Margaux Portron
Biography
Margaux Portron is a French artist living and working in London. She writes graphic novels and short stories, and works as Digital Learning Producer at the National Gallery in London. Before that she worked for Art Night, London’s largest contemporary art festival, as Outreach and Participation Manager, and for Artraker, a not-for-profit organisation supporting artists living and/or working in conflict zones. In 2017 she obtained a European Doctorate in Political Philosophy at the University of Paris 8. Her thesis researched drone warfare and its impact on contemporary republics. As part of her research she held fellowships at UC Berkeley (2016), Queen Mary, University of London (2015), and Auckland University (2014).
Statement
I write and draw comics. After studying fine arts for my A-levels, I stopped drawing nearly entirely. I spent these years collecting photos, stories, maps and documents. When I became a mother I decided to tell these stories I had been entrusted with.
Using sepia and kraft paper, brown and white pencil, white and turquoise gouache, I try to recreate the feel of vintage photographs, found letters and archival documents, whether I am writing fiction or non-fiction. I am particularly interested in the domesticity of motherhood and marriage, and that’s why hands feature heavily in my drawings: sewing, podding peas, fighting in a boxing game, smoking or gesturing while singing. Drawings take more space than writing, with a big play on negative space. As a film lover, my compositions are very often cinematic, with play on scale, close-ups, or a page that takes you on a drive through a city, almost shot-by-shot. The most freeing process in the last few years has been to ditch ‘real life’ colours in favour of a play on tone and layers. Historical paintings, and my own take on fairy tales, are very present too.
I will often start by roughly drafting the dialogue, and then prepare the background with white gouache or tape: it could be a silhouette roughly laid out in paint, or an entire panel which is key to the narrative on this page. White backgrounds and negative spaces serve to highlight the important protagonist or, on the other hand, who or what is missing: a family member or a building that is gone. I then, if necessary, draw a more detailed background, in pencil. Sometimes, I will go over the background again with gouache or an acrylic pen, to make space for a silhouette. I’ll then draw the character. The layers, dilution of the gouache, thickness of the coloured pencil all serve my narrative. So does the negative space, by creating either heaviness or openness. I add or withdraw elements between which I make links: the hands of my grandmother on a photo, a painting of the Virgin Mary at the museum where I work, a vintage map of the Mediterranean and how the road resembles the veins on the fingers.
Coloured pencils are very forgiving: I used to like the watercolour variety, but they tend to be too soft, and I like them sharp and light-touch. I enjoy using children’s materials because they have vivid colours, are cheap and so robust I’ve owned some of my chunky pencils for 25 years. Because of my limited colour palette, I can play around with a range of materials without it looking disharmonious.
I think of my comics as a repository of stories confided in me by the women in my family, taxi drivers, or neighbours for example. Since becoming a parent I have developed an urge to tell these stories, prompted by both the need to model doing what one loves (in my case, making comics) and a fear of hereditary dementia in my family. This is why the recurring themes are memory/ies – with its inevitable flaws – Herstory, migration, legitimacy, loss and grief, gender, music, with visual art as a thread. I hope people can relate to these themes and perhaps, along the way, laugh a little, and cry a little.
In March 2022 I successfully completed a Kickstarter campaign to self-publish my first book, “Podding Peas”. It will be printed in Autumn 2022.
Podding Peas is a graphic memoir telling the true story of my grandmothers, their sisters, their mothers, and of the women of my family in general. It is about finding the extraordinary resilience and humour in what could have been very ordinary lives.
Spanning over a century, and across several continents, it mixes the drawn reproduction of family photographs and of archival documents such as maps and letters with fairy tales The Princess and the Pea, Alice in Wonderland and art history.
