Penny Hulbert has worked in the UK, Tokyo and Germany, and currently lives and works in Australia. Hulbert works in the medium of paint, and her abstract practice predominantly explores the notion of the sublime and its manifestations in water. She has completed studies in fashion design, painting, sculpture and education, and achieved a Bachelor of Arts in Visual Culture (Honours) at the University of Brighton, UK in 2001. She later gained her Master of Creative Arts at the University of Wollongong in 2011, and is currently researching for her PhD while teaching at secondary and tertiary institutions.
Catherine Woolley: Your body of work almost entirely revolves around a fixation with water. When did this interest begin, and what is it about water that captures you?
Penny Hulbert: I think that began very early in my childhood when we lived on the edge of the harbour and spent a lot of time down at that swimming pool where I ‘drowned’ according to my mum. Now, I don’t know whether I actually did, but I have always been drawn to the water… I think because it’s moving, I like that idea of moving patterns and reflections.
CW: Coming from a non-painter, could you explain your use of materials and your process?
PH: I work with oil paint and basically lots of layers, so they take a very long time to build up. Then there’ll be areas of paint that I’ll scrape back and then I’ll build over, scrape back and build over. So they do take quite a lot of patience. I’m not saying I work on them constantly for six months, I usually work on maybe a set of four or five at a time, certainly the smaller ones. And I think that’s possibly why my smaller ones are more successful than the bigger ones. If I’m working on a bigger painting I tend to just focus on one. I actually don’t really enjoy working big, I find it more challenging.
CW: That’s interesting considering much of your work explores ‘the sublime’ which, for me, conjures images of large, overwhelming expanses. Why then do you choose to paint on such a small scale?
PH: I think because the big had been done with the sublime, so it felt like a cliché doing them all big as well. I referenced the philosopher Bachelard, one of my favourite writers, and he writes a lot about the minute and the large, the macro and the micro. I think I’m always in a sense looking at that scale in my work. The immensity of landscape, it’s also in your mind as well, and because your mind is limitless I wanted it to be like a portal into a mind. I prefer the intimacy of the small work. I like the idea that someone has to come up very close and look in. They’re abstract enough that every time you look, you see something different.
CW: The sublime was a prevalent concept in the 18th century and in 19th century Romanticism, and I understand that an aim of your Master’s thesis was to investigate the relevance of the sublime in contemporary art. Could you discuss how you legitimised the sublime as a contemporary notion?
PH: Well, I’m not so sure that my artwork necessarily successfully made that leap, and that is what I probably am now needing to address in the PhD. I think in terms of what I was researching, I was very focused on the ‘terror’ aspect of the sublime which is still a major component of the contemporary sublime. Because that whole thesis was based around that drowning experience, for that purpose, the terror was the link between the ocean.
CW: With the progressions of digital art, the ‘death of painting’ has been rumoured again and again. How do you go about working with painting in the contemporary world?
PH: I feel quite ambiguous about that. Sometimes I let that conversation get to my head, and feel like I should suddenly be working with photography. And I am pulled towards photography, and I do admire photographer’s work and I am pulled towards Photoshop, but the bottom-line for me with painting is, it is about the sexiness of the material in my hand. I’ve never really been that excited by the simulacrum. The real has always excited me far more than the simulacrum. For all its faults, its messiness and its lack of perfection, to me that is always going to be more attractive—whether that’s old-fashioned or not, that’s just where it sits for me. The smell of the paint, the texture of the paint, and the accident component of the paint, I don’t know how much of that spontaneity can be necessarily captured in Photoshop, it all becomes very contrived and controlled—not necessarily in a bad way—but for me, capturing the feeling is the spontaneity and the accident. So for me, and for people that are really into painting, I don’t think painting is ever going to be dead.
CW: Which particular artists have inspired your practice?
PH: Well, there’s the obvious influences from Turner and Rothko, of course. I quite like Dale Frank now. I’ve been looking at Annie Hsiao-Wen Wang, she’s been at Dominik Mersch, my favourite gallery. I’ve been looking at work by Lara Merrett. Anne Penman, you can see she’s very inspired by the same artists I am. And I really like this guy Nicholas Jones, his work seems similar but is actually quite different in terms of abstract landscapes. Margarita Georgiadis, is also an amazing painter, and does amazing figures.
CW: You’ve studied and worked in the UK, Tokyo and Germany as well as Australia. What influence have your travels had on your practice?
PH: I think that attachment to place has hugely made a difference… That weird feeling about belonging to everywhere, but nowhere at the same time. There’s always been a duality for me about belonging and not belonging; to be mobile and to keep moving, but to need somewhere to stay still as well. I really want to travel, but I want to come back to somewhere. I don’t want that anchor-point to keep moving, and that’s what has happened for me. I don’t think it’s healthy to not have an anchor in your life… Migration has been diagnosed in many people as a post-traumatic disorder… I think what I’m trying to look at in my work now, is to bring not a solution, but an understanding of that scenario.
CW: Could you elaborate a little more on what you’re currently researching for your PhD?
PH: My PhD is now trying to incorporate the interrelationship of migration, place/landscape, identity and the sublime. So basically everyone is situated in a place, and generally speaking within that place there is community, and you’re affected by the landscape around you, and that in turn has an effect on who you are. When you migrate, that changes and it leaves you with a sense of disorientation and dislocation, and not a clear sense of where home is if it’s a permanent migration. Everything becomes disjointed, dislocated and you become actually quite prone to parapraxis, where you have memory lapses, memory slips. I wouldn’t go as far as to say that you can’t tell the difference between reality or not, but there are definitely moments of déjà vu. So for instance, when I first arrived [in Australia] I’d be walking down the street, and see someone I thought I recognised for a split second, and then had the realisation ‘Oh no, it can’t be, I’m not in England.’ So that’s what I’m looking at, there’s a certain generic-ness in places, for instance like an airport, where you are in a liminal space. I’ve always been interested in the liminal space, and that’s what attracted me to the topic of the sublime in the first place.
My methodology is going to be phenomenological, it’s always about yourself situated in a place and therefore you absorb through yourself. A lot of my memories are smells, sounds, spaces and energies of places. All of that ties in very strongly to what has been identified as one of the seven key areas of the sublime which is the uncanny, and you can read more about that in my Masters. So I’m probably going to have a chapter on each, and then I’m going to have to tie up the interrelation.
This does mean my work is going to have to change. Because the whole thing is about the body in relation to place, I am going to have to introduce a figure into my work. So, it’s really hard, and I’m really stuck on the work aspect, I actually prefer the theory. The practical, especially with a change of direction in my work, I’m actually a little bit stressed about that… I don’t want to completely change my style of painting, but I do need to introduce the figure… At the moment I’m only really thinking about a silhouette, and that may change and I may end up eating my words and having to sandwich things on Photoshop. Even, I’m still more excited about the idea of working with fabrics. For me it’s very much about making art as touch and sight, tactile experiences and visual. That’s sort of where my work’s going, though I can’t say I’ve made any great progress on the practical yet.
Penny Hulbert’s website: https://pennyhulbert.wordpress.com/
Masters of Creative Arts Thesis: Hulbert, Penelope. “The Sublime: Water, Flux & Duality.” Master of Creative Arts, Research Thesis. Department of Creative Arts, University of Wollongong, 2011. University of Wollongong Thesis Collection. Digital Commons, 17 Apr. 2012. Web. 10 Oct. 2015. <http://ro.uow.edu.au/theses/3459/>.
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