Fleeting Phenomena

Interview with the artist Mia Middleton

In conversation with the artist, exploring multiple themes and delving into the deep subconscious sphere. The oneiric and psychological realms can be intricate and mysterious, thus providing fertile ground for artistic expression. Alongside the inner soul of her works and that aura of mystery, Mia opens a window to see what lies within her life and personal imprint.

Your works resemble magnifying lenses on particular details. What leads your gaze to focus on the “part”? And from here, the choice of small canvas sizes: why these small but meticulously detailed “windows”?

By only showing a small slice of a scene, focus is directed to what is not pictured as the mind attempts to extrapolate a larger context from that sliver, to piece together a broader story. We seek to solve the problems we’re presented with, but there is no single or salient resolution. I’m interested in that automatic function of internal narrativisation and the personal and/or collective subconscious that feeds into that. That’s why I reference film, time-based media and story-boarding a lot in my work, as a nod to the collective imagery we are all swimming in and affected by either consciously or unconsciously, and also as an exploration of high-impact, fleeting phenomena and the mnemonic resonance left behind. In terms of scale, I like to keep things roughly to life scale. I feel like this aids in that exercise of recognition and familiarity, and also of teasing out a sense of desire and discovery in the experience of the works. There’s something so potent about modest sizes and they lend themselves well to work that is inherently orbiting themes of intimacy and mystery.

From a chromatic point of view, it’s possible to see a strong contrast between darkness, gloominess, and the interplay of lights and clear highlights. Both technically and conceptually, what does this duality represent? What do you like and find appealing in it?

The more I work the more I realise that colour is really at the core of it all in such a baseline way. Sounds moot given we’re talking about painting, but as a figurative artist who hones in on subject matter meticulously, it might be surprising to hear that I often start a whole story with colour. It’s frequently the first thing I see when I’m conceptualising a new body of work, in the same way a DOP would pull focus from a chromatic blur to crisp life. I like my work to live somewhere between those two states and that idea of ‘pulling from the depths’ is sort of where those ashy or muted browns and greens come in, as mental fragments and memories seem to coalesce from a muddy blur and dissipate from whence they came. Add to this the richness of deep or brilliant reds, plums, flashes of light and you pump that blur full of visceral elemental tonality and it’s almost a ritual act of re-animating that which has faded, like suspending something in amber. Interplay of disparate elements is technically and thematically everywhere in my work. I am fascinated by dualities, or multifariousness in general. The notion that many seemingly contradictory elements can be true and relevant simultaneously is where life seems to begin, and yet we’re pretty bad at accepting and celebrating this. Our quotidian systems have to simplify things down and so we get used to all the guard rails and structure, but seeing vast connections and contradictions doesn’t have to be an overwhelming, mind-stretching feeling. There’s a wonderful communion and recognition there, a great lullabye inside it all, too.

“I’m interested in that automatic function of internal narrativisation and the personal and/or collective subconscious that feeds into that.”

If you had to step out of your comfort zone, in general terms, what would be the first thing you would do both as a person and as an artist?

As a person.. drive a truck. I can’t think of anything more terrifying hahaha. I’m kind of a nervous driver as I only recently got my licence and as such I love to imagine how it must feel to be towering up there barrelling down the highway, but if I woke up tomorrow and someone told me I had to haul some containers cross country in a flatbed truck I’d probably have a heart attack. Generally though, I’m a curious person and enjoy being in novel situations, so I think it’s often the counter-intuitive things that are out of my comfort zone like feeling hemmed in etc. I need a lot of recharge time to feel like myself, so a super busy social schedule can be a challenge. As an artist, augmenting my painting practice with another medium would be out of my comfort zone, and something I’ve been thinking about for some time. I also don’t do much press or media, being on camera isn’t something I’m comfortable with so that would be up there too.

Your paintings evoke a cinematic component and framing. If you had to list 3-4 scenes, snippets of films that represent something particular to you and that, in your opinion, reflect your vision, what would they be?

That’s such an intoxicating question! I think I’ll have to apply automatic thinking to it otherwise I’ll spend hours choosing. The first films that come to mind are The Secret of Roan Inish, Woman Under the Influence and Mandy. The interesting thing about all these films is they explore feminine psycho-sexual enigma and resultant societal resistance. In fact, all the films that just entered my mind touch on that theme – Fire Walk with Me, Three Women and Hagazussa to name a few. That’s interesting to me because I do edge closer towards an emancipatory lens as I grow and evolve as an artist, or at least a lens that positions the maligned woman as a sort of signifier or seer. I think you can sense a thread of female disenfranchisement in my work which I like to fuse with a notion of suasive ethereality. In general, I want to expose magic that is being kept at bay, quashed by external forces and there is much in the female-identifying experience that speaks to that. A scene that has stayed with me since I was very young is of Fiona, the little girl in The Secret of Roan Inish (1994), as she wanders through an industrial laundry and into a smokey bar to find her father. The camera stays at her height the entire time so that all adult figures become faceless machinery in her world. The scene takes place in the city, before she is sent away to spend time with her loving grandparents in a remote fishing village. There, she senses that a mythological creature named a selkie – part woman, part seal – is keeping her lost baby brother safe somewhere on her family’s remote island home. Fiona set’s about rekindling ancestral links to that land and its secrets in hopes of finding him. This film was part of the inspiration for my last exhibition at COMA which touched on marine folklore and history. My family is from a similarly far-flung, primordial landscape in Northland, New Zealand and the film is close to my heart because of that. The symbol of the selkie is also really compelling to me – animism as a portal to our roots – and I paint a lot of animals. I recently watched all the other Sayles films I hadn’t seen and I think he’s amazing, sharing important human histories that get lost in the rubble.

