Angela Eames is a pioneering artist/drawer engaged at the intersection of digital imaging, artificial intelligence and creative practice. She lives in East Sussex. Angela’s work is currently on show at Six Foot Gallery as part of a collaborative exhibition with fellow artist Clare Crines, A Rose Is A Rose… In this exhibition Eames harnesses AI to push the boundaries of drawing, with an innovative survey of botanical specimens to produce both human generated and AI assisted works. Eames finds unusual ways of demystifying, mapping, and subverting technology whilst searching for poetic revelation within the potential successes and failures of digital systems.

Hi Angela! Can you tell us about how your creative journey began?
I learnt to knit with wool when I was five years old. It was probably at the same time that I started to draw or at least to consciously deploy a pencil on paper. Pieces of paper covered with seemingly  endless grey to black line appeared – scribbles? I didn’t think so then and I don’t think so now. Many years later I realised the connection between the knitted line and the drawn line. A piece of knitting is a single thread, a line, ordered through three dimensional space. In making a mark on paper with a  graphite pencil, I am adding physical matter to that surface. The tracery of intersecting or rather  overlaid graphite lines on paper is rather like a kind of flattened-out spaghetti junction – an aerial view.  Line passes over previously placed line – three dimensions compress to two dimensions. A woollen  jumper is made from shaped sheets of woollen line. The line or yarn has three-dimensionality – we all  wear drawings… 

“Notwithstanding Eames’s use of digital tools like 3D Studio Max and Photoshop, she sees no distinction  between a digital artist and one who works with conventional materials and methods. Rather, she emphasises not the means of production but what an art object may convey about its past, current, and future contexts. Eames puts it best herself: “The placing and erasing or embedding and changing  of marks or moments of actuality can give form to new visual possibilities, allowing the imagination to  project beyond two, three and four dimensions. Visual thought has led us to the electronic realm,  which continues to discharge us with responsibility and solicit our attention. Drawing as visual thinking,  unconstrained by means or method, remains vital in developing human awareness of reality in a  synthesis of natural and artificial and so I keep prodding and probing.” 

—Madeleine Pierpont. Manager for Partnerships and Development for Lumen Art Projects

Can you walk us through your creative process?
My recent works reflect on human response to the physical, digital, social, and environmental – a visual artist’s response to a specific space/place/time and the denizens therein. Though public exposure of  my practice until now has essentially been still works within the traditional art gallery space, during the past 3 years my practice has moved to being primarily one of working with moving image. Either way, I am interested in visual collision and unanticipated visual consequence wherein one might  realise and retrieve something unknown as opposed to relying on previous opinion, habit or taste. When drawing/making, as still or time-based, I am looking for something I and others have not yet seen. My works reflect on anthropogenic factors, our culpability for environmental imbalance and our ever-readiness to believe that we are in control. Whether still or moving, they allow the viewer to reflect on what is being seen in the moment. The viewer can come and go, look and leave and encounter sameness and difference. In essence they are about bearing witness. They are drawings either executed in time or drawings produced as time, drawings in the present continuous, drawings  which may be viewed in entirety or not.

How do you overcome creative blocks?
By working!

What advice would you give to artists who are just starting out?
Just keep working!

What emotions or reactions do you hope viewers experience when they see your artwork?
I propose a radical aesthetics of looking – particularly when looking at moving images. In  circumstances where the propensity of social media is to subliminally re-structure contemporary social reality these moving images provide a kind of antidote to everyday video viewing. They are ambitious in premise and duration and are intentionally removed from what we have come to expect from video, I.e. moving image that tells a story. Rather like a conventional landscape painting, they make no demand on the viewer with regard to watching in linear time, from start to finish, suggesting  that there are other ways of viewing the world. My focus is on ‘membrane’, particularly membrane as mediator between two viewing aspects; in front of and behind, revealed and hidden, seen and unseen, known and unknown. In working with concepts of duality, as intrinsic to the visual world and opposition, as vital to innovation, my works propose that we open our hearts and minds to new possibilities.

How do you typically approach your creative process from initial inspiration to the completion of  your artwork?
Drawing for me is not merely ‘the mark’ as derived through application of eye, hand and implement, although this is ubiquitous. Drawing is the very thought process and ideation of an artist. I acknowledge the digital as commonplace but if I frame, shoot, deconstruct, and reconstruct photographic images within Photoshop for example, what exactly am I doing? I believe that I am  drawing. I know that I am not painting, sculpting, printmaking, filming – perhaps I’m not even making – but I am drawing. The experience and knowledge derived from practice in the drawing studio informs my thinking and working procedures (quite often constraining them) but those decisions regarding  what to do and what to do next are governed primarily by my experience as a drawer.

Can you elaborate on the significance or symbolism of the chosen title of your exhibition?
The phrase ‘a rose is a rose is a rose’ was written by Gertrude Stein as part of the 1913 poem ‘Sacred Emily’, which appeared in the 1922 book Geography and Plays. When asked what she meant by the line, Stein said that in the time of Homer, or of Chaucer, the poet could use the name of the thing and the thing was really there. As memory took it over, the thing lost its identity and she was trying to recover that. In paralleling my handmade coloured works with the monochrome AI-assisted works in this exhibition, I am simultaneously calling attention to both the equivalence and the difference in these images. There is also a secondary paralleling going on – that of my works positioned alongside Clare Crines’s paintings – similar subject matter, similar approach, similar attention to detail and context. 

A paraphrase might be; ‘lest we forget how to observe, understand and reflect on the world around  us, lest we forget to remember.’

Is there anything else you would like people to know about the exhibition or your experiences as  an artist?
My practice straddles both the traditional and the technological, specifically through drawing. I enjoy the traditional practice of life-drawing from a model just as much as I enjoy working within 3D Studio Max. My drawings explore the ambivalent nature of our experience of reality in that they comment on time past in relation to time present, in order that there may be a time future. They reference natural form and order and our accountability as makers or manipulators within the world. They comment on  the need for global attention to principles of balance reminding us that whilst we embrace new technologies, we should also be mindful of the balance of nature.

Are there any upcoming events or additional information you would like the audience to know?
I am an RSA Fellow and a member of The London Group – showing regularly with them and in independent galleries.

‘A Rose Is A Rose…’ runs at Six Foot Gallery until Thursday 5th December 2024.