I had one of those horrible post-party dreams. I don’t usually have dreams. If I do, they’re always these repetitive, black-and-white things, where I’m squeezing through a series increasingly small doors, or chasing something, or losing teeth. That is, unless I’ve drunk a lot, or taken something.
I dreamt about a boy. The boy from the toilet, I think. He was sitting at a bus stop, and I was trying to speak to him. He started screaming, and I tried to cover his mouth. My hand slipped inside him, down his throat. His head fell off. Still shrieking, his head was looped around my arm like a bracelet, my hand poking out the bottom of his neck. I flicked the head off my wrist, and it smashed on the ground like a plate. Then I woke up.
The dye I brighten my hair with tints the water a rusty shade of orange; it pools behind me, dammed by my thighs which squeak against the bath when I move. Shampoo, conditioner and three going-overs with the most pungent soap Lush has to offer, and I still feel like the smell of Monday night is on me. My nana, a heavy smoker, used to wash her hair with half a cap of laundry detergent; I bet that’d do the trick for me now. I can’t get the smell of fags and booze and weed out of my hair.
I give up after an hour, too hungry for another round of shampoo and conditioner.
The food in my house is limited, but I can’t bring myself to leave. I’m not getting a takeaway: the solo-hangover-takeaway is the domain of women who eat their feelings.
Bag salad it is, I suppose. I grab one from the fridge and open it. I drain a tin of tuna and dump it in the bag, giving it a little shake. I chuck in a handful of olives, a spoonful of mustard, give it another shake and it’s basically a Ni?oise salad. I go back to the sofa and check my phone: two per cent battery and fifty-odd notifications, which makes me want to hurl the fucking thing through the window.
I like partying, but I loathe the aftermath. I need to stop letting people have my phone number. Maybe that’s something to do while I’m off – new sim card, new phone even. I’ve got that cash from Mr B burning a hole in a pocket. My phone purrs greedily when I plug it in. Four missed calls from Flo, a series of texts from her, from Will, and one or two from Finch. Finch, I check first; he’s just letting me know he sent me his photos, and could I look at them when I’m finished vomming, and later, could I ring Flo back when I’m awake and able. I reply to him first. I don’t quite have the strength for Will’s essay, or Flo’s simpering apologies. I have twenty texts from Flo and seventeen from Will.
Later. I leave my phone in the kitchen, opting to spend the afternoon in the arms of my archive. All my uni stuff is in my studio. I grab the first two boxes and drop them in my living room. I set myself up on the floor with a coffee, a cushion and my Salade Ni?oise dans un sac.
I crack open the lid of box one, marked CSM, FRESHERS in Sharpie. I only applied to art schools in London, and I got into a few, but went for Central Saint Martins in the end. It seemed like the coolest one, to be honest. Colin told me not to; he said the CSM Fine Art course was more for people chasing shock value than people with any actual talent, that it’d be a different story if I was doing fashion, or something, but I wasn’t. He was half right.
We had to bring work to show on our first day, and I’ve never seen so many swastikas or nipples in my life. Do you remember the lad who was losing his virginity as performance art a few years ago? Bigged it up till he got in a few shit tabloids, then just fellated a banana in front of a （presumably） disappointed crowd? That was CSM.
I could have gotten into Goldsmiths. But there was this whole big cock-up with my application. I don’t really know what happened. And the Slade basically only take people from private schools, so whatever. And Chelsea is just… It’s boring, there, isn’t it? Smug. So, I went to CSM, and it was basically fine. A culture shock, but basically fine. I’m quite posh in Newcastle, practically middle-class up here, but there… State-educated, regional accent, a heavy drinker. The clothing which was fashionable and sexy at home was so last year and brassy and showy in all the wrong ways. Someone asked me if my dad was a miner the first day I was there and I wanted to scream.
Flo followed me down. She fit in better – she’s from Durham, the city, not the county. Not much of an accent, and after a term to adjust her wardrobe, you couldn’t pick her out. She went to Camberwell, which is a banded Fine Art course, and she ended up bouncing from sculpture to painting before changing course and moving to illustration, where she stayed. She went from banging on about how she was going to get a Turner Prize nom by 2012, to crying about how she just wanted to go back to drawing without getting the shit ripped out of her for it. I had no sympathy.
My work doesn’t get good till the end of that year, when I realised that I needed to do something a bit different to separate myself out from the YBA Clones, from the swastikas-and-nipples crowd.
And I’ll say now, I never actually deliberately intended to do stuff just for shock value. I can’t really help it if things just bother me less than they bother other people. That really helped me push my work early on. Everyone else is just appropriating iconography they think is shocking for attention, rather than genuinely having an interest in transgressive subject matter.
My first workbook for the year is mostly notes, pages torn out of magazines, images of women posing that I’d later have male models study while I bent their skinny limbs into place like dollies. First year I mostly got boys on my course to work for me by doing model swaps with them; I’ll sit for you, if you sit for me, and so on and so forth. There was a lad I got on quite well with, for a bit, called David, who was really into exploitation films. I don’t know why I’m being coy – it was David French. As in, Turner Prize nom David French. He was pals with Peaches Geldof for a bit, so I used to see him knocking about in the tabloids, which was weird as fuck.
The first photos I find are of him. They’re quite funny, actually. He’s on the couch in our halls – which I covered in a pink Ikea throw – nude, feet in the air, lying on his stomach. He’s holding a toy telephone I’d picked up at a charity shop, with the red plastic cord wrapped around his fingers. There are two shots side by side, more or less identical, but in one photo David is biting his lip, and looking at the phone, and in the other he’s giggling and staring straight down the lens. Smiling at me. Blushing.
I’ve written underneath, pic 1 is more what I had in mind but pic 2 is better. I peel them both out, and pop them in the ‘to include’ wallet. The next page of the book is just notes, a bit garbled, but you see me work out a good chunk of the driving principle of my practice in two sentences.
Picture 1 is posed and cute and it’s fine but he’s like interacting with the viewer in picture 2. David is giving me very genuine fuck me eyes in picture 2 IMO, and that’s why it’s better, because then the audience get the fuck me eyes as well?? More engaging. Does this make sense????
It does. It makes perfect sense.
I flip the page, and a print of one of David’s photographs falls out, from the agreed model swap. It’s a photo of me dressed up as the eponymous character from classic Nazisploitation film, Ilsa, She Wolf of the SS. It’s a photograph which, in this post-woke economy, would be a massive embarrassment. I think he’s buried all of this stuff, or no one cares too much about his early work, now his shit’s all serious and black-and-white and wanky.