A Question? for Mindy Lee
How are the materials you choose important?

The silk is really important because it’s transient, transparent, ghost-like nature is really good for catching fleeting moments

And it’s also very susceptible to what’s happening around it but personality wise it’s really awkward to handle, and hypersensitive to being touched. if you’re not careful it will tear or buckle and it will not take the information you want to share with it. But when get it right it has a really incredible memory for detail.



The hoop is really important as a material because it has this big history of women’s domestic work, but its also only a temporary support for an activity inside, it holds something inside but it’s not permanent, it’s also, I’m using it as a focusing tool to get into the middle of the painting.



And the materiality with the paint is important, you know, because it’s fluid, it’s staining, it’s gloriously sticky and visceral and then when you put it on a wet surface it kind of adapts and interferes with my suggestion of gestures, and it will settle and shift in its own time. And the way I combine the pigments is quite unpredictable so it allows for that surprise, a (hybrid?) conversation which the drawing doesn’t allow for in the same way.

I wonder, because like you say the silk on one hand if you get it to talk to you, [to] hold, an incredible amount of information, if you get it to work it can hold a lot of, quite precise, minute detail with the way you use your pigments. [But] everything has to align for this quite perfect moment to happen. And then it happens very quickly. ... And I wonder if there is a certain mercurial quality with the material, but also the process, that you might enjoy? That it’s a bit alchemistic, in a way?

Yeah, and chance as well. Everything has to be perfect, kind of, but how much do I know, before I start.



Even with the nuance of how wet [the surface is], or when do I wet the surface before I work on it, or how tight is the surface, how big is it will all these things change everything. And, I don’t know it straight away which I also realise is an important part of making the work, is to make numerous attempts.

And that stops me from fiddling as well. So make one, make another one, and usually the first one is rubbish, you know,” Mindy laughs, “it just doesn’t sit well. But I find maybe the second or the third one is maybe where it is… sually the good one, is not the last one either. The last one, becomes too resolved somehow or I’ve been so surprised by what’s happened or what’s happening with the previous attempts that I’ve tried to settle it down a bit, calm it down in the last version, and then when I had some distance, some time, I can go back and see the last one has lost some of its energy.. so, there is this peak.

Words as told to Martina Šišková
Photographs © Jon C Archdeacon