Ind Solnick graduated from Wimbledon College of Art in BA Fine Art Painting in 2017. Her practice is based in collage, across mediums of painting, writing, and sculpture. She builds narrative structures that explore human-planetary relations in the context of climate change. How do we approach thinking about our place among the life forms of a planet that we are simultaneously destroying? How do we justify, as artists, the perpetual creation of new objects in a world already so filled with them?
Her practice is object-led and based on material symbolism, making processes of collection and harvesting a primary method for creation. Her paintings have a focus on mark-making as a site of rhythm and pattern, referencing systems and forms observed in plants on both a micro and macro scale. Symbols and motifs recur across mediums of painting, drawing, and sculpture, building up a syntax referring to her engagement with the land. Currently, she is developing a concept of ‘composting’ in her studio, where material enters but does not leave. All waste material is ultimately reincorporated, whether pencil shavings or broken ceramics, in a reference to the soil.
Self-taught or art school?
I went to Wimbledon College of Art where I graduated with a BA in Painting in 2017. I’m also starting at Slade this September in MFA Painting which I am so excited for!
If you could own one work of art what would it be?
This is such a hard question, how can I choose?! There are so many artists whose work I love. In the year above on my BA was an artist who I really admire, Tahmina Negmat, who went on to the RCA. Her paintings feel like they’re overflowing, they’re so tactile. She builds in all sorts of material like clay and cardboard into her paintings. I would love to have one of her really large works if I could, or even one of her smaller paintings actually.
How would you describe your style?
Fluid? Off-kilter? I like things to feel slightly out of balance like you can’t really pin it down. I want the works to feel like they have a persona like they’re talking to you or each other but you can’t quite hear what they’re saying. That’s how I think of my relationship with them at least. I guess it’s also how I know when a work is finished too when it feels “active” like it’s talking back to me. At the moment I’m very intrigued by theatrical aesthetics though, like the circus or the funfair, references to old traveling theatres, and the stage. I feel like there’s magic in those spaces, an energy that I want my works to carry. But my work is really about land and our engagement with it, so a lot of my imagery originates from looking at plants.
Can you tell us about your artistic process?
That really depends on the space that I am in because I work in a lot of different places. In my studio, my process is really collage-based. The works layer upon each other all over the walls, interacting with each other in quite a sculptural way, and the ones I’m working on the move between the floor and the wall. I cut up old works and reconfigure them into new objects. Nothing ever leaves as waste, it all stays until it can be integrated into something. I think of it as composting, building the soil structure to grow something. But then I’ve spent a lot of time working in other places too. I spent some of the pandemic in a remote cabin in Finland. I didn’t have any materials with me really, so I gathered, categorised, and pressed with plants in the area around, and made paintings using newspaper as a structure. Last summer I was working in an old barn on a farm, where I dug and processed my own clay and I again had that process of bringing everything in my surroundings into the paintings.
Is narrative important within your work?
Yes, but in a very messy sort of way. I write stories a lot and, like with my physical materials, I have a very tactile relationship to words and language. I think there are voices in my works, like characters in a story, but they are incoherent. As soon as they become neat and comprehensible with a clear structure, then the story is finished and that project or chapter of work is over. No single painting or sculpture has its own narrative though.
They are all moving parts within a combined story. Maybe this brings me back to this idea of a stage; they are actors in a play. I don’t worry too much about it making sense though, it’s more about the atmosphere and rhythm of the story than anything structural like events.
Who are your favourite artists and why?
This is something that changes all the time. It’s like music; what speaks to me right now, at this time in my life. My first real love was Odilon Redon when I was seventeen. His paintings are so soft and yet so vibrant at the same time, so full of energy and magic and never shying away from it. Then you have artists such as Richard Tuttle and Daiga Grantina, from who I take so much inspiration. David Thorpe I first saw at Camden Art Centre when I was about eleven and it really stuck with me although I didn’t know his name until I went through their archives as an adult trying to discover who he was. That perception of nature and optimistic sci-fi utopian vision really speaks to me. I’m a real sci-fi lover and totally obsessed with the writer Ursula LeGuin’s. Another is John Newling, not just his visual works but his essays too. The way that he thinks about our relationship to our planet fascinates me and the ways that he approaches it in his work too.
What or who inspires your art?
Inspiration comes from all sorts of places. The consistent thread is environmental, coming from a motivation to look at my own position in the ecosystem of our planet. Trying to understand where I fit in as a member of a species that is destroying our planet and also is part of it. That’s quite a painful thing to work with at times, but it is my main focus. A lot of inspiration comes from my materials, which are mostly plant-based, although not entirely so. I make paper from grass, I apply clay to my paintings. Naturally, processes of decay feature a lot, such as burying paper for a few weeks or months before working on it.
Sometimes inspiration will come from something as simple as trying to work out how two surfaces come together in a collage. I think it’s mainly about the investigation. I don’t plan my work very often unless it’s something like a large sculpture, and my process is always about trying to understand something, trying to work something out.
Where’s your studio and what’s it like?
My current studio is in Southwark. I have a tiny windowless room all to myself. The building is an old GP surgery so it has a built-in wall-to-wall countertop and cupboards. One of the cupboards still has a label reading “Condoms/Chlamydia swabs” which I leave there on purpose, although I’m not sure why. Maybe it’s as an artifact of the room’s history, I’m not sure. The walls are completely covered, like an ecosystem in themselves with the works moving around constantly. I have a huge set of paper-drawers there that I inherited from my old neighbour but it’s getting a bit overfull now. It’s also a total mess because my process is quite chaotic and I work with clay in there too, so keeping the dust under control is a real battle. I like the feeling of being enclosed in my own space and I can have a good dance in there too.
Do you have any studio rituals?
I turn the heater on first thing, that’s number one! My first hour or so is usually about unpacking, pulling things out of drawers to look at. I spend a bit of time looking around at my walls, moving things around, attaching things to them, playing with works as containers for other things or each other. I decide if I’m sick of anything and it needs to come down.
Sometimes I tear down the whole lot and get ready to start fresh, but that’s usually a drastic measure when it’s getting too noisy for me to think clearly. I write in my notebooks, although that’s not a studio thing entirely, I do that on my commute and pretty much wherever I am; so if I’m writing while I’m in the studio it’s usually because I’m stuck with something and I need to write my way out of the problem.
What are you working on currently?
I have a really exciting project at the moment. I started a collaboration at the beginning of the year with an old classmate from my BA. We reconnected after noticing that we were both working with harvested natural materials and things just spiralled from there into some really large scale sculptures and a joint practice. We’re calling it Grass_work at the moment and we have an outdoor exhibition of the sculptures coming up in July 2021 at Gallery 32.
Where can we buy your art?
You can contact me via my website https://indi.solnickfarrell.co.uk/ or DM me on Instagram https://www.instagram.com/indsolnick/?hl=en and if you have any questions about the work, I’m always open to chatting about it.
