Tanya ling green lines bathing

We took a train to Paris during the summer holidays, and queued out for ages. But it is amazing. Timing for you is very significant: coming from a fashion background, how did you know when was the right time to concentrate in your art practice? I never really planned to be a fashion illustrator. It was very unexpected, but I am really grateful for it.

I wanted to do something just for the poetic-ness of doing it, with no functional purpose, without operating within a team, and just to have the privilege of making. You were pioneer in displaying your work on social media in the form of a visual puzzle, by juxtaposing images. How important is the role of social media in your practice?

So, my Instagram development, and the use of social media has also been a contradiction in a practical way. So, I was just using it as a tool or as another found object, it was something else that I could use to make work with. That has really been my approach of Instagram. Colour, fabric, and the use of different textures is frequent in your work.

Is this an influence from having previously worked in the fashion industry? Everything does relate, and I find myself in a position where I want to use everything I can. To me, that process removes anything that moves me. You signature pieces are your line works. These lines have taken the shape of a house installation, fashion patterns, paintings, and drawings.

How did these lines start? That year, The Mayor Gallery was closing and the building was going to be demolished. Referencing the history of blue, ultramarine, and then cobalt blue, and how cobalt blue almost looks purple, and then greens that look almost blue, so using green had to be addressed. With the green lines, what I can almost find slightly irritating about them, and I want to fight that, but in a way is what makes them work, is that they are so obviously, longingly, wanting to be botanical, organic, and plant-like.

How can something made in sap green not look like that? The lines are already there, I just find them. I can make them public like I did them once at an art fair, I think I did an 8 by 5 metre one, and people were just coming over during the weekend. My work is a lot about what is going on around me, and how I react to it, so when one line drawing is completed, it seems to have been there for ages, but then it has this newness about it.

One of your inspirations for this exhibition is English potter Josiah Wedgwood and his use of colour, specifically his use of blue and white. Could you tell us more about your influences? My influence on Josiah Wedgwood goes back to the early 70s. Moreover, I realised it was the colour which was always drawing me into these Wedgwood ornaments.

It was just the way that particular blue was bounded with that white. It was the texture of that white, and the matt-ness of that texture, with that dusty, chalky, flatness of the blue. That rawness. In that manner of speaking, do you know how a work is going to look like at the end, or is it changing constantly as you are working on it? The sculptures just happen, but I do have ideas in my head that I want to apply to make a sculpture.

To me that way of working is not a love affair anymore. Your practice deals with paintings becoming sculptures, and sculptures become paintings. Could you expand on that concept? What they are in fact is found objects. I wanted these works to be sculptures, so they are sculptures that are canvas on frame, and are framed as a painting. There is this freshness about them.

They have also appeared on a Fendi handbag and a large mural that formed the back drop to her sculpture show at Darbyshire frame makers, Sophie Hastings commissioned Ling for Art16 to paint one in front of the art fair visitors and a single work was included in Selected Works from the Murderme collection at Newport Street Gallery, This exhibition led to a commission to make drawings for British Vogue.

Privacy Policy. Installation Views Overview. Installation Views. Open a larger version of the following image in a popup:. Tanya Ling lives and works in London. Download Press Release. Related artist Tanya Ling. Terms and Conditions. Lines comprised a textile design she painted for the Louis Vuitton Cruise Collection in and they appeared on a Fendi handbag around the same time.

These earlier ones were painted in blue and green, with lines that never intersected. Her current ones are looser, with crossed lines and with that contemporary style of leaving the drips. The works in this new show are all painted in red, specifically in Dr. She chose this because it reminded her of old football scarves from the s that had an orange tinge to them.

None of the paintings have been reworked and the spontaneity of each one is a necessity, she says, for maximum life to live in each line.

Tanya ling green lines bathing

In the clip below, she speculates as to whether she is influenced by pre-conceived notions. Tanya Ling feels liberated by the loosening of the restraints that working as a fashion illustrator imposed upon her — the demands, for example, of the art and fashion directors. Artists, though, are not always entirely free to do exactly what they want since they have to be aware of the marketplace in which to sell their work.

Tanya Ling has never, in that sense, been an outsider. She went to art school and has worked for a long time in the commercial, creative profession.