Genieve Figgis

This interview is featured in Almine Rech Magazine #39

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SIMONE ROCHA: You’ve been good?

GENIEVE FIGGIS: All good. Once I’m working, I’m happy. That’s the only thing that makes me happy. I give out about everything else… but when I’m working, then nothing else matters. I’m sure you’re the same.

SR: Big time. It’s like a safe space.

GF: Yeah, it’s lovely.

SR: And are you in the studio every day?

GF: I am. Now and again I get out and sort of look around at the world. I went on a massive adventure the other night. I jumped on the LUAS and I went to the other side of Dublin just to see what it was like—what the people were like and what they were wearing, things like that. I saw this gang of young guys. They’re only 15, 16. And of course, they were all wearing tracksuits, but then they started combing their hair. And it reminded me of 1940s, ’50s Teddy Boys. They were so interested in combing their hair and grooming themselves in public. It was unusual. I’m sure you see some unusual stuff in London. I mean, that’s such a great city to live in.

SR: London is amazing, you can go anywhere and it can feel different, you know what I mean? And there’s a huge amount of different communities, religions, so it’s less segregated. Everyone’s kind of lumped together, especially where we are, because we’re kind of east and northeast. So everyone’s in a mix, which is kind of amazing. I’ve lived in this area for nearly 15 years. Very different from growing up in Dublin.

GF: Definitely. But I think Dublin’s more multicultural now. I really like it a lot. Growing up in the 70s here was horrific. I mean, you had the darkness, what was going on with the North and everything. But you had the power of the Catholic Church as well, which I think I really feel influenced your work. The whole Catholic thing going on and the costumes and I mean you really had to dress up to go to church. We were made to, we had no choice. Going to church was a big ceremony and very theatrical, you know?

SR: Yes, totally. And it’s interesting because obviously on Saturday was the Pope’s funeral and I had it on in the background, and my eldest daughter, who is nine, she was in the other room and she just called to me and she goes, “Mom, are you listening to music for your next show?” And I was like, “You’re not wrong.” I was like, “No, I’m watching the Pope’s funeral.” For me, growing up in Dublin, like you said, there was such a strong sense of Catholicism, but then I grew up not a Catholic. My parents brought me up non-denominational. And it was something that was so close but untouchable. So, I’ll never forget the feeling of not making my communion or not making my confirmation and the jealousy almost of not getting to go through that… I think that in one way it made me much more kind of obsessive and interested in it, because when it’s drilled into you, you fight against it. So it’s almost ironic that I really gravitate to this idea of procession and it’s funny because I grew up non-denominational, but my Irish granny from Offaly was a very strong practicing, traditional Irish Catholic. And she had a lot of iconography in her home and that’s where my mom thinks I also got really attracted to it. So there’s this idea of home and family, whereas I think if I went through the forcing of the way it was, I don’t know if I would feel the same about it. It’s almost ironic.

GF: It definitely influenced me as well, the art. That would have been my first introduction to art, I would have seen it in the church, it wouldn’t have been in a museum. My parents didn’t bring me to museums, you know what I mean? And then the costumes, the fashion, that was very much part of the ceremony, what the priests were wearing—

SR: —And you really see those colors in your work, like the purple, the red. The clothing that they would wear was so rich, and so visceral. And I always thought it was so interesting because it’s such a stark contrast to the actual churches, that are so cold and almost soulless, but then they get to hold all the vibrancy and essentially hold the power, you know?

GF: Yeah, definitely.

SR: What I noticed when I came, what I think about your work a lot is the procession, but also capturing the scene, you know what I mean? I really feel like you see… almost like a moment in time, but then obviously it’s twisted and manipulated. Do you feel under pressure to manipulate it and distort it or is that just part of your—

GF: I don’t think it comes… I don’t think I purposely do anything. It’s just who I am and the sense of humor, the stories when I was growing up—everything affects you, and affects your work. But I can see that in your work, that’s why I love it so much. Your shows are phenomenal and so theatrical. We went to drama school, myself and my sister, and putting on plays, all of that was part of our growing up. I had an aunt who was a seamstress and she was very, very inspiring. She made my communion dress. She had an old spooky house in Ranelagh, and then you’d go into her sitting room, and it was kind of creepy, she had all this sort of lace all over the place and they were creating, they were making. My dad was very creative as well, he was always making something, creating, the whole energy in the house of making and creating and putting on—I suppose when you’re going to put the dresses on, or the communion dresses, or whatever—it’s all about performance as well. So that was very much my growing up as well.

