In the studio with….Nerissa Cargill Thompson

18 August 2021

Nerissa Cargill Thompson is a designer, maker, and facilitator with over 25 years experience of professional and community practice. She was originally trained in Theatre Design but through her community arts practice,  her interest in fibre art grew alongside a desire to develop personal artwork. She returned to college and graduated from Manchester School of Art with an MA in Textile Practice in 2018. She is a member of Prism Contemporary Textiles Collective, ArtCan, Society for Embroidered Work, Precious Collective, and is a graduate member of Design Nation.

Her work investigates change over time, not just eroding or decaying, but new layers of growth, giving juxtapositions of structure and colour. Recent work highlights the issue of plastic pollution and the permanence of disposables through sculptures that combine embellished textiles and cement cast in plastic waste, inviting us to consider the packaging that we use and discard daily. Objects that are so lightweight and seemingly so insignificant that we barely notice them, are cast in cement to make them heavy and solid, to convey the weight of the issue and the permanence of these disposables. Naturally inspired textures emphasise the way our waste becomes subsumed into the natural world around us.

Nerissa creates coastal inspired textures using a combination of embellishing and embroidery; blending a variety of recycled fabrics to create subtle variations in tone. These are stitched inside waste plastic to cast true to life pieces with cement giving a distinct contrast between the manmade structure of the packaging and the soft natural textures of the textiles. She makes work with old clothes and scrap materials for both economic and environmental sustainability.

As an artist how do you keep up with what is happening in the art world?

Not sure I do keep up and not sure it is even possible as it is so vast and ever changing. The term ‘art world’ always feels very establishment to me; what the ‘right people’ are currently championing, and I never felt part of this. Years of being told I wasn’t a ‘proper artist’ as I’ve come from a background of performance design and community arts and even when I returned to college to develop my personal practice, I opted for Textile Practice; another art form frequently dismissed as just craft. I have never been to a major art fair and rarely get to the big shows in London. However, being based in Manchester, I have access to a vibrant arts scene across the North. As well as the cultural powerhouses and festivals showing both national and international work, there are frequent smaller exhibitions, often artist led, in a variety of spaces. Being a member of Castlefield Gallery Associates and Neo Artists helps me keep up with what other artists are up to. Being part of Prism Contemporary Textiles collective and Design Nation, keeps me in touch with what’s happening in textile art and the special borderlands where craft meets art. I find Instagram particularly useful for getting a wider, international overview and a great place for finding and connecting with interesting artists.

What is your favourite work of art?

The one that’s had the biggest impact in recent years is probably Alice Kettle’s Thread Bearing Witness. I visited several times when it was at The Whitworth: alone, with family and with fellow Prism members. It is a large textile artwork made up of three vast panels making it an immersive experience. The combination of technical skills, colour and composition are very impressive, but it is the integrated community engagement and storytelling that make it such a powerful piece and I loved the added dimension of it being displayed so that you could see the reverse.

What is your favourite art book?

The art book that I have kept going back to since my college days (first time round) and that I recommend to others has no pictures but the ability to evoke thousands. Chroma by Derek Jarman is a meditation on the colour spectrum. In some ways more of a self-help book than an artistic tome, you can dip in and out when you need a boost, reading a chapter or even just a paragraph. It is crammed full of snippets of fact and history but also poetry and emotional connections to colour.

What are you currently working on and what inspired you to make this work?

When lockdown hit, I was working on a new series of work called No Man is an Island combining textile maps and landscapes in domestic plastic packaging as the embossed lines and grids remind me of those on maps. The title and work are about our responsibility as even uninhabited islands are polluted by plastic and some islands are disappearing, suffering from the knock-on effect of climate change and rising sea levels. I was in the middle of my largest piece to date, a full world map over 27 panels for the 2020 Prism Contemporary textiles exhibition at the Art Pavilion at Mile End. Unable to go to the sculpture studio, I ended up having to cast it in my back garden, nearly losing Alaska over the fence from a gust of wind. Unsurprisingly the exhibition was cancelled but went online so I was glad I had persevered and was able to still share the work. The piece went on to be shortlisted for the Fine Art Textile Award, another exhibition forced online. I am really happy that it was shown at the Festival of Quilts in Birmingham and that it will be at the postponed Prism exhibition later this year. Having then been on hold over lockdown, I intend to continue to develop this series using maps, both real and imaginary, looking at responsibility and climate change.

