Abigail Jones interviewed by Holly Márie Parnell

This interview appears in the ‘A Taste for Perfection’ book and was conducted through a series of WhatsApp messages and email exchanges in summer 2023. 

Holly Márie Parnell (HP): Let's start at the beginning - when and how did A Taste for Perfection come about?

Abigail Jones (AJ): A Taste For Perfection (ATFP) started in 2008, when I first encountered Charlotte Salomon’s ‘Leben? Oder Theater?’. I came across it in the library and was so moved by Charlotte’s valiant work. I started to sort of copy it - to create small, dated drawings, collages, and paintings initially as a private attempt to record and order my life in the flush of my early 20s.

In the following years, as the series kept growing bigger, I resisted considering it as part of my ‘formal’ artistic practice, concerned that it was too domestic, diminutive, and ordinary to occupy anything beyond a personal, if obsessive, indulgence. Sometime in the ‘10s, I said to someone that I would continue to make it forever. I can’t remember to whom I said this, but at the time it felt like a promise to myself, and one that I had to honour as a mark of fidelity.   

HP: Are they laboured over and pre-planned, or are they made in a stream of consciousness kind of way, without ‘over thinking’?

AJ: In the earlier years of the series, when I was more anxious about the outcome of each piece, planning and drafting pieces took much longer than it does now. Text often used to come first back then. I would scrawl out what I wanted to say or to remember in the back of a book, and then I’d make or fudge together an image about it a few days later. 

Over time, the process of making ATFPs has become less fixed. Nowadays, I often make backgrounds for pieces in small batches over an evening and then work into these later. As a result, some paintings over successive dates can share a distinct look. A recent example of this, for instance, would be 3 January, 16 January, 21 January, and 9 February 2023, where the base of all is monotype. Each is then worked-up later, when I’m ready to make a dated piece. 

Therefore, although the finishing of a piece can be very quick and spontaneous and responsive to the moment, there’s also a lot of structure / control that goes into it. I can spend a lot of time making backgrounds (so I’m not faced with a scary blank sheet when I want to make a piece). Splitting the work off up like this just makes me looser and I enjoy responding to the shapes, layers and textures in a background that was generated days or weeks ago. I feel like it takes me away from myself or removes me from myself somewhat.

HP: That’s interesting; this idea of being taken away from yourself or removed from yourself, which is essentially a devotion to not overthinking. That kind of mindset feels so connected to the way things operate online, where words, images, videos etc have this forward moving, fleeting transience. And there’s an unprecious nature about that type of output. 

In a way, your works - and the amount of them - echo this unpreciousness, taking on an almost ephemeral quality. Because of this, they start to become a body or find their weight in the passing of time. Time feels like a really important element to the work…

AJ: Time is fundamental to this work…it sort of feels like the only thing to this work sometimes! I couldn’t have anticipated how predominantly time would figure when I first started it – or even by its fourth, fifth, sixth year – simply because there hadn’t been enough of it yet.

A devotion to not overthinking is a good way to describe how I’ve ended up relating to this work and I think that you’re also right in seeing in it an association with the sheer momentum of being online. To me, ATFP can be very guileless and gets caught up in the moment and frequently ‘overshares’

I find it quite calming and comforting to make, make, make, and to not exercise much restraint. You might say that instinct has a defensiveness to it, even as it might look like confidence – sort of shrouding oneself through excess. 

HP: Oh, I love the idea of oversharing in relation to this - would you say that in making these, you are inspired by a position of voyeurism, and re-enactment? Are you preserving what you’re seeing from an outside perspective, or are they more interior and close, like dreams and memories?

AJ: That’s an astute observation and there is doubtless some re-enactment at play here. 

The act of painting and then writing about something that recently moved you in some way usually involves some degree of mulling, whereby you begin to reconfigure your relationship to what was happening at the time. It strikes me that when you’re at the stage of retelling the thing, it’s more likely that you will begin to position yourself as a character - an entity that you temporarily split off. This is not how we experience the world, though - not on moment-to-moment basis, so it’s quite an interesting, funny little shift.  

