When the artist Roxana Halls was a child she considered becoming an actor or better still a film director when she grew up. Halls invented stories and ideas for the films she imagined she would make but soon realised the overly collaborative nature of filmmaking would only dilute her vision. This led Halls to seek other ways to capture the images which burst like fireworks in her head. She decided on painting. From early self-portraits in her bedroom-cum-studio at her parents home, first in Plaistow, London, later a small town in Devon, Halls taught herself how to paint picture by picture through hard work, discipline and an innate desire to make her ideas visible.
After briefly attending Plymouth College of Art & Design, Halls returned to London where she established her first studio in an abandoned theater. It was a perfect venue for an artist whose passions were art and performance. Around this time, Halls began collecting mannequins which she incorporated into her work - sometimes explicitly recognisable, sometimes appearing as an uncanny presence.
Among Halls early works is Tingle-Tangle a series of paintings exhibited at the Royal National Theater in 2009. Partially inspired by her time staying in Berlin and through the film Cabaret, Halls paintings revealed how “through the alchemy of paint, an inventive aesthetic can transform the mundane - cardboard sets and charity shop costumes - into extraordinary spectacle.”
Next came the series Appetite which examined sex, identity, and female repression through the inhibiting forms of censure, surveillance, and denial in women’s relationship to food.
Halls works within a feminist tradition as an artist. Her paintings engage the viewer in a dialectic. In her series Laughing While… (2013-ongoing), Halls presents women center stage laughing euphorically, joyously, while behind a wrecked car ignites, a house burns, a shop has been looted, or a plane has crashed. These are brave women. Revolutionary, rebellious women liberating themselves from the strictures enforced on them by others. Our first response may be to smile at these women in acknowledgement of their actions then perhaps wonder how much we are similarly seeking our own liberation.
Roxana Halls lives with her wife and has her studio in south London. Over the past twenty years, Halls has created a significant and substantial body of work, which places her as one of the most important and pioneering artists working today Dangerous Minds contacted Halls to discuss her work and career.
The artist Roxana Halls in her studio, photograph by Kris Kesiak.
How did you become a painter? What inspired you?
Roxana Halls: I didn’t exactly decide to become an artist, it was more of a sense of vocation to me. I hadn’t really made a great deal of work as a kid in terms of painting, I’d written stories and illustrated them and apparently one of my earliest activities was to cut shapes out of paper and images out of mags and move them around on a large board to make movable visual tales.
Painting, however, no more than the average child until one night aged sixteen I thought I’d try some oil painting and although the painting I made – it was a self-portrait which I still keep – is pretty abysmal I somehow just knew from then on there was nothing else for me. It was more a kind of uncovering of purpose than making a choice.
I have read you originally wanted to be an actor, if you had followed that path what kind of actor would you have become?
RH; Yes, for a while I imagined I might be, and I’ve often spoken about that in interviews in relation to self-portraiture and the taking on of guises. I can’t recall what I envisaged at the time other than to take on as wide the roles and possibilities that were offered to me but certainly, I didn’t imagine anything mainstream or broadly popular.
But long before enjoying acting for a while, one of my earliest memories is of the playground pretending to be a film director and casting fellow pupils as my performers in my upcoming movie. I strongly recall an incident where I made an error of judgment in casting my lead actress and causing some tears! I often feel that in another life and under other circumstances I would have been a film director, but we can’t choose our language, it chooses us. I’m often struck by how our younger selves can intuit some bedrock of truth about our natures which we keep mining for a lifetime.
‘Laughing While Crashing’