As my work often responds to the litter found in my community, I observed a change in this on my government mandated lockdown health walks. I noticed fewer plastic bottles and take-away cartons and started to find disposable gloves. This connected with my worry over plastic pollution but also the notion of story. The empty discarded gloves suggested human presence no longer there. Some looked as though they were still inhabited with a hand, others had fallen to form gestures suggesting a feeling or reaction to the pandemic and then there were combinations as though they were communicating at a time when touch and communication were so restricted or combined with other litter to suggest a situation. So, I started a collection of photographs as a way of documenting the pandemic. After the initial heatwave of lockdown, the rain came, and I was seeing gloves washed along the gutters and caught in the drains reinforcing for me the notions of loss and waste. Loss of lives, particularly being PPE, of key workers. I thought back to the embossed patterns of the food trays I used for the No Man is an Island series. They reminded me of drains, grids, and cages so I started to cast my manipulated fabric gloves in these. Entombed in the cement, it reinforced the permanence of loss and the long-lasting effect of this pandemic. As time went on, my collection of photos increased, death tolls rose and my collection of panels grew, forming Glove Story: Memorial. It also felt right to respond to the death of George Floyd and the Black Lives Matter protests as part of this series.

For only a short time in Greater Manchester, lockdown lifted, and I was able to spend some time in the reopened studios in Bolton casting my three-dimensional gloves. Once done, I played with placing them on their own and in combinations both on plain backgrounds and outside like the gloves I’d found. I named them Glove Story: Three Stooges after the way key workers have been treated. As the pandemic continued, the amount of discarded gloves decreased only to be replaced by disposable masks, either twisted sculptural forms on the ground or suspended from their elastic loops off trees or fences. Media reports of the environmental impact started coming in with headlines declaring “More Masks than Jellyfish” in our oceans and a new piece in my COVID collection was born although once again it had to wait for another break in the lockdown restrictions to be cast.

It was important to me to both respond to the crisis through my art but also to continue with the Beached and No Man is an Island series of works as it felt like people and governments had been starting to take steps for change to help the climate crisis, but the pandemic has caused a massive leap backwards towards single use plastics. I am looking forward to getting back to casting again. As I cast actual litter, the size of each cast is determined by this, so to create larger works, it becomes about multiples which also reinforces the build-up of plastic waste. I have been working on the textiles for new pieces over lockdown that I am eager to cast.

Another lockdown diversion was that of creating miniatures after a challenge from the curator of The Doll’s House Art Gallery to create mini versions of my work. I created some for their group show finding appropriate confectionary packaging to cast in. I am currently putting together a full solo show in my own doll house as part of a commission for the New Mills Arts Festival whose theme this year is ‘Home’. I am enjoying the challenge of trying to work how to replicate certain existing works and I will be casting a mini version of new work, Mountains of Madness alongside the full-size version.

What would you like a collector to look at and know about your work?

When I describe my work, I often get puzzled ‘and that’s art?’ faces. I am sometimes referred to as ‘concrete litter girl’, and who wants someone else’s waste? However, I urge people to take a wander around these projects on my website or my Instagram, and I hope they will agree that there is beauty in both the embossed patterns captured by the cement and in the naturally inspired textiles and the power of the juxtaposition of the two; a celebration of wabi-sabi and the poetry of decay. Each piece is unique as even when I cast multiples in a series, each is cast within the plastic waste rather than a mould.

At an exhibition pre-lockdown, someone compared my bottles that were on show to biblical samplers; beautiful to have around but a moral reminder of our sins. I thought this perfectly captured what I am trying to do with my work. Basically, I intend to continue to make aesthetic work that makes people consider their choices and responsibility for our environment.

www.nerissact.co.uk