Catching him just before his flight to Mexico, where his work is exhibiting at SALÓN ACME, we wind our way through the artistic nests of his fellow students toward his own.
Upon arrival, four concrete slabs and one embryonic-like miniature, all of which mimic the templates of cardboard boxes, hang from the walls like portraits. Their stature is significant. “I’m calling these paintings and when I first made them I put them on the floor and it wasn’t really doing what I wanted, so I put them on the wall and was just like ‘f***’ – there was something about putting it on the wall that to me was really unknown territory.”
Evidently, Lomax is taking on his possibility to create and explore such artistic territories, fully aware of the creative incubator he’s in. Thoughtful and bearded, the 28-year-old is in his second year at the RA Schools. The work that surrounds us, solidified in all its glory, is his offering for this year’s ‘Premiums’ – the show that marks the halfway point of a student’s time at the RA Schools, taking place tomorrow, Thursday 13th February.
See James’ work at the Premiums show in the Weston Studio and The McAulay Gallery, Royal Academy of Arts from tomorrow (13th February 2020).
For Lomax, this show is not a closed-off event for the artistic cognoscenti. The very nature of his work is conceived to be opening, accessible and – with the nod of his sombrero toward his imminent travels – a “breaking down of cultural and linguistical barriers”.
“I guess I’m interested in the work being accessible to everyone,” he explains, “so whether you come from the UK, or China, or whether you’ve got a knowledge of art history or this is the first time you’ve ever been to a gallery… I just like an open-read.”
“I mean, cardboard and concrete are two very political materials; by political I mean they’re in the world, they have reference, they have a history as a material, as an individual object. So therefore, for me, they’re much more relevant in the world. They stand as a visual language these two materials – there are very few places in the world where you wouldn’t find them both.”
“It’s also about seeing them alongside each other. It’s about the decontextualization of the object in front of us. By putting it on the wall it decontextualizes it: it shifts it from what we already know it as, which is a cardboard box. It’s already gone from one transformation a bit, being made out of concrete, but it’s also put through this other transformation of it put on the wall.”
“It presents itself like a painting, like a pictorial image on the wall. And that allows for a different reading as to what it would be if it was lying on the floor. It’s entering into a whole language of work that I’ve not really entered into before of large wall-based paintings really. I have found it important to push my comfort zone.”
Whilst far-fetched to suggest this simple trick pushes the viewer’s own comfort zone, these “portraits” nonetheless carry a similar weighted force to that of Anselm Kiefer’s work, which was recently exhibited at The White Cube. They have the simultaneous impact of both reeling you in – for you to want to touch them, wrap them up and pack them, like cardboard boxes – whilst also giving you a cold, concrete shoulder, bidding you keep your distance.
From here, as Lomax explains, “in a way, they’re immortalising and, in a way, I think memorialising as well. In this body of work, they each have individual titles but as a series it’s called ‘It All Unravels’.
“They’re a moment in time – very much about anchoring us in the now, in this time right here, right now. It also anchors your mind right back to that thing being that thing. They still allow you to remember that it was a cardboard box but I think it also allows you to break out of that.”
Lomax has been breaking out of his own artistry, growing year on year since Jim Allchin, a former Ruskin graduate, took a group of youngsters, including a young Lomax, to check out the prestigious Ruskin School of Art’s studios.
Tasked with making a sculpture “in around five minutes”, Lomax remembers jumping into a skip, retrieving “some massive blocks of polystyrene, smashing them with a steel frame and tipping a bucket of orange paint all over it” – a “terrible” finished product, he admits, but certainly a formative creative outburst, with “something really liberating about making something quickly and then moving on.”
Following this, Lomax heeded Allchin’s advice to “‘go and do an Art Foundation – to go in the studio and do what you enjoy, every day.’” And for good reason. Before being accepted into Ruskin himself, Lomax was shortlisted for Saatchi Gallery Young Artist Award in 2009 and then went on to become the youngest ever recipient of the Sky Academy Art Scholarship in 2014.
The latter, he explains, helped propel his artistic endeavours, which awarded him £30,000 that “really set him up for the long-term – it set me up with the studio and all my tools and equipment came out of that money. It also afforded me the much-valued mentorship from Godfrey Worsdale who has been incredibly generous with his time, knowledge and experience both during the prize and since”
“I’ll just admit, though” he candidly adds, “what I was going to say but didn’t want to sound too negative.” There’s an evident reediting and remoulding of his words here, as though the process of his work had now imbued him with a constant scratching of the surface – a hacking away to reveal a more honest showing. “It was really good but I think for me, winning prizes doesn’t give me validation.”
“I think my main validation comes from my own enjoyment of it, which is maybe a really self-serving thing but if I don’t love what I’m doing, then I don’t really care if people like it or not; even if someone really likes my work, if I’m not happy with it then I won’t do it. The validation comes from me.”
With this work for Premiums, Lomax is “working them all out – I don’t necessarily understand why things are happening. But things are happening by chance. I’m happy with them but I feel like I’m only scratching the surface.”
The same could equally be said of Lomax’s career as a whole. If he is free to make – to produce in the same wide-eyed, playful manner in which he poured orange paint over his steely, polystyrene mish-mash – then we will all reap the fruits of his artistic merit.
On the other hand, though, Lomax doesn’t deem joy to be a marker of success for his creative output. In fact, art has been his authentic place of comfort – a domain of authenticity and comfortability with oneself. “Art is what I do when I’m feeling really great, and it’s what I do when I’m feeling really s**t.”
“The studio doesn’t really care whether you’re feeling s**t or not, you can just crack on with things and just make stuff and create things – put them out in the world and you can either keep them for yourself or you can show other people. But it’s definitely like a therapy, it’s certainly very therapeutic. The studio’s always there.” May it forever be there, in this creative enclave tucked in the RA Schools, and beyond.
You can see James’ work at the Premiums show in the Weston Studio and The McAulay Gallery, Royal Academy of Arts from tomorrow.
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