Faye Wei Wei: I was born in South London in 1984. I grew up in London and always, I wanted to do art. I went to art school at the Slade school of fine art and I graduated four years ago. Since then I've just been painting and I've done lots of shows on the road. My studio is still based in South London.

READYMADE: For this issue we are focusing on the role of artists as storytellers - how you communicate the narrative that's going on in your own life, what's happening in your world, or what your influences are. Can you speak to that, or even how that has changed given the current political and social climate?

FW: I think things changed a lot. Before lockdown, I was living in Berlin and I had a studio there for years, and I was making work that was similar to what I'm making now. I do think (being in Berlin gave me) a sort of different lens. In Berlin, I had a lot of time to see friends, go out. You can drink wine until the candles are out, until five in the morning every night. And it was these kinds of things that, you know, you do that, and then the next day you force yourself to go to the studio.
I had treated my studio more like a little bubble that I could escape to. Whereas during quarantine, my studio was the only place that I could be. So it was less of an escape. It was more like a means to survive in a way, to not go crazy.

Before what was a little bit more about learning, about flowers, about an ideal space, became about these symbols, a thousand things with them. They feel a little bit more enclosed. They feel a little bit more abstract or surreal. These flowers are falling from the sky. There's no real branches holding them down to anything, they become extremely personified.

I have always sort of felt this way about the flowers and my work as being very figurative. They have a kind of emotional depth to me. So, I think during lockdown the symbols and things were consistent, but I guess I thought a lot more about creating images that came from from my mind, photographs of friends, memories. As they were the only references I had.

I felt extremely frustrated being alone and away from everyone. Drawing was a real release and something that just felt really simple and needed. I feel really connected with the materials that I use to draw away. All my material is a little stubs of oil pastels, or little crumbs of chalk. And they’re all jumbled into this flute box that I have, that’s black and it's lined with black velvet. Which, of course, used to hold the shape of a silver flute and now holds my drawing and material - it’s quite beautiful. I use that box as a source of inspiration.

RM: Do you feel like the lockdown freed you or opened you up to a new type of work?

FW: Yeah. But I also think everyone just felt like they had loads of time. I just felt like time was there. Every time I looked at my clock, it was 4:00 PM. I think I felt kind of liberated in that, there was less pressure to make stuff. A lot of shows and things were postponed so I just felt like, well maybe this is a good thing, I have some time. I have always wanted to have time to just explore not just be churning out things for shows constantly. I really feel like I'm on a journey. Im not anywhere near what I want to be making yet, but I feel that it's so interesting to me personally. I just keep rediscovering all these new things that I can do, how the materials behave. But I'm back into painting less than drawing now. So I guess things just come in cycles.