The Most Cake// Art Party… meet the artists – Susie Hogarth

by Sticky Toffee Pudding

As the geekily installed timer to your right will tell you, here at TMC we are counting down the seconds to our next offering of heaped up, cake smeared, riotous good times. Yes that is (drum roll please)… The Most Cake// Art Party.  As the lovely Florentine has informed you all, this time a night of drunken revelry against a backdrop of feel good tunes is just not enough, this time we invite you to be dazzled, to be engaged, and to be captivated by sparkly things as we showcase a variety of London’s up and coming artist talent.  I’m literally bouncing off the walls in excitement (I may have bruised my elbows).

To whet your appetites we thought we’d give you a little sneak peak of the fabulous artists that will be featured in our exhibit. We’ve sent out the TMC busy bee to coax little interviews from their metaphorical bosoms and first up is the ever so sweet Susie Hogarth.  We hope you enjoy the appetisers, and save some space for the main show.

Susie is a freelance writer and illustrator, and author of 2007 book Hogarth’s Very Large Handbook of Celebrity. She contributes to independent and commercial magazines and once took a commission for an erotic publisher. She says of the experience – ‘I drew a lot of breasts and penises and tried to find a way to make them fresh; that was fun.’ She’s currently working on a book of illustrated stories.

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How’d you start out?

When I was a child there wasn’t a lot of spare cash around for proper dolls to project my fantasies onto, so I drew my own. A4 office paper and biros from my mum’s office provided a gateway to the elusive grown-up worlds I had spied in Littlewoods catalogues and late 1980s MaxMara adverts. I soon discovered that a long scribble of HB hair and an eraser provided just as good a hair styling experience as a Girl’s World; this hair, after all, could grow back.  Most evenings were spent belly down in front of the tv drawing girl after girl in outfit after outfit – predominantly in a combination of deep green and purple – with wistful looks, often carrying assorted foodstuffs or clutching academic looking books, and waiting for boyfriends who never seemed to materialise. I thought this meant I might become a fashion designer and a lesbian. I was wrong on both counts.

And how about now?

I often find myself in the same position now, belly on the carpet, drawing girls and calling it an actual job. I took a while to work out I was allowed to take it seriously, and I spent most of my English Literature degree and my abortive career in being various people’s assistants, doodling girls and ghosts and wishing I was somewhere else. So now I am. I’m less interested in the outfits, and more in the awkward frowns and discordant moods of the girls and women wearing them. I like pairing the magical and the everyday, the pleasant and the sad, and waiting for them all to find out how much they have in common.

What is art to you?

I think art is the stuff you think is hiding around corners, and lurking in attics and secreted under the floorboards, before you tear it all up and realise there’s nothing there. I suppose that’s just plain old childhood wonder, but childhood wonder has a perpetual hold on us for a reason. I suppose in a more theoretical way I mean I find art in the in-between, the ambiguous and the nonsensical. I have no time for literalism. Art, for me, is the fuzzy space between what language or science or images are straining to try to describe and what it actually, somewhere, might be.

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If you could meet any artist dead or alive who would it be?

He’s not a visual artist but I would love to have met Frank O’Hara. I bet he was fun.

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If you were a cake what would you be and why?

I think I’d probably be one of those little madeleines or sponge fingers you get in clammy packets from corner shops – because they are maybe a bit cheap and humble and poorly-formed but they are ultimately well-intentioned.

All pictures © Susie Hogarth.