Phoebe Collings James

Phoebe Collings-James is a force to be reckoned with. Not only a model who regularly appears in the likes of Vogue, i-D and Love Magazine, the Goldsmiths graduate is also a visual artist whose work is woven with family, sexuality, race, revolution, language, strength and shame. She describes it as “intentionally sprawling and messy”; it feels open, and defiant. 

Now that she’s back in her home city after a stint in New York, we were lucky enough to sit down with Phoebe to ask her about her inspirations, her courage and her identity. 

Hi, Phoebe Collings-James! So, how about you tell us a little bit about yourself and your work? Well, I’m an artist. I grew up in London: born in Hackney, and mainly grew up in Forest Gate. I guess I grew up in a place that was, in some ways, weirdly rural for London; it’s just where London begins to end and Essex is about to start. So there’s a rural aspect to it, with lots of fields and forests nearby that I spent a lot of time in as a kid – even just walking to and from school across Wanstead Flats and just generally being in nature a lot, or going on bike rides with my whole family. That extended back into the house, with mud pies and generally playing outside. This was contrasted with the area. For all the love in the area, there was also a lot of poverty, and I guess [it was] quite a harsh environment at the same time. Especially by the time I went to secondary school, it wasn’t necessarily a safe place for young people. So there’s always been this exposure to the city being very hard and very soft all the time, and nature being anywhere you could get it really. I think that had a big influence on me, both through what’s important to me in terms of where I’m from, and also what’s important to me in terms of where I see art, because I didn’t grow up seeing art in a gallery. The way I understand art didn’t start when I went to university. So I guess that it’s linking those two things with what we think of as art and what it is to be an artist, which I guess now I would think is to do with a hypersensitivity, and a desire to find a language to speak about the world and to have some sort of self-expression, and maybe to have some connectivity as well. I guess that’s probably why a lot of my first encounters with art were through music, through friends making music at school. Generally, that was my first access: TV, music and nature being all-inspiring and having all the elements of art already in it. And then I went to art school. And yeah, what else can I say?

That was good! When did you decide you wanted to be an artist? We had a dark room in our house when we were growing up, so I spent a lot of time in there. I guess there and the garden were the two places where this idea of transformation and magic happening through the developing process and chemicals and images arising out of these semi toxic chemicals [occurred]. From that moment, I understood there was a way to have an artistic life even though it wasn’t my dad’s primary job. So I guess I must have been thinking about it then, and that’s when I was really young. And then, when digital photography came around, my dad was quite claustrophobic so he was really excited by it, because he doesn’t like being in the dark room! We had a tiny house – my sister and me in one room, my parents in the other, then this other room as a dark room which doubled as the bathroom. I started using photoshop quite early on, and me and my dad would have photoshop wars. So I guess there was always a domestic and a playful element of having this young art life. 

I can imagine. How do you begin a new work? Does it vary every time, or is there a kind of method to it? No, the ideas are just around all the time, and they often happen at inopportune moments, when I don’t have a pen or I’m trying to sleep or I’m out and about somewhere and suddenly dots will connect and something that’s maybe been floating around for a while will become a bit more solid. The difference between just having a studio or just being at art school and now is that I’m a lot busier with projects, so quite often I’ll just be thinking about things, and maybe working on ideas or focusing, and then I’ll have a show where there will be a few more parameters. So maybe it’s a residency or maybe it’s a show, and things grow towards that. Which isn’t necessarily the way of working that’s always the most serving towards the work, but it’s practically how it happens these days.

And how important is the space you work in for that creative process? Obviously you’ve worked in a lot of different place, and lived in New York until recently, but now you’re back in your hometown… Yeah, I always think about what’s in between. And ideas don’t happen in a vacuum, so if I’m walking down a street then it does matter what street it is and how it develops and where I am, what materials are available, who I next speak to. I even think a lot about my identity. So many of my thoughts have come back round to thinking that there is no one place. Even with these nationalist identities… is it related to my ethnicity, my race, my sexuality, my gender, or is it related to the places that my parents have been in, or is it the different islands I’ve been to? And then you realise that it is always these things. 

We’re made up of our lived experience, kind of thing? Yeah, and singularity - which is something that some people might feel - is definitely not something that I feel. I think, zooming in, maybe there’s Jamaica and London, then Manhattan and Brooklyn. But then there’s also “which streets are there?” and “which buildings were they?” I think, particularly moving back to Leyton, which is round about the area I grew up in, walking past certain buildings means memory becomes important, because it distorts so much. So when you’re thinking about the future, and you haven’t even got the past right – because none of them have been fixed things – then where the things are made becomes really important. 

How does that affect your work? Do you see different things when you look back at it, or see something new? And is that impacted by what you hear other people say they see in your work too? Yeah definitely, especially people who are close to me who have seen my work change from

when I was in college to now. So being able to see things that repeat themselves, or things I might not have seen at the time. That’s why it’s so tricky with writing, whether it’s press releases or interviews or any kind of text that you put out into the world about the work. I’m always quite careful about that, because at the point at which I’m giving it away I kind of want to know what other people think and what their first instincts are. I also think that, when thinking and talking about how to democratize art spaces, one of the biggest problems for people in all kinds of art spaces and institutions is different people feeling like they have access and agency in those spaces, and that’s often about confidence, and people’s confidence that what they think about the work is just what it is, to a certain extent. And even theory and dense texts about a work are just what someone thought about a work in relation to their position in history, and what they know about the past and how to change it. I don’t know how strategically or actively you can encourage that. 

