Space might seem like a necessity for creating artwork, but it’s not a luxury that all artists are afforded, particularly in a city like London where creative enclaves such as Hackney and Peckham have become sought after postcodes, and where many remaining warehouses are increasingly more likely to be used as refurbished loft apartments than studios. Luckily for video artist Marianna Simnett, she was selected for the Adrian Carruthers Award in her final year at the Slade School of Art, which has provided her with a space at ACME’s Childers Street Studios in Deptford, one of the last few areas where ‘creative community’ actually means ‘here be artists’, rather than acting as a Foxtons buzzword for ‘plenty of places to buy flat whites and £2 croissants’. 

‘I’m really lucky to have it – I’ve never had a studio of my own’, Marianna tells us when we chat, with the last rays of afternoon sun fighting their way through the graffitied, corrugated glass of said studio. ‘I like that it’s so versatile’ she says, and it’s clear that she’s making the most of her multi-purpose workplace. ‘I have a music area, and that can turn into a construction area when I’m building sets, plus I have room for an editing suite, and there’s this comfy area’. With clear gratitude at having found somewhere that she can fully focus on her multi-faceted practice she continues, ‘it really can change according to what I’m working on’.

Right now, Marianna has just finished working on her entry for the Jerwood Film and Video Umbrella Awards, two winners of which will be granted £20,000 to fund projects and pay for spaces like the one she works in now. ‘I hope to get to the next stage and if I do, my next project will definitely be a continuation of this one’, she says optimistically. ‘Without the budget though, I’ll have to reconsider everything – either abort the project or find funding elsewhere’.  Exactly how her current project, a narrative film piece called The Udder, a response to the assigned title, ‘What they See of Me’, in which a nine-year-old girl’s experience of looming sexuality is considered alongside the robotic milking of the eponymous udders in commercial farming, will develop is just not something she’s been able to mentally approach yet. ‘I can’t think of anything until I know what the award decision is’, she says. 

If the ambition realised in The Udder is anything to go by, something tells us its continuation couldn’t be any less than awe-inspiring. ‘There are so many layers to it’, Marianna laughs, trying to find the words to distil this complex piece into top line explanation. ‘It’s focussing on the organ [here, the udder] as an object, separate from the being of the animal that you empathise with’, she explains. ‘It’s like an estrangement from the animal’. Interspersed with to the close-up images of fleshy pink udders, tugged and sucked by the automatic vacuum of the robotic milking machinery, we are presented with ‘a protagonist, a nine-year-old-girl, who tries to see the end of her nose by crossing her eyes and the image of her nose becomes akin to the teat on the end of the udder’.  

Underlining these two parallel visuals is the interplay of the themes of mastitis, an infectious condition related to milk production, which farmers fight to protect their herd from, and chastity, as ‘a kind of incongruous opposition’ to this ‘really painful disease’. Mastitis also effects breastfeeding women, a practise associated with motherhood, and thus, female sexuality. ‘The girl’s in this very uncomfortable place where she is about to go into puberty’, she says. ‘There’s this narrative about her not being to play outside for fear that she might attract bacteria, like the udder might, but also attract a danger in terms of being seduced’. By mirroring these two ideas, ‘it’s thinking of sex as clinical, or like an organ, rather than thinking of it in a psychological way’. In short, ‘the girl is the udder, and the udder is the girl’. 

After Laure Prouvost, also a video artist with a sexualised output, having collected the prestigious Turner Prize at the end of last year, discussion not only of women in art, but the theme of sexuality being explored by women is a particularly hot topic. ‘I never really thought of myself as being a Woman in Art except until this last year, and so you suddenly find yourself in this thing that you never really anticipated’. Because Marianna didn’t embark on the project with an agenda particularly motivated by sexuality, she says she ‘would never have had the girl in the film seduced by a man, rather than by herself’. Instead, ‘the girl becomes like a vehicle, like a snake eating its own tail’. The girl is ‘both woman and man, the udder is both woman and man – everyone becomes able to be anything’. Unlike Laure Prouvost then, who quite explicitly uses sensual sounds and images to evoke ideas of sexuality, is Marianna raising questions only to debunk the answers, to neutralise and disassociate the organ from empathetic association with the human or animal? ‘Yeah, it’s a kind of reverse logic’, she agrees. ‘In order to talk about the technology, I talk about the udder, but I hope that people know what I’m talking about without me actually mentioning it’. 

With such an intellectual spaghetti of ideas at play, having ‘a narrative you can follow is ‘a crucial, crucial thing in my work’, she says. ‘Even though the whole thing is a bit weird, there’s still something fluid and structured’. She continues, ‘it’s very much about borrowing from people’s words and trying to weave that into something that feels like mine again’, describing the final film as ‘like an accordion, it kind of shrinks and expands’. 

Funding or otherwise then, it doesn’t look like telling tales is something that Marianna is about to stop any time soon. ‘There is something about storytelling that I can’t get enough of’, she beams. ‘It’s just compelling’.  

 

 

 

 

 

The Jerwood/Film and Video Umbrella Awards: What Will They See of Me, are a collaboration between Jerwood Charitable Foundation and Film and Video Umbrella in association with CCA: Centre for Contemporary Arts, Glasgow and University of East London, School of Arts and Digital Industries.  What Will They See of Me? will be at Jerwood Space, London from 12 March – 27 April 2024 and at CCA: Centre for Contemporary Arts, Glasgow, as part of Glasgow International from 4 – 21 April 2014.