An interview with Marie Hagerty

Marie Hagerty speaks with Lucy Chetcuti about her art practice, honed over the past 40 years.

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Earlier this year I spoke with Marie Hagerty at her home-studio in Hughes, Canberra. She poured me a glass of red on arrival to her Modernist-inspired home (a white exterior painted with black and red features; it was Marie all over). I spent some time admiring her art collection, mainly of Canberra artists, before heading down the garden steps to her studio.

I first learned of Marie’s work when I was a painting student at the ANU School of Art, discovering a trifold pamphlet dedicated to the Plane Girls series – dynamic red, black and white paintings. These evocative images made a lasting impression, and I have admired her work ever since.

In the studio, Marie spoke keenly about her love of the American artist George Condo, and the influence of Picasso, Dada and the Futurists on her approach to pictorial space. With Marie being a private person, it felt like a privilege to gain insight into the more personal and symbolic undertones of her abstract paintings. Throughout her practice she has found a way to approach her religious upbringing and acknowledge the influence of its aesthetic symbolism while maintaining a strictly nonreligious stance. Over the course of the interview, it becomes clear that Marie’s original trepidation of including Catholic references in her work stemmed from a fear that she would be labelled a “Religious artist”, when she in fact identifies as secular.

Marie’s paintings are totally unapologetic – bold, high-contrast, definite – so much so that the subtlety of the artist’s personal symbolism could be overshadowed by the alluring lens of Modernism. Although she does not reveal “too much”, in speaking with Marie and spending time with her in her studio, the nuance of her visual language became more intriguing and complex. What is clear is that her ability to allude to so much in her art with base elements – form, line, shadow and a limited palette – should not be understated. Her strong work remains open enough for the viewer to explore their own projections, as I did.

Lucy Chetcuti: You were born in Sydney, is that where you studied?

Marie Hagerty: I grew up in Sydney, but I came down here to Canberra for the Art School and enrolled in 1984. I loved the look of the building and just wanted to get out, make a change, escape my Catholic upbringing. There were a few of us from Meadowbank Art School who wanted to come down. It was great. Now I hate going back to Sydney.

How influential do you think your Catholic background has been for your art?

I grew up Irish Catholic, it was drummed into me. It was a big part of my growing up and now I’ve got a huge disdain for priests and nuns. I recognise the same thing I hate about Catholicism whenever I read the news and get angry about what’s happening in the world – that thing of “You-have-to-live-this-way” Suprematism. Men ruling the world and squashing people down.

You use a lot of red in your painting. Is that symbolic?

You could read it as symbolic. It started out that I just really wanted to use red. And you know? I couldn’t! I found that my use of colour had to be informed by the composition, it had to progress formally within me and the painting. To me red was like a Cardinal red and the Catholic suggestion stopped me. But once I got through that I was fine.

There’s a strong connecting between colour and memory. Do you think that makes some colours more difficult than others?

I still remember walking into my uncle’s bedroom when I was a kid and there was a really thick black and white abstract painting on the wall. It just freaked me out.

Really? And now you’re making black and white paintings! I wanted to ask you about black because you obviously love the nuance of black, there are so many different kinds of black in your work. What is it about black?

It’s such a fascination. Even just flipping through things on Instagram, it immediately resonates, and always has. I recently found a new black pigment from London!

The way you’ve used different blacks together in the same work creates a compelling dynamism in which the forms are at once receding and coming forward.

Yes, it’s a push and pull.

It has a psychological impact, it’s very graphic and makes the eye work harder like a Gestalt.

It’s like symbolism, only more direct. Sort of like ideograms.

I really don’t like paintings that have every colour under the sun. When there’s too many colours it’s like everyone talking at the same time, no one can understand anything.

But I also really want to use colour because I want to move on. Move somewhere. Not to say that I’m bored. It’s almost like when you’ve got a signature you can’t actually change it, even though you’d like to.

White seems almost as important as black in your work.

White allows me to cut out shapes and helps the work behave like a drawing rather than a painting.

I wish I could use colour, you know, put yellow, green and blue together. But I can’t. I have made some pink paintings…

What is pink for you?

I was really getting into softness and fleshiness. I want to do a series of them. To be really kind of sexy. [Marie laughs].

Yes, the flowing lines of the human body seem to find their way into most of your works. For me it suggests in a sense of intimacy and eroticism, yet it still feels veiled like a glimpse into a private domain.

I always see crosses in your work, is that also a reference to Catholicism?

Yes. I thought, if other people can do it, I can too. You know if Colin MacCahon can do it, why shouldn’t I? For a long time, I was scared to say too much. Now I just do what I want. I’ve got the guts now!

You’re using the cross as both a compositional device and a symbol. Do you think of the role of Catholicism in your work as a social critique?

I’m just trying to bring everything that I know together.