SR: No, that’s very serendipitous because I grew up in Ranelagh. Isn’t that funny?

GF: That’s crazy.

SR: It’s very funny, I grew up in a house that was the opposite to lace curtains, and carpet, and all of that. And I also think that’s why I’m really attracted to it. I’ve always been into the things that you can’t have. And I like capturing them, harnessing them, re-interpreting, and like you said, the sense of humor of looking at something that would feel old-fashioned or overtly feminine, but then harnessing it, and making it establish it as its own identity today, I think, is also part of the exciting bit about it actually. Today I’m picking all my fabrics for the next season. I’ve been picking them out for the last week or two. I’ll find vintage fabrics or archival. I also collect, I buy at auction these old scrapbooks that have 17th century bits of fabric and everything, and I’ll go through all them and then I’ll look, like it’d be really nice to interpret this, and then in the studio we will do little embroideries kind of echoing these references, or sometimes I like to do something more ironic, so I’ll photograph it, and then we’ll actually print it that way. So, we’re doing that today. It ends up being this kind of same, almost like a procession, slash, I think it’s procrastinating. I have to pull it all out, and then I’ll have to walk away and go do something completely different with someone else in the studio. And then I’ll go back and look at it again.

GF: Sounds wonderful. I’d love to be there spying and looking at all the fabrics. I love all that as well. I’m always on eBay, buying bits of rubbish. It arrives and then you’re like, “What did I want that for?” Complete rubbish or whatever, but it all comes together somehow, and they find their way into the work. I don’t know how.

SR: Totally. And I feel like for me, I love making these little clusters of things like, “Okay, This will be this together, this will be this story together.” And then reworking it.

GF: I saw a video the other night. You were just walking around the streets. You were collecting bows and I was like, that just sounds like something that I would do as well.

I’m always looking for anything and everything. I’m just so interested in people. I’m very much a people watcher, people are fascinating. But yet I’m a bit reclusive and kind of quiet. I love my own company and I love making, but I’m absolutely fascinated with people. I think they’re great, you know?

SR: And it’s just amazing to see something that’s got its own sense of self, whether that’s a person, or a place, or a thing. And then when you have your work, it has such a strong identity. My work has a very recognizable identity. Then I think it gives you license and gives you interests in all these other things because you know, even if it influences you, it’s still going to be—when you ingest it and put it into your work—it’s still going to feel like your work. And what are you working on at the moment?

GF: I’m editing. I’m sort of moving stuff around today. I was painting yesterday, but I’ve been moving around. And I have a lot of paintings. When I move them all around they look different. I put them in different rooms, just casually against the wall in different rooms on different colored walls. I’ve only been brave enough to paint my space about two years ago, and I moved into the studio in 2018, it had white walls for a long time. I’m sort of building up color around me and then just seeing how the work looks in the space. I mean it’ll look completely different when it goes to whatever show it’s going to.

SR: I always find that I get a lot out of seeing the work in unexpected places. Sometimes if I travel—I had to go to Korea a few weeks ago—and to see the work there, I was like, this feels totally different. And I think that’s also good for you.

GF: Oh definitely. It’s learning. I mean, you never stop learning. Never. It was phenomenal seeing my work in your show and seeing it in another context really helps me as well, thank you so much for doing that.

