This International Women's Day, we're celebrating the brilliant women whose work happens in our notebooks, with a series of 3 interviews.
Ehryn Torrell is a London-based Canadian artist whose multidisciplinary practice spans painting, montage, textiles, and digital media, engaging questions of the body and representation. She recently completed her PhD and built a neat note-taking system to catalogue five years' worth of research.
Congratulations on your PhD! Can you tell us a bit about your research?
I finished my PhD last year. I worked on it for five years. My PhD is titled "Tearing up Vogue and Mining the Detritus: A Montage Approach to Challenging the Racialised and Gendered Bodies in Fashion Media." The research asks how I can use photographic images from Vogue — cut them up, tear them up, reassemble them — in order to question and talk about representation.
I would take a single magazine and flick through it with my fingers. And I would tear out little bits of images of body and of clothing — nothing too obviously recognisable like a button, but things that would appear more abstract like the nape of a neck, the corner of a mouth. I would tear them out, very much spontaneously, just take a piece and go over to the paper and paste it on. This is how each montage was formed.
What I found amazing was that, even when I was flipping through the magazine tearing out different pieces, it was so easy to find things that connected — a line would meet another line. And I wondered how and why that was. What was it about the formal qualities of what's in a Vogue magazine that made it so easy — seamlessness, even in its deconstruction?
Separate to my PhD, in the studio, I began printing single montage works as large as I could to see what would happen, to see what was there and what the scanner would pick up. I printed them on linen and call these works ‘textile paintings.’ When looking at one of these works, you can see that other pieces are appliquéd on top of the linen - these additional images have come from a second print. I print two versions: one becomes a background and one is used as material to play with, which allows me to work further into the surface, and create further montage. During their making, I'm continually curious about what the images, materials and surfaces can become.
I've also worked with a digital embroidery artist to create small embroidered patches on the textile paintings, which is another beautiful way to add a layer to the surface. Embroidery gives a sensitivity to the sharpness of edges and plays again with the idea of the photographic. What is in focus? What can be seen across the surface of the textile painting — a picture of cloth, a picture of the body — versus actual cloth and actual embroidery. In these works, I’m really playing with the sense of what is real.
What roles does paper play in your work?
Well even though it’s about images and something conceptual, I wanted to ground it in paper and materials I could physically respond to — by tearing, by touching. This is why I turned to magazines as source material for montage. The images I use aren’t just engaged with in a cerebral or visual way, but touched, torn up and re-assembled, engaging multiple senses.
And a lot of your research took place in notebooks?
Yes, this row of notebooks represents everything I used for my PhD. Four years, because I started them a year in. When I found the Mark+Fold notebook, it was just the right one— a notebook I could come back to over and over again. The paper feels beautiful. This has always been my favourite pen (the Staedtler) and they work beautifully together. There's pleasure in using them together. It just feels like an environment I can pour whatever I need into.
I keep the notebooks together in sequence. Knowing that was four years of my life. These notebooks helped me develop a notebook practice — to be able to capture what it is I'm doing. And it continues.
When you’re doing a PhD there’s so much information that you're taking in: research questions, reading notes, insights, frustrations, creative ideas. It can be hard to track all this and let the thinking develop. So, for me, to have it be somewhere, and be really intentional about being able to find it again — this is where the notebooks became important.
At the beginning I was learning how to keep a notebook and looked at bullet journal methods. I like the dot grid because it lets you draw, write, make boxes, tick boxes. The thing that really stuck with me was leaving the first four pages to create an index. Every notebook has an index with a descriptive line and corresponding page number, so I can easily locate and revisit what I’ve written or drawn out.
When I look back through the notebooks, I can see something and remember writing a particular passage somewhere particular— in front of the Serpentine Gallery, for example, the first time I heard the birds chirping that spring. Handwriting does that for me. This is why the material practice of being with my notebooks— of giving my thinking somewhere to land— has been really important to me.
Tell us about a woman who inspires you
I grew up with very strong women in my family — my nanna, my grandmother (my father’s mum), and my mother. They were always talking, and I was always allowed to hear what they were talking about. The conversations ranged widely. I noticed that something different happened when it was just them talking — a space opened up that changed when the larger family was around. I’ve always been grateful for those moments of listening to other women speak.
My mum, in particular, always taught me to believe in myself. Both my parents did. Neither of them ever questioned my path as an artist. They taught me to be in the world as I am. My mother was a teacher but she also started a union. She was endlessly curious about people and believed in her ability to be with people, and to create good. And I really took that from her — I mean, I didn't take it from her, I watched her do that all the time! I always say she loved me for fifty thousand lifetimes. I lost her too young, but there was that love and belief for many lifetimes.
As a woman artist, what barriers have you had to overcome?
It’s hard to get away from the fact that women’s images are everywhere — we are the pictured gender! The Guerrilla Girls talk about this in their critique of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York— how “less than 5% of the artists in the Modern Art Sections are women, but 85% of the nudes are female.”
When I was younger, several tutors—both men and women—told me not to get married. And certainly not to have children as if to say, ‘you're obviously very serious as an artist, so just put that out of mind.’ And they would give examples of artists and say this is what you’ll have to do.
I've also been with my husband a long time and before we married, a lot of other artists told me that it just wouldn't work, that I needed to be with another artist. And they didn't even know him. So a lot of my career has been about challenging who people think I can be, what kind of space I’m allowed to take up, and what kind of life I’m allowed to have.
A friend of mine, Dr Kate McMillan, did the Freelands report on Representation of Women Artists in Britain. Around 70% of art school students are women and 30% are men. But the gallery system is the direct opposite — around 70% men and 30% women. And you have to ask, 'Wait a minute, how is that possible?'
There appear to be issues around maternity there. Gallerists worry about women having children, perhaps thinking they won't be as serious, or won't be able to devote the amount of time needed to make a practice. Yet they have no idea what a woman can or will do— that person you are judging might go through a terrible period of infertility, for example. Along with not being able to having children as artists, are woman also not allowed to make art while broken-hearted? Make art while living under a government that doesn't represent our views? Make art while having rights taken away? I mean, there is a lot of complexity to being human.
If you could go back in time, would you say like to your teenage self?
You have to be fearless to be an artist. It can be really hard. You often have to open up spaces that didn’t exist before.
I would say trust yourself and don’t let other people decide what kind of life you’re allowed to have.
What do you hope will be different for the next generation of women?
What I hope for the next generation of women is to feel and see and know a kind of deep, long history of those that have came before.
Something that I see often is that people get really shocked about things, and I think it's because we are not understanding our histories, and not understanding how much has already happened.
There’s comfort in being grounded by those who’ve come before us. This creates spaces that are much more generous and connected— ecologically, socially, geographically, politically.
I hope women will be received in a much more respected – not just respected, but honoured, cherished — world. To do the good that I know so many women do, and can, when they have the right platforms and channels.
