Jeb Takes the Biscuit: a new exhibition at Project 78

HOT’s Judy Parkinson took a biscuit and a cup of tea with artist Jeb Haward ahead of his show at Project 78, over which they talked about art, truth, freedom and chaos.

“My aim in this show is to expose the drama in the making of work. Nothing is ever finished – one work suggests the next possibility,” says Haward. “My job as an artist is to discard the shackles of established conformity and convention.”

The work in this exhibition explores the unpredictable characteristics of materials and the attempt to find an authentic image. This tussle of forces creates a bewildering, exhilarating and maddening drama that is fully exposed in the making process. The images are direct and necessarily crude in order to demonstrate conviction.

Haward tells me: “You never hear a four-year-old say they can’t draw, while they revel in spontaneous self-expression, but it’s a notion that creeps up on us while self-consciousness sets in.” When he teaches Foundation Diploma students, many of whom are experiencing peak self-consciousness, he takes them through the process of quenching that awkward sense of self and helps them unlearn everything they were taught since they were toddlers and create their own rules.

“It is not important for work to be good or bad, rather it is the process of making something and making your own decisions about its importance.”

Haward’s daily studio practice begins with dressing the part in his painter’s outfit, starting out with the pretext of tidying up, placing some paper down, making and considering marks, rubbing out those marks, turning the paper over, perhaps cutting a fragment from a canvas that catches his eye, turning it around, having a play, acknowledging the absurdity, revelling in the chaos.

“I put the materials and myself under stress, ripping the canvas pouring paint and walking on it. Is it interesting? Is it new?” He lives by his maxim, “Don’t copy, not even from yourself from the day before. It’s a personal challenge, constantly questioning what I am trying to say, cornering myself. I don’t do it to be happy.”

He applies paint and charcoal with a sense of urgency as a means of avoiding the intervention of stultifying aesthetic concerns. This approach allows for the enigma of painting to be exposed, and a constantly revisited period of utter mystification persists. “It’s both a feeling most of us would want to avoid, and ironically it is the very fuel for the creative journey.”

Haward’s subject matter refers to domesticity: pots, cakes, flowers and vases which might be considered banal, but celebrates the non-hierarchical content as well as the rejection of artifice. Torn edges and patches pasted over redundant forms expose the making process and reveal crude improvisation. Everything involved in the image and its making must go on trial and earn the right to exist.

This includes the maker, the materials and the subject matter. Without this trial the event would not be credible or stand up in court. The analogy could be extended into telling the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth; in other words taking the honest biscuit.

Jeb Takes The Biscuit Exhibition of work by Jeb Haward at Project 78 Gallery, 78 Norman Road, St Leonards-on-Sea TN38 0EJ. 11 February-4 March, Wednesday-Saturday, 11am-5pm. Tel 01424 272 348.

See also the gallery’s website, Instagram page and Facebook page, and Jeb Haward’s Instagram page.

Also in: Arts News