Good Wives, Warriors and Painters

You’ve been working together for a few years now. How did your collaboration come about?
We both studied painting at Glasgow School of Art and graduated in 2005. We first worked together in the 2nd year of art school doing the same exhibitions and projects. We were friends and wanted to do stuff together as it was more fun than doing it alone!

How does the collaboration work in terms of the practicalities of making? Your artworks look completely seamless, is there a clear difference between authors that might be visible to the more trained eye?
Perhaps there used to be more of a distinction, but now it would be pretty hard to spot who did which bit. Collaboration is always hard at the beginning as there is a natural tendency to fight for your own identity, but for it to work really well, I think you need to give up your own ego to create something truly collaborative.

How did you continue to make work when you were on different sides of the world (Becky was living in Melbourne and Louise in Glasgow)?
It was oddly a lot easier to carry on working together than we thought! The time difference made it a little tricky, but we worked through it with lots of Skype chats and emails. I think because we felt that we’d already established our ‘style’ it was more a matter of dividing up the work and making sure we both had a clear idea of what we were to do. Although we couldn’t work on the same piece of paper like we used to, we’d often do half and half, or when we were doing a series of drawings, we’d do one and then email it, and the other would do a drawing in reaction, so there were quite a few long distance artistic ‘conversations’. We had a show in Melbourne too, so Louise came over for that. All in all, we managed pretty well on different sides of the world!

Prior to Melbourne you did a painting tour of South America. How did that work?
We were backpacking and painting! That’s the good thing about painting on walls – you don’t need much. Just a couple of paintbrushes and you buy paint along the way. I think we would have liked it to have been more structured but it ended up being quite free-form. We had an exhibition in San Francisco and then we flew to Peru. Apart from that we only had a rough plan. We had been planning to go to South America for ages, and we’d tried to plan the paintings with galleries especially in Buenos Aires, but this was pretty much impossible until we were actually in the place and could talk face to face with people. The painting in Cusco, Peru was quite difficult to organise as getting permission to paint on Inca walls proved quite hard!

I bet. You've been pretty busy since then (projects have included wall paintings in Europe, Australia and the USA, and projects for Adidas, Swatch and MTV as well as the obvious excitement of a Skinny Showcase). What are the highlights of the past year or so?
We have been doing a lot of paintings recently! I think we always enjoy travelling and painting, so in October we did a painting in Berlin at Illustrative and had to fly straight to Copenhagen for an exhibition there, so that was fun. Also, being in a Taschen book (Illustration Now 3) made us very happy!

Is there a clear distinction between your 'design' work and your 'art' work? 
This comes down to context and intent. With our design work, we work to a brief set by someone else, whereas with our own work it is entirely self-initiated with no restrictions. Context is also important, as our artwork is generally located in a gallery or artist-run space, whereas our commercial work fits a purpose and the location depends on the project.

What inspires you in your work? What are you wanting to give to the viewer?
We are inspired by shared obsessions, historical reference points, organic forms, complex natural structures, mathematical shapes and scientific imagery.
We want our work to be accessible on lots of levels. Each work is heavily based on image research and although it is often very dense forming a pattern like mass, the individual elements always have a theme or story.

You're living in London now, is that working out well? What prompted the move from Glasgow?
We loved living in Glasgow for 7 years but felt it was time for a change. We’re really looking forward to coming back to Glasgow for the Recoat show and seeing our friends for the weekend!

What are your plans for the Recoat show?
We’ve done 20 drawings on hexagons that are going to make up a large wall patchwork and 4 new drawings that are more ‘Fun-occult’ – intricate pseudo scientific symbols. Also a window drawing that we will do once we’re in the gallery.

See our gallery of Becky and Louise preparing Recoat for the show here