Hastings Online Times Interview

“Drawing helped me find the edges of myself…”

Bunny Mazhari’s work is disturbing, original and, so far, little seen in Hastings. TARA REDDY talked to her. Pictured, an exclusive look into Bunny’s notebooks

Looking at Bunny’s work, you first take in the intricate colourful drawings mixed with collage, the delicacy and care for detail. And then the horror of the imagery reveals itself. It’s a world where nothing is as it appears, nothing can be taken wholly as it is represented. The pretty nourishes the sinister, the colourful contains the bleak. As in life, nowhere is safe.
She was born in the sixties to an English mother and an Iraqi father. But far more influential than the different cultures of her early childhood was the emotional relationships within the family.“We children were not wanted and were an irritation in the way of my mother’s obsessive need to attend to my father’s every whim.” Thisdysfunctional parental relationship went on to resonate throughout her work. “Almost everything I do is aimed at them, it’s my catharsis, my revenge, that helps me take back what I feel they took away from me.”
Negative influence
In her work today, the men are still portrayed as devious, their motives ulterior and the women complicit, long-suffering, enduring conflict in between amorous embraces. Bunny says, “The earliest negative influence was without a doubt my father, he gave me a reductive view of men. A skewed view that I’ve had to cope with to this day. Men are to be humoured, cajoled and condescended to; in essence, impossible to deal with in any kind of straightforward way.” Art was her way out. “Drawing was a mechanism that helped me find the edges of myself, where I ended and the world began. Most people are shocked by the sheer volume. Working is a matter of survival, something that I can’t not do.”
Another dominant theme in her work is the bodily reproductive functions and the carrying of the foetus. The female body is frequently portrayed as a vessel carrying something that is in itself repulsive, both connected with and disassociated from the vehicle. She remembers being exposed at an early age “to the sexual implications of relationships and the unwanted and subsequent disposal of the outcome”. Little wonder that “sometimes people who look at my work don’t want to get sucked into my world and that’s their choice; I don’t expect everybody to enjoy what they see.”
From birth to death
And what they see is a journey through spot-lit scenes of human beginnings and endings: “from birth to death and everything in-between”. Like her work or not, Bunny has a lot to say. She opens a window into her world which entices you in and the more you enter the more you find.
She has recently spent several years as a mature student at Brighton and the Royal College of Art. Was she tempted to abandon her figurative, narrative style? She says, “I am not a great fan of conceptual art as I think it is more often than not created by con artists who have no talent, just smoke and mirrors to fool rich art buyers who want to invest in the next big thing. I love outsider art because I see in it an honesty and truth that is missing from a lot of contemporary art. I love artists such as Stanley Spencer, Paula Rego, Robert Crumb, Henry Darger.”
Today, Bunny’s partner is Iranian and designs and makes beautiful jewellery, and two of her children, Alex and Lucy, are both artists as well. Her work may contain nightmares, but she has quite wholesome dreams. She says, “My dream is to have a family exhibition where all our work can be seen as a whole made up of individual but connected parts.” Something we can all look forward to.

See the original article here

He Can Make Your Skin Crawl

He can make your skin crawl. Mixed Media, 5"X 7"

Moleskine work in progress

Step One

Step Two

Step Three

 The progression of an ongoing work, this shows what I put where and when.

The Game Started

A brand new page straight from my current sketchbook. Damien Hirst gets a make-over.

My Artist Statement

Drawing has always been central to my work. Even before I could articulate a sentence, I would make attempts at understanding this world through the use of pencil and paper. The proto-artist grew into an obsessive doodler and journal keeper that is never tongue-tied on paper and whose imagination isn’t emasculated by self-consciousness. It has taken the whole of my life to experience this epiphany.

This heart of my work lies initially in my sketchbooks;  they hold everything from lines of poetry to current shopping lists, typographic experiments to acts of revenge. They are my storehouse, my confessional and my laboratory. Everything is bearable when I know that my books, glue and boxes of cuttings are nearby.