SR: Thank you. Oh my goodness, I was so excited, because the particular collection was very much about this idea of the performative, of what you have to show, and potentially the reality beneath. And it’s not always what is the glossy version of what we have to get out there and constantly perform. It was this kind of, almost smiling through the tears, almost through gritted teeth, you know? And I felt like that particular collection, I’d just come off also showing in Paris for Gaultier, who’s also very performance-driven. I suddenly felt like I was in this play, showing in Paris, design collection, and all of this. And I was slightly overwhelmed and overstimulated. I went to see this Pina Bausch play, and it just summed up everything I was trying to say through this idea of movement. And then I was thinking about this idea of identity of what you put out to how you actually feel, and I started looking at your paintings, then I started looking at Cindy Sherman photographs and just this projection of what we put out there. And that’s when I was like: I wonder would she be interested in bringing them to life in the show? And it was a dream come true. I loved that I could send you the research, some of the development I was doing, some of the inspiration, and then some of the paintings I thought resonated, and you could say some that you thought resonated, and I think it came together... amazingly. And for me, what I loved, the thing that I was so taken aback by, was how you’d set up all the rooms, how you could really see this kinship between the idea of setting up a room and then doing these scenes within them. And I just love that you lived with it. I thought that it was amazing that you were living with all these pieces. Like, they lived within the space, within how you could move through the spaces. So then I think we said we’d always keep in touch and we’ve always kind of chitchatted, and then I think I had started the collection. I’d pulled together some fittings and the way that I work is I fit with some old SR garments then I fit with some antique vintage-y garments. Then sometime I’ll run up new things and I’ll kind of start and I’ll do these fittings where I really just kind of throw them all on a girl. I don’t really work 2D. I work 3D, on a body. And then I think I put together a little document and sent it to you.

GF: Yeah. I mean, when I saw it at the show, I was like, oh my gosh, totally blown away. In real life.

SR: They really captured the essence of the show. We wanted the first look to be the Lady with a Bird. We did it cuz we were looking at this narrative of things being kind of performative, and this in-between dress rehearsal and performance and catching in between. So we wanted to send it out really early. I think it was the third look, and it just kind of set the scene for the show.

GF: I loved seeing it in contrast with all your beautiful, I can’t say costumes, but to me they’re just fabulous floaty garments and it was just lovely to see, thank you so much.

LOUISA MAHONEY (Moderator): So you both work in different mediums, but you have such a similar sensibility. Especially the way that you both treat history and specifically the history of women, on this razor’s edge between this sumptuous femininity and something kind of dark that comes along with that.

GF: I definitely think we have the same sort of sense of humor, don’t we? I mean, there’s something going on. The Irish sense of humor, and the darkness and everything is there. I’m really interested in women’s history. I don’t care where they came from, I just want to know everything about women in history. Because I was told in the 70s that I was just a woman. I would never do anything, I just had a womb. Men really had the looking down on women. And I just didn’t feel like that when I was a kid. I was like: what are you talking about? I felt like Superwoman, I didn’t identify with what they were putting me in this little box, I was like—I wanted to take on the world. But did you feel that way, Simone?

SR: What’s kind of ironic is that I was kind of tomboyish even though I’ve always been attracted to things that are super feminine or historically noted as feminine. For example, whether it’s pearls and it makes me think of my granny, but it also makes me think of the girls I went to school with who would wear rugby jerseys but with pearl earrings. That was the look. I just found it really interesting and it’s just as you were saying, as a voyeur, just like looking and thinking and wondering why and not falling into it but at the same time being interested in it, and that’s the same as we said about whether it’s religion, or whether it’s about historically how women should be. I still felt like I could always rub along with everybody, but I felt very comfortable in my own aesthetic and it was always this thing of borrowing from men. I used to wear men’s shoes and men’s brogues, but I always wore vintage petticoats but then I’d pull them up and wear them like dresses.The perverseness of feeling really comfortable in a tutu with men’s shoes. Then when I went to college and graduated, it was the same. My collections that started coming out were this kind of, when I came out of college, people were calling it “tomboy femininity,” because it was these very feminine fabrications and silhouettes, but very grounded in this more boyish tomboy sensibility or feeling. And it was amazing, because at the time it really went against the grain of what was in fashion. It ended up that a lot of people, a lot of girls did feel like that. It was great to be able to put it out there.

