Untitled

Lizzie Needles

Untitled, photograph of mixed media piece

Interview by C. VanWinkle
May 29, 2023

Would you please describe for me the prompt that you responded to?

It was a piece of music. I really grew to like it after being quite shocked that it was a piece of music and not of piece of visual art. I wasn't expecting it to be music. It was very delicate. It reminded me of nature documentaries, of sunrise, and of being alone, actually. It's quite lonely music. When I listened to it, I wrote some things down: morning, dawn, awakening, dewdrops, nature, sunrise, beginnings. It really reminded me of dewdrops on a spider's web, delicate like a lacewing or a moth. A sort of nature documentary thing was going on in my mind. And I suppose feelings-wise, what came to mind was the inevitability of nature. Nature is unstoppable, and humans feel like they're apart from it, but we're not.

I was trying to make a solid thought out of it, but I couldn't. The more I tried to, the more it would run away from me. But the music was very peaceful, quite somber. At the end there was a sound like a bell or a clock chiming slowly, and that felt quite somber and maybe like… death? It was like a death knell or something, I'm not too sure. But I did really enjoy it, and I listened to it in lots of different places as well. I listened to it home and then I listened to on headphones when I was out for a walk. I live in a really beautiful place in the middle of nowhere. I can walk out my front door and I'm in nature. So I listened to it walking around the hills and stuff. It was really beautiful. And I was trying to formulate some ideas of what to do whilst I was walking.

That’s fantastic. You picked up on some really great details! I like that your imagination went to something as specific as dewdrops on a spider web. How did you actually get started with your piece?

I was going to have to narrow it down because it was a bit of an explosion with lots of different directions I could’ve gone in. What I really wanted to do was get out of the felt box that I'm in. I wanted to go back to stuff I used to do a long time ago, but I was afraid of going on a wild goose chase. It was more my desire to do something different than what was springing to mind from the music, so I shelved that and decided to do a felt piece.

I took the spider’s web and dewdrops idea and imagined how a spider might make human music if it had to. I wanted the spider to build a harp out of things it would find around. Going on my walks, I was seeing all these lovely dried twigs with lichen all over them and lamb's wool in the barbed wire fences and all that. I gathered up stuff on my walk, brought it home, and then literally cobbled a harp together. Earlier in the week, I'd been to a Welsh museum in Aberystwyth where I saw these beautiful harps, and I looked up how they were made. I had quite grandiose ideas about what my harp was going to look like. [laughs] I was going to gild it with gold leaf. Then as I started making it, I reminded myself, “This is a spider making a harp out of things it finds,” so I just went really, really basic with it. Even so, I did study harps quite closely. I still knew that the bit that you play had to be at an angle so the spider could reach it. The strings aren’t arranged randomly; they are placed rather like actual harp strings.

I must admit that I really wasn’t happy with it until the end of the project. All the way through, I was thinking I’d really let myself down or I hadn’t got out of my comfort zone enough or pushed myself hard enough, until I had all the objects together at the end. It wasn’t until I started photographing it that I realized that the end piece isn’t the objects, it’s the photograph of the objects.

I'm not a photographer by any means, and I would love to have made it look like how it was looking in my mind, but I think I did the best I could with it. And I did get some help from a photographer friend of mine. He lives in London, which is nowhere near me, so we had to do a video call. My phone was pointed at the objects, and he was saying, “No, over a couple of centimeters, over a couple more…” So we cobbled it together. I’d told him what I wanted it to look like. One of the most important bits to me was that the shadow of the figurine be caught in the spider’s web. I found it really, really hard to achieve that photo, so I’m quite pleased that I pushed myself to make it more atmospheric.

I think it’s all very successful. Those shadows are so striking! How does this piece relate to the rest of your work?

Basically all of my work tends to have this theme running through it of a changeling or humans-as-beasts. I often use the faces of figurines, and it’s just luck that most of the figurines I use are dressed in mock regency clothing or whatever. I suppose my work is generally about humans running away from or dismissing their connection to nature. We’re a part of nature. We think we’re not, but we are.