When I embark on a new piece of work it is nothing less than a spiritual communion. Sometimes the process runs so smoothly, so naturally it’s as if I’ve tapped into some cosmic energy that transcends my everyday existence. Everything I hear, see or do feeds into my sketchbooks. My eyes like a magpie’s, always on the lookout for a sliver of colour, a scrap of text, or a bastard thought that has been discarded. My work affords me the potential and the omnipotence that is God’s alone.

In my work I AM GOD, I can play with cliché; wallow in the sentimental, brood on the arcane without fear, without censure. I can be ugly but reach for the sublime. Confront death but rejoice in creation, this is my world and I call the shots.

Up until recently these books were my private preserve, my playground, my padded cell and for my eyes alone. My body of work stems from these books but in a more resolved, pared down form. In the past few years I have come to see that my books were the wellspring of my art and they represented my only unique contribution to the world. I have found my voice and calibrated my vision.

Every piece of work comes from the heart. I am flashing my very soul. Every piece has resonance. And in placing my work in the public domain I have left myself exposed and vulnerable. But at this stage of my life I can’t settle for half measures. Honesty and integrity are what matters.

Every medium has at sometime or other been co-opted to serve my vision, from linocuts to Japanese brush and ink. Whatever comes to hand, nothing is safe. My works are an ever hungry monster that is never sated. Happily my mind is an ever-churning processor that prepares the feed. I nurture them with maternal care, sawing up the juicy morsels to feed the vacant pages. Curiously, once a work is complete – replete, the spell is broken and I would happily never set eyes on it again. Like a tick that feeds off its host until its fat and full then drops off and disappears. Each work represents a period of my life in which time it is my child, the centre of my universe but alas, I am a fickle and feckless mother.

 Everything I create evolves from the same source. My collages are constructed from found images, rubber stamps, hand drawings and text. All born from my books but exist separate and alone in and alternate dimension. My themes are the great ones, birth, death and life in between. I offer them for your delectation. 

Some of my Moleskine sketchbooks

Inspiration

One of my all time inspirations, the work of Stanley Spencer. © Estate of Stanley Spencer, 2003. All rights reserved. DACS

”The artist is a receptacle for emotions that come from all over the place: from the sky, from the earth, from a scrap of paper, from a passing shape, from a spider's web.” -- Picasso.
I've been thinking a lot recently about creativity: where it comes from and how we express it. I am also often asked where I get my ideas from and whether I ever 'get stuck'. In the past an artist's muse or inspiration was accepted to have a 'supernatural' source. a divine gift that uses the artist as a conduit or an instrument. And it's funny because that it what it feels like sometimes. When the work is flowing and I am working fast to keep up with what's spilling out of my mind, it really feels like a strange force is working through me. At times I hear whispers directing my hand, at others I see a faint line guiding me to trace over it. It is certainly a mystical experience where I can't seem to do wrong. it isn't always like that though! On some days it is laboured, drawn out and frustrating, I end up throwing it away or more often I just glue a fresh bit a paper or a collage image and start again. When I put pen to paper, i never know what will appear. I never approach my sketch book or board with a ready thought up image. That is not to say I don't have an idea I want to work out. I am as curious as anyone to see what comes up. When the work is finished it can take weeks even months for me to figure out what it is saying. And the most pleasurable thing is when someone looks at the work and sees something I hadn't even thought of. I do worry st times that I am revealing too much, but what seems obvious to me, is not necessarily so to others. All this is very personal to me and I don't really know how other artists work or where they get their inspiration. There is an element of superstition to this subject, you don't want to pin the process down too much in case you break it, or you scare the angels away so they never come back!
 Creativity and the compulsion to express it is hard wired into the human psyche, it is a need as vital and as basic as the need to breathe, but sadly it is not recognised as such. I think it was Plato who said all education should be art based, because he understood the importance of this drive and how deeply damaging it is to suppress this need and not give it voice. If every human being was encouraged to keep a book in which to take a daily flight of fancy, right from when he or she could hold a pencil, I am convinced there would be less crime, bullying and mental illness. But this is my theory and I am sticking to it!