I think the specific motivations that underpin any given piece vary, though. I think that earlier on with ATFP, I was more concerned to represent my impressions in quite a straightforward way. In this sense, I was much more concerned with preserving what I was seeing from an outside perspective. That is to say, I wanted the viewer of a piece - or me, at a later date - to know that my emotional and political position on ‘this’ specific issue was situated precisely ‘here’. 

Over time, the instinct to explain to an audience (or to myself) has diminished, and I don’t feel as compelled to faithfully record events or to negotiate the terms of the story. I think that change is mostly an outcome of growing up a bit and feeling less anxious to define the terms of my relationships to people, events, concepts etc. 

HP: Unreliable diaries. Almost like the events or the stories themselves have lost their own meaning or need to be precise. It’s like a form of semantic satiation where the constant repetition of a word just turns into speech and then eventually turns into just sounds, losing all meaning. 

There’s something really funny and satisfying about the way your sentences, dates and images come together on the page, they seem to capture this eerie atmosphere of disorientation. And I think its because you approach them with such a presentness - a refusal to try and analyse or ‘make sense of’…

AJ: Yes, the very act of dating an image or a piece of writing often lends some expectation of significance to it - or at least demonstrates that the author believed such context may be necessary.

I feel like, when you date something, or log its site of origin, or moment of being made, you sort of anticipate its destruction. You’ve committed it to always having a past. It never gets to float around. It becomes so pinned down, so old-before-its-time, so utterly contextualised. 

There is a real earnestness in the impulse of ATFP though. At least, there definitely was in the first years of its being. I sense that I had quite a naïve impression that I could better make sense of things in my life and in the world by recording some impression of them. The frailty and absurdity of that need only swells as more and more pieces are added to the series over time. 

HP: This frailty reminds me of the first thing you said, not considering it part of your formal artistic practice, once seeing it as too ordinary…can you talk about this swell that has happened with time, and how the function of this series has changed for you?

AJ: I think that, as the series has grown, my relationship to it has changed quite a lot. After a few years of doing it, I had begun to post the pieces on social media, which really significantly altered my relationship to it. At times, I’ve often used it as an attempt to communicate with an audience or with specific individuals (straying boyfriends, lost loves, a friend I was too shy to express my high admiration for in-person, political groups on Twitter I liked…). 

It has sometimes functioned as a mute therapist, sometimes as a place to record something I never wanted to forget, often as an attempt to defy the passing of time. 

The series has, over time, had an array of psychological, social, or libidinal functions beyond the paintings themselves. Sometimes, I resent making these paintings because I feel like I must continue to do so. For whom am I making them then? 

HP: Do you have to be in a specific mood to make these? 

AJ: Again, I think that it varies - it feels like such a broad question to me, like asking someone what mood they’re in when they write a text!

I think in ATFP’s infancy, I would be quite deliberate and orderly about the process. I don’t think I was making them in a very spontaneous way. I used to get extremely stressed if I hadn’t made one for a long time and would set aside evenings to do them. It’s become a lot more fun, a lot more a part of me.

I feel like, from 2017 to late 2018, I would rarely make an ATFP without being quite significantly drunk. I was very depressed at this time, and I haven’t included a lot of the ATFPs from this period in this book.

When I look back at the pieces I’ve included here, I note that there can be flurries of activity in certain years. These productivity spikes may represent crisis moments wherein my ‘need’ for the support provided by ATFP was heightened. Or they may simply represent times when I was more euphoric and productive.

HP: You’ve described this book as “inviting and acknowledging the messy, fluid, shifting, fermenting experience/s of time.” What has made you want to contain them now, in this format. Is this closing a chapter, or starting a new one?

AJ: I think ‘containing’ them is a good way to describe it. 

