Christabel Stewart Now that you know that your source material photographs might become paintings, does it interfere with the way that you take photographs now?

Mike Silva No, not at all.

CS You don’t think “This is going to be a painting”?

MS I mean, it’s funny. I don’t think, “This is going to be a great painting, click.” It’s more: “Oh, that’s beautiful. Click.” When you shoot on film you forget about it as an image, and then about a month later, you’ll get it processed and think, “Let’s experiment and see if this works.” I did the big ones purposely for this space because when
I came down around Christmas time the departure lounge aesthetic was a bit alarming. I’m so used to smaller spaces, like the Approach Gallery – I love that space because you can encounter work intimately. This is quite an engulfing space. It’s an old cafeteria. There’s been decades of people just gazing out at the sea, drinking cups of tea. I do love this show. I’ve done all the work within [the past] five years. The painting of Jason and the CDs is from an image from the late 1990s, but it was done during lockdown. There’s a lot of lockdown work, and I was doing medical treatment during that time. When I was well enough in between chemo sessions I’d come to the studio, get on two buses, practice socially distanced travelling, go and paint for a few hours, and then take those two buses back. It was my only way of not fixating on the illness. When you’ve been diagnosed with a blood cancer, you’re just constantly Googling symptoms, looking for a link. I’m never free of that.

CS I think that mode of switching into something like painting is almost like doing daily therapy or mediation – it takes you out of yourself because so much gets directed into that moment.

MS That’s how painting should be, like an effortless chat about interests. I hate certain people from college days who were just obsessed with, “Who you are showing with?” Or “What’s your next move?” It’s not a fucking chess game. I was hanging the show and thinking about what’s happening now in Lebanon, seeing footage, thinking about what’s going on there.

CS It’s been utterly merciless. A year in and there’s just been so much blind-eyeing. This week Germany finally announced a temporary pause on arms sales to Israel. But it has taken a lot to nudge them.

MS The weird thing is the spectacle. When we were at Middlesex, we weren’t spectators. We were always wanting to be involved. We were always on the front line. We really wanted to engage, not only with the poll tax, but with racist murders, you know, with Altab Ali, Rolan Adams, Stephen Lawrence, all killed in racist hate crimes. We wanted to engage, not just spectate. So much of the current scenario is about seeing people losing eyes, or seeing people being blown to bits, with this accompanying sense of powerlessness. Making paintings about beautiful things can seem a bit perverse. But maybe beauty is – I mean, I’m not trying to justify my work – a form of resistance against what we see in these videos, and the doom-scrolling that we all tend to do. People have asked: “Do you want to engage with politics in an aesthetic way?” I think Picasso did it with Guernica. Richter, perhaps, did it with the October series. Even Warhol kind of did it with civil rights issues, indirectly, but I think he stumbled across something that became more political. Like Godard said: You can’t make a political film, but you can make a film political. It’s something I wrestle with all the time because activism for me came to a head during the tuition fee struggle in 2010 where I saw students being scooped into ambulances. One was in a coma. It was really upsetting. I’m very passionate about education being available to everyone because that’s what informed our education: it was a social education.

CS Coming back to the question of whether you’re looking for a more quiet or hidden drama – you could have taken pictures of protests and make your work all about that.

MS I took a reel of film to the big poll tax march, and I shot an entire film the moment the sit-down protest happened outside Downing Street, and I looked at images and it just felt voyeuristic. Police arresting people and a guy ripping down the Union Jack. I was focusing more on the event, as opposed to the drama of light coming through, which I feel is more evocative to a memory than it is to a moment of history. I mean, I love William Eggleston in comparison to Don McCullin. I find his war reportage a bit disturbing in the same way that Larry Clark’s Tulsa is a bit jarring. I prefer Eggleston, Peter Hujar. There’s a softer gaze as opposed to trying to find the nearest heroin addict in a squat.

CS I really respect the idea that you can find other places to insert your ideologies or your ideas. Your beliefs exist, but you’re not purely illustrative of them in art.

MS I remember going to Sri Lanka during the civil war in 1989 and my
dad and I were driving down this road, and we saw a bunch of people staring at something, and it was a burnt body. I could have got my camera out, because I got a travel scholarship from Hastings to go to Sri Lanka. I was 19 years old, and I think my mantra was, we must confront man’s inhumanity to man. And I did have an opportunity to just snap away, but you know, your perception of death and horror via Hollywood is zooming in as soaring orchestral background music crescendos, but it’s very banal and quite fucking horrible. People were staring at the charred remains of some student and my dad pressed accelerate and sped off. I’m glad I didn’t capture it because it’s not my struggle. If I lived there, it would be different, but I was a tourist, so I suppose I’ve deliberately always chosen subject matter that’s true to me, that’s not exploitative. .