Do you work in thematic series? I’m looking around the studio and seeing there’s a few different themes.

Yes, I am doing that. Most of them are sort of figurative. [Marie points to a large painting of bulging, jellybean-like shapes.] There are these ones -to me they’re figures. They’re playing on that absurd kind of theatricality. Its saying, “I’m a big, Trumpian…” There’s the purple robes of the Pope or something like that, and that mechanical kind of thing – racing cars. The paintings are named after an Absurdist play, Ubu Roi, which is all about gluttony.¹

The result is a body of strikingly unapologetic paintings that are uniquely your own.

Oh, unapologetic, I like that! I enjoyed working on that series and I’m glad when I don’t know what’s going to happen in my work. It’s more exciting. For example, if I take the red out, I could do something else. It might take me somewhere I didn’t predict. But I know with a white painting I’m going to end up fucking cleaning it up. I was saying to myself today, “Just stop it!”.  I really want to become painterly, but it won’t happen. I’m always, you know, tidying it up, tidy, tidy Marie. Why can’t I just splash paint around? I got a compressor, and it was bloody loud and it didn’t work. I had to take it back. Now I’m trying spray paint. I have to do it and then run out of the studio because even though its water based, it stinks. I really want to change and do something different. Every time I have a show I think ‘OK I have to move on, I have to move on.’²

Would you say that your practice is intuitive? Because to me some aspects appear very logical, but then there are always little moments of freedom or room to breathe

Yeah, both. It starts off as logical and then I’m always hoping it’s going to change. It has to feel organic to me. So, I stand back and go, ‘Nope, doesn’t work’. I come back, simplify, and almost start again. If you try and hold onto something it stops you from moving on. Like, if you’ve got a little favourite bit in the painting, but as a whole it’s not working, you might have to ditch that bit.

So, do you have a set of rules that you abide by when you’re making a painting?

No, I don’t. I say that to my students: there’s no rules, there’s no such thing as a mistake.

Given your desire for looseness how much planning do you do before you work on the canvas itself?

I draw first, there are many versions. The paintings come in series and become like a kind of book. When I did the Plane Girls series they felt almost like flick-books – one image a variation of the other.

You’re not working from still life when you paint?

No, not still life. I work a lot with collage. Sometimes I fold up a bit of paper and put it on a drawing, which creates a shadow. I put the shadows in to anchor the form, but the shadows don’t have to replicate a real shadow, like in a still life.

Do you use photography as well as collage?

I’ve been printing things out and getting old books. I used to take a little scalpel with me to the hairdresser and if I knew them, I’d ask if I could cut the page out because it’s really expensive to buy an $18 magazine for just one image. I don’t usually take photos and print them out, it’s more found images, they’re much more exciting when it comes to putting things together.

When I was doing the Plane Girls series, I really wanted to find images of wings. I really wanted to find certain bikes. I was seeking it out, really, really looking for it. I used images of real people, I chopped legs up and put another head on, and then stuck on the wing. I could then come back and abstract it, so it would still be very figurative but more about the motion of twist and turn.

What is your interest in motion?

The push and pull of the space on the canvas really intrigues me.

That relates to the figure/ground?

Yeah, like a pose. I’ve always loved life drawing. I’ve been teaching it for 25 years. At the moment I’m teaching at Strathnairn Arts. I used to be a model for eight years. That got me through art school. It was a good job to have.³

And finally, what are you looking for in a finished work? How do you know when it’s done?

It has to be ‘as it is’ I suppose. Like how you are what you are… I don’t know how to explain that… I think it has to be bold and in your face.

Marie’s ability to create works of art that are entirely themselves is undeniable. As her lifelong preoccupation with life drawing can attest, the human figure, its movement, volumes and form, underpin even her most abstract paintings. Her particular reference to the body lends her work to the erotic realm, bringing to mind feminist theorist Audre Lorde who wrote, “The erotic is a measure between the beginnings of our sense of self and the chaos of our strongest feelings.”⁴ Talking with Marie, I can’t help but feel inspired by her internal drive and commitment, and the sustained quality of her artworks. I am excited to see her next body of work.

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Notes

1. Ubu Roi is proto-Dada play written by Alfred Jarry in the late 19^th century. A parody of Macbeth and King Lear rolled into one, Ubu Roi ridiculed the social conventions of the time. Marie’s Ubu paintings were produced from 2011 onwards and could be seen to draw on Dadaist collage techniques.
2. One key point that emerges in our discussion is Marie’s desire for change but, try as she might, it is her art that leads the way. She is dictated by an inner visual sensibility.
3. One of Marie’s primary jobs as a model was for Jan Brown’s sculpture workshop at the Canberra School of Art in the mid to late 1980s.
4. Lorde, A. (1978). Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power. Out & Out Books ; Trumansburg, N.Y. (pp. 2–10).