Hazel Soper in her studio, photo courtesy of Hazel Soper.
Damaris Athene: Could you start off by giving an introduction to yourself and your background?
Hazel Soper: Yeah, I'm originally from Norfolk and I currently live in Newcastle. I work with installation and videos, and some sculpture and print.
DA: So you work with lots of different media, how does that come about?
HS: Usually, I'm research based in my practice. I read and research a topic and then make a video to start to explore that and learn as I go. It’s helps me to decide my areas of interest and my opinions on the topic. Then I take bits of these video elements and make them in real life, blurring the boundaries between offline and online and making it more interactive.
DA: What are some of the things that you've researched in your recent projects?
HS: I've done a lot about witches recently and the witch hunt, which I'm loving. I'm obsessed with Sylvia Federici's 'Caliban and the Witch'. It's about the dawn of capitalism and how capitalism and the patriarchy worked through the witch hunts to oppress women and how that's carried on to now. It's about how women had knowledge of plants and things and the witches in the village could do abortions for people and give contraception. Then with capitalism, they needed a bigger workforce so they were demonised. Men could control childbirth again and the workforce could keep reproducing.
DA: Grim isn't it?
HS: It's horrible. There are so many parallels, especially with what's going on at the moment, with control over women's bodies and the fact that in America and Poland there's still so much contention around abortion. How is that still an issue?
DA: It's so shocking isn't it? It's 2021 and yet still there are many places where you can't get an abortion. It was only recently legalised in Ireland which is just crazy.
HS: In Northern Ireland I saw today that the the British government wants to push through some laws quicker, but the DUP are fighting against it. It’s just crazy that people can't see that as inequality.
DA: Yeah!
HS: Oppressing women and people are saying that feminism doesn't need to exist anymore.
‘She’s So Annoying And So Irrelevant’ 2017, Video, Audio, Screen Printed Paper
Photo courtesy of Hazel Soper
DA: It’s crazy! Has it all your research been centred around feminism?
HS: Yeah, it's always feminist issues, I think just because I am a woman. It's best for me to talk about things that I do know and understand rather than appropriating anything else. There are a lot of influences of Marxism in there too, and concepts of alienation. With the materials I use, and with trying to bring out elements from the videos, I'm trying to create more engagement with the work. I feel like we are very alienated from the process of making products, because everything is made globally far away from us that we can just buy, and we have no idea how anything's made. With the sculptural elements of my work I try and address that.
DA: There's so much miscomprehension about how things are made, especially electronics. People used to know how to fix their toaster or whatever and now we have no idea how to fix our iPhones, which were with 24/7. Could you speak a bit more about the different materials you use? Maybe you could use one of your previous installations as an example?
HS: I like printmaking a lot, especially screen printing because it's mass produced, but also each copy is unique having slight different flaws. The whole history of printmaking and literacy is really interesting and how it has been democratising. A piece I made a while ago, ‘She's So Annoying and So Irrelevant’, was about online abuse. I made about 500 meters of prints on paper to accessorise a video that I made. It was really fun because there was just so much of it. It worked to cover up the space and be impactful.
DA: What was the image that was printed that many times?
HS: It was all quotes from people online, really horrendous stuff.
DA: What kind of reaction did you have from visitors to the exhibition?
HS: People hated it. I made my friend cry because it was so awful.
DA: Yeah, so in their face. It's very easy to ignore it normally - you don't follow those people on social media and you're in your nice little bubble where everyone's nice to each other and you don't need to think about all the nasty things. Until, yeah, you then plaster a whole room with it!
HS: There was a real absence of people saying this stuff about white men. No-one is saying anything horrible on the internet, about that group of people. Yet all these other groups of people? There was so much.
Close-up of ‘She’s So Annoying And So Irrelevant’ 2017, Video, Audio, Screen Printed Paper
Photo courtesy of Hazel Soper
DA: It must have been pretty horrendous for you having to research into it and collate all of that information?
HS: I got a bit desensitised, which is horrible. It did open my eyes a lot. I think it's so silly, because people were feeling the need to have so much vitriol and express so much anger, but to no one in particular. It would be comments on articles about a woman celebrity or something. She's never gonna see that. Why are you sitting there feeling the need to spend your time doing that?
DA: Yeah! How is that making you feel good? I wonder why someone would want to do that? They're just lashing out anonymously into the void.
HS: I did start collecting everyone's names from the public Facebook comments. I was going to do a piece with that, where I made a plaque of the quote with the actual name.
DA: A whole wormhole you can go into! How did you come out of that project? Normally does one thing lead to another or do you have a completely new idea for next thing?
HS: I find something interesting from that research, and then pick back up on that. I moved on to a project that was about our personal relationships with our phone, and the intimacy we have with that object. I’ve been wanting to make work about the climate crisis for a while, but I didn't quite see how I could make it fit. Through doing projects angled towards it, it’s naturally evolved in that direction, through looking at how our phones are made, where the components come from.
DA: In your statement you mention ecofeminism. Could speak a bit more about that, and define the term?
HS: It’s a theory that the environment and women are intrinsically linked through oppression from the patriarchy, and how the issues that affect one affect the other. For example, one of the biggest factors of damage to the climate is birth rate and population size, but there's proven links between if females in a population have better education, the birth rate goes down, because they've basically got more opportunity. If women were emancipated it would mitigate the effects of climate change more.
