An Interview with Paul Fryer
Aimee Resnick (she/her) - March 8, 2023
Paul Fryer is a renowned artist who lives and works in London, United Kingdom. Fryer has displayed more than 15 solo exhibitions and taken part in over 28 group shows. Perhaps best known for his edgier, darker, and more macabre pieces, Fryer’s work also encompasses highly technical technology based sculptures. His compulsions focus on religion, mimesis, light, and the ephemeral and mysterious. Fryer is a truly multidisciplinary artist whose artistic canon spans decades. This week, we sat down to discuss Catholicism, our own daily apocalypse, and the meaning of life.
NAR: Your work centers around religion in a rather macabre nature: are you a believer? How do you reconcile your practice with the idealized artistic forms of the traditional church canon?
Fryer: There’s a lot in that question. You know, "the church" isn’t really one thing anymore. There used to be the Patrician “Constantinian Roman Catholic Church,” but that was split by The Reformation . It's much more fragmented now, all Christianity. There have been many thousands of variations on that story.
I think self-knowledge is central to everything. The orthodox way of dealing with women priests, heretical ferment and general turbulence in the early church . They didn't want arguments all the time. They didn't want discussions about the nature of God or the nature of Christ. They wanted it all set in stone: they wanted people to obey because at its core the orthodox are not interested in theologies that can’t keep control of its congregation or clergy .
That’s why the Romans got involved. It has been said that The Roman Empire still exists today. We live in it.
I think that I’m probably a Gnostic. I believe that knowledge of self is the key to everything. That's why you exist as an individual: you can't get true, empirical knowledge from a book, or even in most cases another person. You have to experience yourself in your own life. Hopefully you will experience the knowledge of Christ Consciousness, or whatever you perceive that to be.
At its heart it’s kindness, but you have to remember there's a shadow-side to everybody. We have to understand our demons and get them to work for us. not cast them out. They’ll only come back if we don’t assimilate them.
NAR: Can you elaborate more on this “shadow-side” and from where it arises?
Fryer: I think it's necessary, like everything on Earth which is natural. Everything has a shadow, you know? It says in the Bible that God split the night and the day. You can’t have light without darkness. It's the same with human beings. The Male and Female principle. The Left and Right Brain.
Some people refuse to acknowledge that they have a shadow-side. And then, like a tray of mushrooms, it grows in the dark. It can become very, very, strong and propel us to do terrible things, like the terrible things that have happened in the churches with the abuse of children, or people who have abused their immense God Given power for financial gain.
It happens because people can't imagine that these leaders have a shadow side. They see them as Christ incarnate, and that gives them the freedom to do whatever they want. Terrible things have been done in the name of God. It's very important to acknowledge that most people are capable of horrifying acts. Atrocities aren’t committed by demons or devils. They are done by ordinary people.
In my view we have come to terms with our demons and make them work for us. We have to integrate them. They're part of us, whether we like it or not.
NAR: A common critique of your biblical work is that it’s almost too human: that your canon doesn’t separate the sacred from the profane. Do you feel any subjects are too divine to be portrayed as earthly?
Fryer: Is it? I never knew that. For me, the things I see as divine are often not human at all. Like light: just light coming from the sun or reflecting off the water. Pretty much all of it comes from the sun. Ultimately, all the light we see is sunlight, really.
But I think that light itself is truly a representation of the divine. And that's not human at all. And silence. Humans are rarely silent. Silence is something incredibly beautiful to me.
I made a silent tuning fork, which was 17 feet high and didn't make a sound.
Later I took the Holy Bible and redacted the entire book from beginning to end with blocks of ink, like the CIA does to documents. It's completely blank. You can't read anything. I was thinking listen, silence is where the truth hides. That's where the word of God is. You won't find it in a book. You might find it in silence.
NAR: You seem to have a near-obsession with light. From where does this stem, and how does it impact your artistic practice?
Fryer: Well there would be a lot of art missing if we didn’t have light. I got obsessed with certain technical aspects of light in artwork. Which can be time-consuming and often frustrating to address practically. But I did manage to make a star in a jar. in A small, domesticated particle accelerator that makes a little plasma ball in its center. It basically forces very tiny amounts of air together to create a tiny little star about the size of a golf ball. A plasma of about 10 million degrees centigrade. I just thought it was a miracle when I first saw it.
But it's sophistry, really. It's one of the ways we can spot the true hand of God. The divine does not need to be fed. It sustains itself.
In the Gnostic tradition God needs no sustenance.
But this machine must, of course, be constantly fed with electricity. That's why I called the first one we made Perpetual Study In Defeat.That said, the sun can't sustain itself forever either.
I made another work that allowed you to observe cosmic rays descending from space in real time. That was really hard to make, it took six years to build but it’s very beautiful. It is a window on the invisible working of the reality we inhabit. It allows one to see these invisible rays which travel through our bodies all the time without us noticing. These rays go through your body all the time. They are a form of light. We do not understand their origins.
Light is the most beautiful thing. Ultimately, it's all we see. Light at different frequencies. It is a miracle.
NAR: Light, above all, is ephemeral. The water of your series Glasstress only maintains such shape for a moment. What are your thoughts on the temporality of art? Does transience reduce or augment worth?
Fryer: I liked the idea of capturing a fleeting moment in glass.