When I heard the piece of music, it reminded me of nature documentaries, and it made me wonder if we’re programmed in some way – maybe it’s like semiotics – that certain sounds make us think of certain things. In nature documentaries, it’s very deliberate, isn’t it? Certain sounds have come to mean certain things, so it’s like a language. I suppose that's why I wanted the shadow of the person stuck in the spider's web. It’s stuck in the music, in the language, of nature, even though we try to be separate from it.

Wow, that’s a really interesting way to put that. I recently heard somebody say something similar. When you see a bug or something in your house, which was built in nature at some point, it makes you wonder who's actually in whose home.

I definitely feel that where I live. I’m surrounded by nature. My house is just plunked in the middle of all this beautiful stuff. There are spiders all over the house and I feel like I'm in their home rather than the other way around.

I like that so much of what’s going on in your piece is left to the viewer to read. Do you usually leave things so open to interpretation?

How I tend to work is that I'll have a germ of an idea or a feeling about something. If I really try to put that into words or intellectualize it too much too soon, the whole thing just runs away. It hides in my head and I can't find it. So I just tend to go with a feeling and start making stuff. It’s as I'm making something that it occurs to me what it is and what it means. That does sound back-to-front, almost like cheating, you know? But I like creating characters and objects that will tell a story. It doesn't even have to be my story. It can just be the story that people get from it when they look at it. It's as if I don't really want to tell the story myself, if there even is one. Sometimes there isn’t and it's just a bit of a macabre feeling that I want to portray, and other times there is more of a narrative there. But generally I don't really tell people what it's about.

I have a bad habit of over-explaining some big point I'm trying to make, rather than allowing people to draw their own conclusions. I’m trying to let go of that control and allow the process to guide me. I'm not great at that yet, but I'm getting better.

See, I'm not great at being very concrete in my ideas. They flit about all over the place. So it's quite hard for me to pin down exactly what something’s about because it changes all the time as I'm making it.

That sounds like you’re doing it right. For this piece, you found some materials in nature, things to make a harp out of. Where else do you find materials to work with it? It looks like you go through a lot of figurines.

I do! I've got absolutely tons. I go to things called car boot sales. I don’t think you have them in the States, but they’re like flea markets or a garage sale. Everyone drives their cars onto a giant field and gets rid of all their old crap. [laughs] They might put it out on a table or a blanket. Do you have those or anything similar?

Sort of. We have swap meets and things, but I think we mostly set up a tent rather than doing it out of the car.

It's bonkers! Just a big field full of people trying to sell all sorts of nonsense on funny trestle tables and stuff. I get a lot of my figurines from there. I’ve also got friends who look out for figurines for me all the time, so they'll send me funny photos from a charity shop or a thrift store and say, “Do you want these?” And generally I do. So they're basically all from either junk shops or charity shops or car boot sales.

How did you like working from a prompt? Did you find it to be more freeing or limiting?

I didn't like it at first because I was definitely expecting some visual art, and when it was music, I thought, “What?? Oh no, what have I done?” So I did have to twist my mind around that bit, and then I did actually enjoy it in the end. I do this all the time with anything I'm making, prompted or not. I start out and have a period where I'm really excited about it and get really involved in it; and then in the middle, I just hate it and think everything I've made is absolutely rubbish; and then by the end, hopefully, I've fallen back in love with it and I really like it. And luckily, that’s what’s happened this time. I really like what I've made.

I'm pretty fond of it myself.

Thanks!

Now that you are on this side of this process, what would your advice be to another new person getting started with Bait/Switch?

Let yourself have fun with it and don’t worry about whether it's really good work or not. I struggled with that. Because it's going in a magazine, I wanted it to be the best thing I've ever done, just a really good representation of my work. Somewhere in the middle, I had to let go of that idea. It's scary being experimental when you've got a practice that's so embedded, I suppose. So my advice would be to try and have fun and be as loose as possible about it.

Call Number: C94VA | C96VA.moHo

My name is Lizzie Needles (aka Lizzie Pearce). I am a textile artist and needlefelter working primarily with wool and repurposed ceramic figurines. I make surreal and whimsical anthropomorphic creatures inspired by the British countryside, fairytale illustrations and children’s television from my childhood in the 1970s. Originally from Bristol in the South West of England, I now live a rural existence in Powys Mid Wales.