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Get to Know Margot Bowman

You’ve been in New York for a few months?

 

Just had my three month anniversary.

 

How did you celebrate?

 

I actually got on my roof. I have a really fucking great soundtrack, in Crown Heights.

 

And you’re living alone?

 

Yeah, spending lots of time naked. It’s great, never been able to before.

 

Do you work naked?

 

No, but I might in August. I think the weather just makes everything more visceral and sensual. And this is such a hedonistic, “right now” city. The heat activates that.

 

What’s your go-to food order in the neighborhood?

 

Glady’s jerk shrimp. They bring you coconut ice cream at the end of the meal, the best.

 

What brought on the move?

 

I love my city and I am a Londoner, but I got to a place where I just wanted to grow more, have more experiences.

 

In terms of art or generally needing to explore on a personal level?

 

I think it’s all the same thing, T.B.H. What I do is make work in my context, as an individual with my community. I felt like I needed to push my work, push what I was saying, and get uncomfortable again.

 

Your work is super political in so many ways, so was it a difficult decision leaving the U.K. right now?

 

Yeah, it’s weird. Especially the last few months it’s been heartbreaking and shocking to watch. But I come at culture-making from a very emotional perspective, and what’s going on is all the same stuff. So it’s a response to what is happening on a global level. All my work is just about people. Connecting.

 

It’s a good metaphor for understanding your work— ‘Connection’. Given that you focus on media and multi-media. Whether it’s in the most arcane practices or the most digitized, technology is an inescapable topic for any current artist.

 

You have to engage. Number one rule for making culture. [Multi-media] is powerful is because it helps you understand and be engaged your present. We need that right now with everything that is happening. I am drawn to collage and bringing things together in unusual ways, and using technology. Reclaiming those spaces as human spaces. There is this mono-experience in so many of the visual digital interactions that we have daily, which are so unrepresentative of the diversity in richness of human experience.

 

Especially in art. It’s great to be able to come to terms with art in person, but the multi-media medium really allows a wider audience to experience it. Which is the ultimate political move.

 

I’m not mad hung up about not being in a ‘defined’ category. At the moment, it’s not relevant. If I am in a space creating work I believe in, telling the stories that people can access, I don’t need to be doing it in solely an art or commercial space. There can be a wider cultural audience, a bigger and more visceral conversation. I just want to create what people can understand. More explicit story-telling.

 

Fuck it, look at the President’s twitter.

 

Exactly, and in tandem with that, there is still space for beauty. Whatever happens, we all still have a heart beat, we still sweat, we still orgrasm, and the powerful thing about art is it speaks to those things that won’t go anywhere. Evoking that shared humanity is so important, because that’s what we can hold onto through all of this. That last wonder.

Still Not Over You - Klyne

  • Art Margot Bowman
  • Production Prettybird
  • Executive Producer Juliette Larthe
  • Producer Thomas Manaton
  • Talent Leah Abbot & Jonathan Small

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