“Dream fragments definitely make their way into my work, I think they can feel closest to a wellspring of fresh ideas sometimes”

Gina Rowlands is mind-blowing and haunting as Mabel in Woman Under the Influence (1974). It really is one of the best character portrayals I’ve ever seen. She plays a wife and mother fractured under the weight of self and responsibility as she attempts to balance her internal and external worlds. The former, long suppressed, encroaches inevitably into the latter. It’s hard to choose one scene because the whole film feels like a single shot in many ways, but the opening scene, the dinner table scene, the final scene… just faultless slice-of-life, slice-of-mind nuance by Cassavettes. It channels such a deep sense of empathy and love and chaos and pathos. The quiet friction of domestic life is a big theme for me too so I find a lot of treasure in this film.
I saw Panos Cosmatos’ Mandy when it came out in 2018 and it’s the first film in a very long time that I old-school downloaded just to have and keep and luxuriate in whenever I wanted. I can’t count the number of times I’ve seen it. The trance-like momentum and visual impact is unlike anything else, Nicholas Cage is galvanising as always and the score by Jóhann Jóhannsson is mesmerising, it was his last work before he died. Mostly, I’m obsessed with Andrea Riseborough’s portrait of this disarming, nymph-like woman named Mandy who seems to occupy more than one dimension of a prismic Earth. The film centres around attempts by malicious actors to possess and co-opt her life-force, and the ensuing battle waged in her name. Every scene she’s in is special and palpable and leaves me inspired and closer to spirit. There are so many more to mention but those three just hit me first. Miranda July’s You, Me and Everyone we Know is such a joy and really left a mark on me as a teenager when it came out. I just finished her latest book All Fours which I think should be mandatory reading for all people.

Your style incorporates a somewhat mysterious and elusive essence, revealing a complex inner web only in small parts. As a person, do you identify with these aspects, or is your artistic side more of an alter ego?

I definitely identify with it as a person, but it can simultaneously be viewed as an exploration of ego states as opposed to alter ego’s. On a simple personal level I’m someone who is fascinated by the mind and I’m no stranger to its dark recesses and dissonances. My work is definitely occupying this space because it’s a space I live in and need to navigate, and I do that through painting, writing, research, practice etc. However, as a storyteller I might delve deeper into a single voice that in reality is part of the chorus of myself, and play out scenarios through that voice. I think it’s healthy and edifying to find ways to transcend the self, so although I need a seed of personal relevance to animate things, that kernel of curiosity becomes a gateway to explore broader dialectical discourse within a given realm; consciousness, cognition, matter, mutability, history, theology etc.

Getting inside the theme of dreamlike representations, is there a close connection with this world? Do you ever have nightmares and reflect them in your art? If so, is there a particular nightmare, one of the darkest, that you can share with us?

I think the veil is thin, I find it hard to pinpoint where reality and fiction bifurcate and rather see them as dichotomous, or as insufficient language. In some ways the most primordial earthly experiences can be the most dreamlike and hard to translate, conversely the most fabricated and disembodied aspects of human life increasingly invade our waking hours. We do not have the means to articulate/unravel all of life’s mysteries but getting messy and roused in the attempt is special, and
respecting the mystery is crucial. Scientifically speaking, observable matter makes up such a small sliver of the universe and it’s a wonder we have the means to fathom a fraction of that. Pursuing an objective understanding of what’s going on here doesn’t really hold a position of primacy anymore. My dream life and mental visualisations are so vivid and far roaming and can be very fantastical or berserk or perverse. Dream fragments definitely make their way into my work, I think they can feel closest to a wellspring of fresh ideas sometimes. In dreams we can undermine all the noise of thoughts and get to the tectonics. I recently had a trio of deep underwater ocean dreams over three consecutive nights that I found really fascinating. In perhaps the most unnerving one, I was diving deeper and deeper into a series of giant subterranean chambers, gathering large orb-like structures from their recesses and returning them to a milky surface tide pool next to a forest where there were many unidentifiable figures facing away from me. It wasn’t a nightmare but it had that lasting disquiet that stays under your skin for days. It was the feeling of astronomical depth that stayed with me, a depth so expansive and endless and inhuman that I was sure I could never survive there, but which I innately knew and navigated.

Can you give us a little spoiler about your next work, what we will see, or something you plan to work on?

I’ve been deepening my relationship with working on a slightly larger (for me) scale when it feels right and I’m enjoying finding my stride there. I’ll have two of those works on view at The Armory with Roberts Projects that I feel really excited about. I’m also working on a more unconventional presentation of my next body of work with my Australian gallery COMA, so that’s a really fresh feeling. I want to draw out the physicality and modularity of the work, and I’ll incorporate some writing alongside the paintings in some way. I am writing more and more these days and I think a few different things are forming there.. time will tell.

Fleeting Phenomena

Credits:

Artist: Mia Middleton / @miamiddleton
Interview: Annalisa Fabbrucci / @annalisa_fabbrucci
Editor: Maria Abramenko  / @mariabramenko

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