‘Altar for the Commons’ 2020, Vegetable Dyed Fabrics
Photo courtesy of Hazel Soper
DA: So interesting, in mainstream media that link is never made. I hadn't thought about it in such a holistic way before. If women are more equal it's better for everyone, including the planet!
HS: Yeah!
DA: What's the project that you're working on at the moment that's exploring these things?
HS: I'm making a video and experimenting with some soft sculptures. I’m using women as a metaphor for how we treat the planet and the notions of how we extract elements from the earth. Going back to what you were saying about how we don't know how iPhones are made, and the fact that there are all these mines where people are treated terribly, trying to extract the elements needed for the iPhones. We don't even know that. I don't think we associate technology with being natural and coming from the earth. So going back to this abuse really, that both the planet and women suffer. And how we are used by the patriarchy and by capitalism for resources and are not respected.
DA: Definitely and I think that's borne out even more in the pandemic. Already the weight of emotional and domestic labor was very much on women and it's significantly increased. Maybe we've gone backwards and will have to claw it back. Has the pandemic affected how you usually work?
HS: Obviously I understand that people have been having a terrible time and there's been lots of loss going on. But for my practice it's been a good opportunity. I've had more time in one place and more head space. When you're trying to have a job and make art stuff can be a bit discontinued and disruptive. Also my partner and I have recently started a curatorial project called Slop that we never would have done before. We've been putting on projects in lockdown. It was born out of the difficulties that come with being an artist and not getting paid for anything, and having maybe to pay for opportunities that you're applying to give your work to. We're trying to create opportunities to address that.
DA: That sounds great! Going back to your work, when people are actually able to see it in person again, what do you hope people will get from it?
HS: I hope people think it's fun. Although maybe not fun, because some of the stuff I do is a little bit more harrowing.
‘Altar for the Commons’ 2020, Resin, Plants, Electrical Components
Photo courtesy of Hazel Soper
DA: That's rather oxymoronic, a little bit harrowing!
HS: *laughs* I want people to have a response. I think art is quite inaccessible in general and some people feel like they're not allowed to have an opinion on it in case they get it wrong or they look silly. I want to force people into having a reaction, so they don't feel like they can't.
DA: Yeah, everything you feel is valid. You don't need to know all of art history to have a response to it. What’s the most interesting reaction you've had to your work?
HS: I got the most response to ‘She’s So Annoying and So Irrelevant’. Some of it was quite funny. Someone just walked in the room and shouted fuck really loudly and then like turned around. People were very uncomfortable and didn't really want to be in the space, which was my intention. My partner's dad came to see it and was a bit upset afterwards and I thought…not that I wanted him to be upset, but I liked that it was emotional. That you can create emotion through objects and paper effectively in a room.
DA: Maybe that was the first time he was confronted with it in a physical way. Especially if you're of the age that doesn't go on social media you don't really know about the vitriol that's there. It must have been a pretty intense experience for him. Amazing you could facilitate that…Which artists do you take inspiration from?
HS: My favourite artist is Laure Prouvost. I'm obsessed with her. Her work is so impactful and all encompassing, but I also really like her voice in it. She often talks to the audience, and I really like the sensitivity and personal quality of it. As a women it's impressed upon us that to be successful or powerful you should emulate a man and that being sensitive or emotional are bad. That you can't be authoritative but also feminine.
DA: Is there anyone else who you look to?
HS: I love Rachel Maclean. She does a lot of work about social media with video and installation. She plays the characters in her films which are created by abstracting elements from social media. In one piece that was like a big brother futuristic work camp she was playing Siri and Alexa.
DA: It sounds incredible and very multi layered.
‘Men-an-Tol’ 2020, Soft Sculpture, Performance
Photo courtesy of Hazel Soper
HS: It's so interesting. I’ve read articles on how Siri and Alexa having a woman's voice is teaching the passivity of women and using them as a tool.
DA: Yeah and the way that people speak to Siri or Alexa, especially kids, and how they can be really rude. How does that translates to how you treat real women? Why do they have women's voices? Why do they even have identities when they’re machines? It evidently sells!
HS: That's bizarre. I've never actually questioned that before. We don't name our laptops.
DA: So true! You mentioned your project with the soft sculptures, but is there anything else upcoming or that you’re working on?
HS: I’m trying to embed environmental concerns in my practice with the actual materials I'm using. I'm trying to only use recycled stuff or natural materials. Also, I was going to visit the RSPB for a residency, which obviously has not happened in the last year. I'm planning on doing some workshops with women working there.
DA: The bird charity?
HS: Yeah, they’ve broadened out what they do to be about the ecosystem, which will then keep the birds alive. They do a lot of things with policy, lobbying the government to change farming practice laws and things like that. I want to talk to women working there to find out about their relationship with the environment and what their perspectives on ecofeminism are. It's going to be online for now so I can get started, but I'm hoping that I can have a visit. It's actually an old quarry. So with the soft sculptures I’m thinking about recreating stone and about the extraction of resources from the land. I think it would be really interesting to spend some time there.
DA: That'd be amazing. Let's hope it's not too long! Well, thank you so much Hazel.
HS: Thank you.
DA: You’re very welcome!