Art has the power to change the way we live, and to change and enrich our lives, and hold a space for changing conditions of our lives.” 

How do you feel about traditional artistic institutions? You mentioned the democratization of art… I guess I am a little bored because it often feels very one-dimensional. I don’t know if that’s necessarily about changing what happens in those buildings, or doing it somewhere else, but I don’t know where all the somewhere elses could be. But then I guess that relates to conversations about institutions in general, and should we try to reclaim them or should we just smash them down, and I guess the answer is probably yeah, we should probably smash it all down and start anew. But do we all agree on that, is that what everyone wants? Are we going to do that. or will we just keep umm-ing and ahh-ing until nature does its course?

I think we still draw quite arbitrary distinctions in this country between high and low culture, and maybe one strength of social media is that more people feel that they can engage with things. As someone who’s very active on Instagram, is that something you think about? Instagram’s weird for me really. In terms of being prevalent, I don’t know who those people are. I don’t know if they’re bots mostly, I don’t know if they’re people who probably follow because of doing fashion work, which has an inordinate amount more people engaged on Instagram compared to art. I dunno, I think someone in an equal position in art compared to fashion… some of the people I know who are legends might only have like 500 followers, or something considered small compared to a fashion designer, because I think it just creates so much more noise and activity. So I don’t really know how to engage with it or what to do with it or who’s there. But are you asking if it’s good if it exists?

I guess kind of that, but also your Instagram looks quite carefully curated, which makes sense because you’re an artist. But I wondered whether that’s a conscious process of you trying to show your work in that way, or whether it’s just that it makes sense for you to have Instagram for your modeling? It’s not how I would do it...if I could make something that I thought was purely artistically interesting, it wouldn’t look like that. So at the moment it just feels like it’s a news page for me now. And in the past, when I was first on there, I think it would probably have been way more messy and personal, but now I just try to somehow have some enjoyment with it. It feels very like work-y and bizarre, and how to create this least cringe best reflection of what I’m up to… I don’t think I even know anyone anymore - maybe one artist - who tries to use it for something actually more interesting, for the way that it flows. I guess I’m waiting for what the next thing is, because I do think these things are exciting and it’s undoubtedly so good to meet them. I guess it feels like, maybe not quite a Tinder profile, but some kind of dating app. Like how do express really briefly, quite productively, who I am, so that I can meet up with people. Because actually I have friends who I keep in touch with on there who are in different places or aren’t as able to move around. There are lots of ways in which I actually appreciate it, and as much as I might have to massively limit my time on it because it’s a black hole, I do appreciate the deep need it fills. But I’m also excited for what’s next.

For someone who is very interested in power structures, what are modeling and the art world like? They, from the outside, seem to be two quite strict hierarchies, with different people having different amounts of power, but not necessarily the ones who are doing the creating…Yeah with some difficulty, really. When I was a lot younger, I saw it as a means to an end, so I did it as a teenager purely because I was scouted a few times. I was working in a hairdressers when I was 14. and I wanted to make my money and my parents weren’t able to give that to me. So modeling was a good opportunity. I don’t know what would have happened if I’d suddenly become the next supermodel or something at some point, I guess I’d have just gone along with it, but the nature of the industry then was so explicitly racist and narrow at the time – which was over 15 years ago – that I started reversing a bit. Then when I started it again when I was about 25 or so, I didn’t think the things I thought were my values could match up to it, but it seemed like this opportunity that I’d be stupid to pass up. I guess I don’t feel happy about the way either of them work as industries. I feel uncomfortable, I feel angry, but I find a way – like with everything else – to live within them in a way that compromises me the least, and in which as much as I can enjoy it right now. Especially on the modelling side, everything was a struggle and I was being really hard on myself. I also just felt so uncomfortable in so many situations, and now I try to manage those situations effectively. And doing art as a career is really good, but it’s always the process and weighing out the options. But yeah it’s not perfect. 

In terms of another power dynamic, once you’ve created a piece and it’s in an exhibition and you know people will start reviewing it, are there things you hope people will pick up on in the work? I don’t want to be reductive and say there’s a message, but are there things you are hoping most people might see? Just that they will get many things, and not just ask what is it about, which is the worst! Or I guess just to think that they might have thought deeply or felt something deeply about the different reasons, or different things, or reflect on how that made them feel, really. 

Do you think art ever can or should have a didactic purpose or direct impact? Yeah, I think it should. I think that it has the power to change the way we live, and to change and enrich our lives, and hold a space for the changing conditions of our lives. But I don’t think it acts in that way directly, and that can also be allowing space for creativity, for play, for pleasure, and some sort of radical thing. I don’t think it’s going to solve problems directly, but it can ask questions, create space and change the way we think, which could then maybe change the way we live. 

Words Emma Irving

Photography Emma Williams