Bleach Scene : Interview with Gravesend bleach artist Elle Tennyson
Gravesend artist Elle Tennyson on bleach, salt and koi carp safety blankets
Experimentation takes bravery, but to make a career out of it takes skill – and that is exactly what Gravesend artist Elle Tennyson has managed to do. Having become a full-time artist 18 months ago, she has taken a concept that started at school through the worlds of fashion and television graphics and into her own unique art form.
A graduate from Ravensbourne College with a first-class degree in art and design, Elle is now based in the Art Is For All studios at St George’s Art Centre and collaborates with other creatives in the Household Essentials collective. Her work specialises in ink and bleach to delve into the surreal intricacies of world mythology – pieces that get better the more she takes away from them. We caught up with Elle to find out more.
Elle Tennyson
Tell us about how you create your pieces.
First, you have to use a special ink. Using bleach kills the colour and sometimes it’ll give you those subtle tones of light and dark.
Putting them together creates a very moody effect instantly, almost without me having to do much, and I think that lends to my style.
I studied that at school and I’ve just kind of kept experimenting. It can look a lot like watercolours, but I think inks have a much more vibrant colour to them and I guess they mix differently. Sometimes I use salt, which gives a lot of texture in the work, but that salt also draws things out and creates really fun patterns.
What tools do you use to get the highlight effects?
I just use a paintbrush and home bleach – literally, just what you use for your toilets or in the kitchen. It’s handy because it’s always there, so if I ran out of mine I could just go up to the loo. I’ve always got an endless supply of bleach, which is good and it’s cheap.
Koi carp are recurring in many of your works – is that your signature design?
I think when I was starting out, and not very confident, koi carp is what I’d keep doing – repeating it. So, now every time I have a new ink, I’ll use my koi to kind of experiment with it.
Also, I love Japanese mythology and folklore – that’s a big theme running through my work. So the koi do always kind of appear. At the moment, I’m trying to move more towards combining mythologies to create my own narrative, work with different creatures and other elements. But, yeah, they definitely were my starting point and are something of a safety blanket.
Bleach always feels like an uncontrollable element, like when you spill some on clothes, it spreads so quickly.
Oh, it can be. Working with bleach is almost like collaborating with another artist. It’ll do its own thing. Sometimes I can’t really control it, which is kind of the great thing about it but also sometimes the frustrating thing.
Sometimes I use a thicker bleach so it doesn’t spread. So it’s always a bit of a mystery and experiment. But that’s kind of the fun thing about it.
Tell us about the Household Essentials collective.
It’s a group with Izzy Tennyson and Grace Chilton, so my sister and her friend. Izzy is a writer and playwright and we first collaborated on a play [The Great Ruckus] she’d written that she and Grace starred in that was going up to the Edinburgh Fringe, and she wanted illustrations to be projected on to the wall.
They would show characters or scenes or like there was a kind of a nightmarish sequence.
We split the work and did it together and it worked really well, so it continued.
INFO: www.tennysonstudio.co.uk