Sometimes, I sell a piece, or give one to a friend, and so it feels like a sensible idea to capture them before more disappear and the archive becomes yet more depleted. I’m not particularly great at keeping art in a safe condition and I have ATFPs stored all over my flat. They’re usually in silly places, where they get crumpled or damp. A book of pieces from 2009 - 2016 was printed by Eros Press in 2016, but it contained substantially fewer pieces - and was a while back. 

I don’t anticipate that I will entirely stop making ATFPs any time soon, but I also sometimes feel like I don’t pay enough attention to making other art when I’m working on ATFPs. 

HP: Haha, I really like thinking of them as bothersome - a hindrance from paying attention to other art, or that physically take over your flat, occupying every corner and surface; these things that just have to get made. I think this adds to the visceral feel of the series, they feel very bodily and I think that is because they are made with a need to be made, something very honest and real about that, it makes you wonder what is the point of making anything that doesn’t occupy this kind of impulse, anything else feels false. 

I love the way the images and words interact; do you have a writing practice outside this? How do you approach writing in this series; which comes first, the words or the image? Are the words coming from your own imaginary, or do you integrate or appropriate things you see or overhear?

AJ: I’ve always loved writing. I write short stories and I usually keep a diary, so I feel quite relaxed about writing. When I say ‘feel relaxed’ about it, I mean that I don’t feel hesitant about it. I find it fun, almost like socialising with myself. 

Pursuing writing formally used to be something I chased quasi-seriously in my mid-/ late- twenties, when I submitted to journals, applied for residencies etc. I’ve sort of laid off those efforts as I’ve become more minded to maintain consistent employment and realised that I may not have the requisite temperament or flair!

I’m just thinking about your question, and mapping out how I make an ATFP and, nowadays (say, for the last five years), the image usually comes first. In fact, the background usually comes first, flaps around in my flat getting in the way for a few days or weeks, and then, as a phrase or conversation or news story starts to stick with me, I’ll jot down the text in my iPhone notes. Then, usually after work one evening with a beer. I’ll overlay more imagery and introduce the text. I seem to recall that, in earlier days of ATFP, I used to do the writing first.  

HP: The whole series has a lot of humour, which seems like the only way to approach the incomprehension of what we are ingesting/digesting on a daily basis. And they are obviously very steeped in sarcasm , which seems an understandable reaction to an atmosphere that is not precise or understood - more like a feeling, like we are all losing our minds…

AJ: Yes, there is a lot of sarcasm in it. I only really realised just how much when I was choosing, collating, and reviewing pieces for this book. I think that this is unconsciously a tone I frequently employ because I listen to a lot of political podcasts and news. I think that an attitude of sarcasm and cynicism pervades much of the news media, and that, if you’re a consistent listener or consumer of such, you’re likely to mimic this a little. I like what you say about that being a ‘reaction to an atmosphere’ – almost like a posture of eternal pessimism.

In a more straightforward way, because I’ve sometimes used ATFP as a way to have conversations with people I might not talk to IRL, I suspect that, I was sometimes just trying to appeal to these people and make them think I was funny and au fait with the zeitgeist…

HP: When you say they are used as a way to have conversations with people not IRL, are these people who you know are not listening and will never listen? The works do have this nice invitation, offering something into the ether that functions more like a post than a diary entry, with the hope that someone might listen, like a radio host speaking to a somewhat imaginary audience they can’t directly interact with. Who is your audience?

AJ: I’ve made lots of pieces about or for boyfriends, or friends, or exes. Or for people I admire or wish to keep in my heart in some way. Sometimes these people have been my intended audience, but often I have known that it is unlikely they will see the piece in question.

I loved communicating with strangers on message-boards when I was a teenager in the early 00s and, as a younger woman, felt very comfortable splitting myself off into different varieties of myself – more confident, brash iterations. The excitement and potential of engaging someone online (someone that you’ll likely never meet and may not even like or care to know), hit me very hard as a young person and I still enjoy the rush of it sometimes. 

In this sense, my audience doesn’t always really even have an identity, even as this audience sometimes provides the incentive and basis for my making a piece. Maybe this is why I mentioned earlier that I felt guilty if I hadn’t made one for a while…