Interview with the artist Nicola Dale

A short interview with Nicola Dale, commissioned by the Centre for Jewish Studies to work on a piece in response to the 50 Jewish Objects. You can see her creation here.

What is your background? Was there a pivotal moment when you decided to follow your path as an artist?

This is the way I’ve always been. I can’t remember a time when I wasn’t led by my imagination. I drew and made and wrote from a young age. I always found time to be creative. By the time I was old enough to think about university I initially chose to follow an English Literature route, but during the first semester I knew I’d made the wrong choice. It was a gamble – English seemed like a more ‘sensible’ option than art - but I am very glad now that I swapped. After uni I was happy to do a variety of jobs, I didn’t really care as long as I could keep making and thinking about art too. Eventually art became a full-time occupation (with bits of teaching here and there). I couldn’t articulate this when I was younger, but deep down I think I always wanted an interesting life rather than a predictable one. I love this path, even though it can be uncertain and difficult. 

What work do you most enjoy doing? And do you have a dream project?

I enjoy variety. I enjoy trying to find the right medium for the idea. I enjoy getting lost in the act of making and the way time works differently in the studio. I enjoy trying to balance intricate detail with suggested volume. I enjoy unexpected twists of imagination and the mixture of terror and glee that comes after a rush of inspiration and hard work. ‘What have I done?!’ is a question that repeatedly plagues me and I have to try to enjoy finding the answer.

As for a dream project, well, there are things I would like to do that don’t have an outlet yet, but I’m working on making them happen… It’s a hard question to answer because I don’t have a big future dream stored up, it’s more about trying to make ongoing ideas into reality. The point of a dream is to understand your own strengths and limitations isn’t it?

Do you have a favourite artist? And which artist of the past would you most like to meet?

So many! And the answer is always changing! The one that has stayed with me the longest (since school) is Mondrian, and today I feel like saying Velazquez, Marisol, Eva Rothschild, Matisse, Jonathan Lasker, Camille Claudel, Thomas Demand… but my answer might be different tomorrow. 

I would like to go back in time and watch the Venus of Willendorf being made. I also wish I could have seen Nina Simone play live, just once. I don’t know about meeting favourite artists though, that would be an incredibly pressurized situation. What if you caught them on the wrong day? Artists are a strange mix of sociable and withdrawn and a lot of us are not always easy to talk to. Having said that I have had some amazing conversations with artists – it’s great to know that wherever you go in the world, if you meet another artist, you have a shared understanding that is hard to put into words, but at the same time makes having a good conversation possible.

What are your first impressions on the 50 Jewish Objects project?

My first impressions were ‘I don’t know anything about any of this!’ which turned out to be a great starting point. I was forced to find a way through. I found inspiration in the fact that I was facing huge gaps in my knowledge – first and foremost no knowledge of Hebrew whatsoever - and yet the objects I focused on were all written texts. I got hooked on trying to find a way to translate them, to turn them from one kind of language into another. I also realized pretty quickly that I wouldn’t be able to settle on just one object; the parallels and echoes between objects were too strong to be ignored, plus I suppose I was interested in the idea of ‘archive’ anyway. What constitutes an archive? Where does it begin and end? Who is it for? What relationship can I forge with these objects as a secular, non-academic woman? 

Can you tell us about the process of making your work? And will this be influenced by the collaboration with the research carried out on the objects?

It began with writing, which is an atypical starting point for me. I suppose it made sense in that I was trying to replace words I couldn’t understand with words that I could. The whole process really was driven by language, the idea of translation. I wrote a range of responses to various objects and these became the basis for sculptures. I translated words into numbers, then measurements and objects in space. I translated the objects into images in order to create a whole in many parts - an archive in response to an archive. 

Again, unusually, I did not undertake research in the way I have during other archival projects (e.g. ‘Figurehead’ based on research into art historical representations of St Jerome, or ‘Bedrock’, inspired by a collection of 1950s x-rays of coal miners) and I am still processing why that was. I think it was just getting stuck on and fascinated by the problem of translation – the languages I do know and the ones I don’t.  I think I am talking here about what non-artists find frustrating in the artistic process: you can justify totally bonkers methods and processes... but surely these also tell us something about ourselves? My creative method may be idiosyncratic, but the themes the project has drawn me towards - translation, communication, touch - are absolutely relevant to all of us. 

If you want to know more about her creations take a look at her website.