When you’re lying in your bed looking out the window and you see rain running, your eye catches these beautiful shapes and forms. You'll see them drop, you'll see these droplets as they land, and it's something so extraordinary.
The irony is that glass itself is liquid. In a million years, those sculptures will be puddles on the floor. I haven't stopped time. I've just slowed it down. But it's very apropos that you say that. I had throat cancer two years ago, and I nearly died. My treatment lasted for nearly two years. I had 2 operations and 30 rounds of Radiotherapy. Cancer made me hyper-aware of the impermanence of everything, not just the form that water takes. I realized that everything can be utterly transformed in a second and we are no exception.
NAR: Why wax? How does the medium alter, or even intrude upon, your recreation of humanity?
Fryer: Well, Wax is a funny thing. It's another primal medium. Like glass, it’s a very old material. Wax was used by the ancient Egyptians. Tallow, by the Palaeolithic peoples maybe a hundred thousand years before them.
Wax makes light in the dark. Years ago, we didn't have electricity. We had oil or wax. That was it. Until very recently there was no other way of Lighting our homes.
In terms of my art-making: wax has a quality whereby it transmits light like human skin. If you paint it very lightly with oil paints, you can make quite translucent skin models. They look remarkably real because of light’s refraction through the wax. This brings the material to life. Light again, you see.
And you can model it relatively easily and you can cast it and mold it together. With a waxwork of Lilith (2012) her hair is put in one-by-one with a needle. So when you look at the hair, it looks real, because each one sprouts out its follicle. So it's really quite versatile for modeling people.
NAR: Your piece Lilith has been particularly hailed for its meticulous mimesis. Do you feel the creation of your highly-realistic pieces mirrors divine creation?
Fryer: Women make babies. You know, they make real life. Men can’t hold a candle to that, even a wax one. Funnily enough I doubt you would never hear questions about creation directed towards a female artist.
The model for Lilith was a girl called Bunny who's really attractive and I really liked her. But something switches when you're making art. When you start working with somebody that way, they become an object. You have to objectify them in order to copy them.
Each part of their body becomes just that: a part.You’re doing this bit, and then you're doing that bit. You dismantle them in your own mind. It removes the reality of them being human. That said, Lucian Freud had sex with most of his models. And Warhol famously said “well, if I don’t sleep with my help, who am I going to do it with?"
I don't think it elevates you, though you have to become a technician. Unless God is just a technician.
Maybe he is. It would make a lot of sense. I heard Slavoj Žižek the other day and he was saying that God lost interest at the subatomic level, that God was an engineer and he was making the world. And so he made the atom and then he thought: what if they look in there? So he made electrons etc. And then he thought, well, no one's gonna ever go any further than that. Surely that's high enough resolution for anybody.
And maybe that's why all logic breaks down beyond the quantum level. God lost interest.
Anyway, when you’re creating art, you become so involved. It's a great meditation. It takes you out of yourself. You become less concerned with all your normal worries. That's true of any manual work that requires concentration. It's good for you.
NAR: Tell me more. What makes repetitive labor a positive process?
Fryer:It’s soothing; in terms of anxiety and worry, it makes you feel a lot better because you're focused.
Even more, it's good to have a purpose. It's good to do something with your time. And if you have a result at the end, that's a bonus.
You can be too results-focused, though, when you're making something. It can go badly wrong. Sometimes you simply realize you've done something completely wrong and then you have to start again.
I've had some real disasters. So it's not always soothing, but the process is.
I think I might have ADHD. I always have about 10 things at once. I can't always focus on one thing. So maybe that's why I like it: I'm able to focus on one thing, at least for a while. It can help me to make sense of the world. It can be nice to be able to get into an obsessive state. I know some people get it with cooking. People have it with their homes. I think it's all the same. We need something to do to give our lives meaning.
NAR: You have said that “we are living in the heart of a continuous apocalypse.” How does this apocalypse manifest? Can we prevent its perpetuation?
Fryer: We're in a rolling apocalypse, aren't we? Every second people are dying and every second people are being born. There’s an apocalypse going on every minute of every day. And yet as individuals we're renewed all the time as well. Molecule by molecule.
So yeah, I do think we're in the middle of an apocalypse. We don't notice it. We're all heading towards the edge of it as well. We just gotta keep the show on the road, I guess!
Today, I saw a clip of Elon Musk saying that he thought the most pressing issue of humanity is our population. Our reproductive effectiveness is apparently declining, which I found amazing. I wonder if it’s true. That said, he does launch automobiles into space and think we can colonize Mars. I’m not sure I can take him that seriously.
NAR: You’ve also stated that “humans are beautiful and that life is worth living.” What brings you joy?
Fryer: It's funny because for years I had suffered from depression. It's a very hard thing to live. The only thing you can do is try to find something to give your life meaning. Life has no meaning on its own. It only has the meaning that you give it. And that is what the Gnostics say too. That is the meaning of Gnosis.
Joy. Well, I love my boat. I love reading. I love listening to music. I love making music. I love my friends and family and they love me.
I think the main thing is to realize how lucky we are to be alive. It's a massively unlikely equation, the balance of life on this Earth.
So if you're a bit fed up, remember that it's gonna be over very soon. If you're loving it, remember it's gonna be over very soon. So you might as well love it.
And it's beautiful. People are beautiful. Life is beautiful. I'll stand by that.
Please note: this interview has been edited for length and clarity.