GF: Yeah, that women can wear anything. It’s really funny the way you describe how you dressed as a teenager, because I also used to borrow my dad’s clothes, like the waist coats. I wore bubble Doc Martens laced up and I wore a very, very big swingy skirt that was very long, it was ankle length, but it was swingy and with the bubble toe docks, my dad’s tie, my dad’s shirt, my dad’s leather belts, and he never said a thing. But my mother’s clothes were off limits, I wasn’t allowed to go into her wardrobe. So there’s the forbidden- there’s the allure of the forbidden

SR: Exactly. But I think it’s a real credit. People say to me all the time: “was it great, were there were so many enhances to growing up in a family that also do what I do now?” The absolute biggest gift about it was that it was so normal to be yourself. That really was the biggest gift, to not be criticized for having individualism or anything like that. And then to bring that into my work and be able to harness femininity and give it strength. There’s something like if you go back to historical dress like the way the women dressed. For example, they didn’t have the opportunity to have an opinion, so the way that they would dress in these huge crinolines, for me I see that as how they would take up space in a room, without being able to say anything. How they could take up space, if you can’t vocalize it…

GF: I know the tops you’re talking about, big huge blouses with the big shoulders that came out. They look like legs of lamb or something. Is that what they were called?

SR: It’s called a leg of mutton sleeve, exactly! Or these huge big skirts that people would have to step out of the way. So you can’t give your opinion, but you can still get people to get out of your way, I’ve always been really interested in this idea. Someone said to me, that before I was doing what I was doing, the way to be a strong woman was to wear a suit. You know what I mean? That meant that you were a strong woman. I’ve always wanted to show that no, you can be a strong woman, but you can still wear a huge ball gown, doesn’t matter. It’s how it makes you feel, like an armor or a security blanket, or a uniform.

GF: Definitely. Taking control of your clothing, that’s a phenomenal way of surviving in the world.

LM: And I think there’s a throughline here, what you were saying, Simone about taking up space with your clothes when you can’t take their space in any other way. And I think Genieve, in some of your paintings that are based on these Rococo models, do you feel like there’s a bit of that as well—taking these models from a time where, in a Fragonard painting for example, the women didn’t have as much agency.

GF: The Rococo, I think my attraction to those, is they’re kind of similar to the paintings I would have seen in church, the hovering cherubs, the angels, the clouds, the heavenly aspirations, all of that. But also with the Rococo, you have the nudie ladies. I always give them their own personality. They’re not just for looking at, they have their own identity and they kind of glare back at you.

SR: And they’re almost teasing, I love this idea of teasing and flirting. Like you said, something might be frozen in time and it resonates in one way, but you don’t know the personality beneath, and it could be teasing or flirting or provocative and I think, you get that in the work, but you get to discover it yourself, which I love.

LM: This collaboration, and your work in general, how would that fit into a modern or contemporary Irish art scene within fashion, within art, within its overlapping worlds?

SR: I feel like for me, I’ve always been very proud to be Irish. I always felt really fortunate to grow up in Ireland, and to be on a small island, I really feel like an islander actually. And also, I grew up Irish, half Chinese. My dad’s from Hong Kong, which is also an island. So I’ve felt the thing about being home, is it has influenced my work, but in one way. I never really think how I’m a part of it today.

GF: I mean, I’m Irish as well, but I’m very very proud to be Irish, but also my mom was adopted, so there’s the unknown there as well, which is very very fascinating. I use my imagination to fill in those gaps. So, that’s why I love really old photography and I’m obsessed with history, and interiors, and antiques, and old fabrics. It’s the only way I can get to sort of fill in the gaps of the unknown, you know? I never really fit in, as I say, I always felt an unusual kind of person. So yeah, I don’t really think about how I fit in ever. I just do my own thing.

SR: I think it’s working for us. And then it’s ironic. I think we went to the same college as well.

GF: Oh, NCAD? I absolutely loved going to NCAD, it was great. It sort of gave you the permission and the space to be who you are.

SR: Exactly, it gave you license to create something that emotionally makes you feel something, and then to be able to create it into something physical that other people, in my case get to wear, or in other cases get to look at, and it resonates with them and gives them emotion—what a privilege.

GF: It’s really great speaking to you. I mean, we clearly do have a lot in common, and your show was phenomenal, and I’m just so grateful for you including me in your show. Thank you so much.

LM: Are there any other future collaborations?

SR: Anytime!

GF: Of course. Come and visit soon. I want to show you some of my new teddy bear collection and things like that.