefed in advance. The lack of consequence to anything was something of a blessing. It was really possible to cut your teeth and make a fool of yourself within your work.

Cooking with ashes is really perfect, on every level, incinerated, fried, torched. Blinding heat, the extremities which fuel discovery are essential. Without them what can really grow?

Exactly. Plus I like the image of debasement. So often trying to start work on what you want feels pathetically disarmed. There is no escaping this eternal return to nothing.

Your work fluctuates between 2D and 3D but always feels very much in the world of painting, the sculptural elements feel like they occupy the extended field of painting, has you always been drawn to that physicality beyond the flat surface.

That’s been observed by various tutors as well. When something has a surface or shell incongruous to its identity, I love the suggestions that are released. I really enjoy looking at models, especially ones with some ‘oddness’ such as old museum displays etc. And then I like the slick ones too. They’re also gently humming with weird narrative. 

I suppose the artifice of painting, how it might paradoxically constitute a view with some multi-dimensional depth, is the same process as when the surface of an object actually renders it deeply strange instead of just functional. It’s this facet of physicality that I deal with in my sculptures.

I can really imagine this relationship being explored through the cultivation of a whole environment, does the intimacy of the scale hold priority, would you be interested in expanding those relationships at scale?

That’s an evergreen question. It’ll pursue me for life I expect but I always step back from doing anything fully immersive. I have a real axe to grind about stuff that really plucks at all your senses in a carnivalesque way. I’ve got absolutely no respect for the wow factor. For the most part, immersive art can do one but there are obvious exceptions like Pierre Huyghe or John Bock and a million others. 

What I will say for it is that as an undergrad I came across (and stumbled through) Monika Sosnowska’s uncanny interiors and that possibility for an unobtrusive but pervading atmosphere is something I’m always about to reach for. There are ways that total environments can really lance the baggage of the past.

You were the inaugural winner of the Waverton art prize, how did winning the prize affect your work and practice?

I used it to buy myself a solid two months in the studio with basically no interruption whatsoever. During the summer. It felt wildly deranged. I’ve never had that before as when I was Goldsmiths and RCA I’d often just not go in despite all the freedom I had. I made loads of progress in those two months.

We should have conducted the interview in the midst of your deranged summer of painting, how did the ideas present themselves, did you work through them quickly?

Talking about lockdown as an artist is a snooze fest but obviously we were all a bit backed up after that and It’s a fact that I had a lot of things to work through because I’d spent nearly two years working more in pastel than anything else.

Scaling drawings and small paintings up never works but it’s a strong position to start from, and I have this repeating form I call ‘the Angel’.  It’s a winged triangle, sometimes squat and sometimes tall and tree-like. It’s in almost every painting right now. So that was the first thing I put into these larger works I immediately began. There are more in my current alphabet of shapes that went into those works. To actually answer your question - some of those resolved in a few months whereas some are still being worked through nearly two years later.

Does music/cinema have a presence in your sphere of influence, if so what are some films/music or that have had an impact on your work?

I’ve curated two shows now named after things by Magazine - Howard Devoto’s post Buzzcocks band. The first was a non-event solo I organised for myself called Real Life at ASC in Elephant & Castle in 2016 and a group show at Thameside in summer ‘22 called Secondhand Daylight. I’d still like to do the title ‘Real Life’ justice one day.

Magazine are a dystopian entity which blow about in the vacuum left behind by punk and embody that deranged loneliness outside punk’s self possession.

It’s the same for New Order, who constitute a kind of after-the-fact desolation. Then along came Burial who typified that hangdog sleepless millennial experience of night buses and spiritual starvation, making an inverted sonic poetry out of wage slavery and cigarettes, zero hours ‘self employment’ of twelve hour days and a deep negative balance to show for it all.

Those three musical things account for my teens and twenties.

Lars Von Trier’s Europa Trilogy, specifically Forbrydelsens Element depicts a world of constant night time, which is as much an allegory for delusion and solipsism as anything else. A foreshortened dream Europe is interconnected by tunnels and covered canals leading to generic sounding Städte, nonsense conduits between pubs, brothels and run down apartments.

Michel Elphick’s narration is that of a man under hypnosis. The sense of an ignorant ‘dark age’ is so vivid yet intoxicating, you end up as sleepy and confused as the protagonist.

I lived in Germany during my early twenties and then on and off for a few more years. I could expound at length on how well this conception of a perpetually nocturnal Northern Europe resonated with me. In a big way, this picture of my own primitive landscape is what I’m trying to map. 

I am yet to experience this trilogy, it is now a serious priority, it sounds like a pretty incredible cinematic voyage. If you had to pin down one or a couple of songs by each act which would you choose?

Magazine - Motorcade 

New Order - Here to Stay

Burial - Rival Dealer

I’m very curious about your time in Germany. What were some of the keystone moments within your work and practice there? Did you have any major transformative realisations within your practice?

The students and teachers there put things very directly and constructively in their criticism. I’ve rarely had such kindness. It was really generous and came from such an earnest place. Often unsolicited, I was often put out by it, because my maturation in all things (and I cannot stress this enough) is absurdly delayed. Now I can see that it was a proper gift. You don’t deliver criticism like that otherwise. It’s like walking up to something broken and fixing it, simple as that. No rudeness or arch theatrics, just clean insight.

I cringe now about how poorly primed

I was to receive everything during those years. 

Another brilliant thing in Hamburg was the Zentralbibliothek whose art book selection and film library was possibly the most accessible educational resource I’ve ever enjoyed. Myself and my girlfriend at the time went a few times a week, spending hours there. That was her doing. 

That was also when I conceived this impression of Europe as a sort of continuum tunnel. For one reason or another, I/we travelled about Germany and Central &

Northern Europe a lot in a few years. It was

So easy to slip from one Stadt to another through the conduits of conveyance. I’d be in london, working for nothing. Then catching the cheapest flights at 3am. Then exiting a train station in the dark, out of money and so tired, wherever it was.

I stopped moving around and tried to come up for air after a couple of years. I hadn’t actually made a lot of work and so began to try and put it all into something coherent like a grown-up should. 

And finally, what does a really good day in the studio look like for you?

There’s a point at which something unexpected comes out of the sludge of circumstance. That’s always what I’m fishing for, and it’s probably same for everyone. It feels a lot like digging in the mud with your hands and it throws all the flim-flam into perspective - tidy studio or messy studio, well stocked or not, money or broke, accolades or obscurity. None of it has any relevance on the outcome when you’re mining that proper seam it’s all just external decoration. It’s grubby but pure and I love that. The rest of the day doesn’t really matter if that happens

Rae Hicks is an artist living and working in London, he was the inaugural winner of The Waverton Art Prize in 2022.

Mark Connolly, The Founder and Director of Paint Talk, is also an artist living and working in London.

The Waverton Art Prize is now open for submissions until 31st March. The prize is open to artists of all ages living and working in the UK.