Re-stor(y)ing the Self

In this two-part chapter, Dr Hester Westley argues that the life story method offers one of the most inclusive methodologies available for archiving the living reality of artist practitioners. Artist Professor Rebecca Fortnum goes on to considers her own experience of interviewing for publication, as well as her experience as a subject of an Artists’ Lives.

In addition to her ongoing life story recording with Fortnum, Westley draws on a range of recordings held in the Artists’ Lives’ archive, part of National Life Stories, an oral history fieldwork charity based in the British Library. The Artists’ Lives interview considers a range of informing biographical factors—from socioeconomic status to race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality. By providing an artist interviewee the opportunity to put together the story of their life, in effect to contextualise their identity, the interviewee directs her own narrative and ‘restories’ her life and career.

The Artists’ Lives interview captures the artists’ thought processes as they themselves unravel the processes of their practice. Through gently probing discussion, new and perhaps previously unidentified connections emerge; as the audience, we listen to something fire in real time—a therapeutic interview of narrative reimagination. As a form, the life story moves fluidly across delineated boundaries; because of the nature of the medium, it speaks to an emergent generation of artists who have a heightened critical (self) consciousness about how to navigate the complexities of contemporary life. By contrast Fortnum explores the process she has developed to construct the printed text interview, exploring the ways she has worked with women artists to articulate and illuminate their own practices. She also reflects on being the subject of interviews and the particular wide-reaching effect of the life interview on the artist.