“Mamie and Tatie” shows the hands and feet of my grandmother and her sister, and “Christmas Eve”, my great-grandmother mending clothes on a stormy night in Casablanca. “Umm Kulthum” is the embroidered portrait of an Egyptian singer who was adored in her country and abroad. She was one of the first world superstars. Beyond the fact that several generations of women in my family listen to her music, she holds a particular importance in my story and my process. At my grandmother’s funeral, the Catholic priest played a recording of Umm Kulthum singing a surah from the Quran. Although suffering from dementia, my Mamie still knew dialectical Arabic until the end, and would help the priest with the Moroccan migrants he worked with. But the particularity of Umm Kulthum’s singing was that, beyond the fact she had a singing range of six octaves, she made great use of ‘negative space’. She would sing around the note she wanted the audience to hear, without singing the note itself. The artwork would exist in the silences. “Resting” shows the weight of the head on a hand without showing the head itself. “Podding Peas” shows hands working, and I had to ask another woman in my family to model the hands instead of my grandmother, recreating the artificial linearity between them that exists only through me and my partner.
“Oran to Casablanca” mirrors the hands of my great-great-grandmother, Maribel, doing needlework, with the North African coast, showing the trip my family took from Oran, Algeria – where they settled after leaving Andalucia – to Casablanca, Morocco, where my mother was born.
Interview
1/How do you make creative work whilst also actively mothering ?
In the evenings. I’d love to say I make work during naptime, but usually I need one too. I use the ‘Notes to Self’ feature in my texting app to text myself the ideas that come when I’m with H, who’s 2 years old. I cannot trust my tired and attention deficit disordered brain to remember text or dialogues. But I can remember the images I want to create, and there’s a great joy in feeling it simmer and come to life in your imagination and then finally being able to put it down on the page. I’ve made more work since becoming a mum than in my entire life before, because there’s a sense of making every minute count in and out of the studio.
2/What boundaries or challenges have you faced or overcome while working as an artist/mother ?
I can really get stuck in the drawing and writing process of my comics and it is excruciating to be interrupted. I won’t eat, sleep or go to the toilet if I’ve cracked a way to tell a particular story, but my son does need to!
3/How has the Artist/Mother community helped you to reflect upon your practice ?
It has provided me a place to exist fully, as a creative parent, with all the constraints it contains, with all its conflicting feelings. How pregnancy, childbirth and breastfeeding can impact your body as well as your creativity, navigating the guilt of wanting an escape from repetition, feeling legitimate about wanting to devote time to a practice that does not bring a lot of income to a household, and the gendered implication of that, too. It has made me feel legitimate, period.
4/How are you disrupting the idea of the “good mother” or idealised mother in your arts ?
Podding Peas is about the stories told to me by women in my family, mostly on my mother’s side. They were Spanish people who became French in Algeria, and then moved to Morocco. They were also Catholic, and there was a lingering ‘Spanish patio mentality’, as I call it, referring to those open courtyard enclosed within the four walls of the house, which you also find in traditional Moroccan riads.
Issues were not discussed outside of the family nor the home, but rarely inside. Conversations about abuse were stifled, and there was some kind of mythology associated with family members, which I suppose the move to France in the 1960s also helped. I am trying to challenge this narrative, because I believe the most interesting characters are whole, three-dimensional, and that you have to take down a few idols in order to tell the truth. Those women were brave, but they were also flawed, and flattening their stories, their personalities, is dishonouring them.
Equally, I am convinced sadness can coexist with humour, I am never scared of making jokes about my lived experience and my trauma.
5/How has art making helped you to become more resilient and maintain your wellbeing ?
It helped find my sense of self again. When I was away from office work, keeping my newborn alive in the midst of a global pandemic, I went back to what I loved doing most as a child. I had been told that being an artist – not an art teacher, an artist – is not a career. I had been told that drawing is not a valid art form – I left high school when video installations and performances were all the rage. I searched for who I was before all that nonsense, and I nurtured that child as I did my tiny baby.
6/What do you feel you carry as a mother?
The responsibility to tell my child the stories I was told, and the duty to show him his mother does something she loves, every day, that he does not carry the burden of making me happy, of fulfilling me.
7/How does drawing or process driven methodologies inform your practice?
Drawings make up the most of my comics. Because I speak two languages I don’t want to have to translate too much – though I also work as a translator, I find it too hard when it is my own words, I second guess myself. It has made me a better comic artist, because it means I need to convey an awful lot of meaning, only adding a few words.
