In the small Fitzrovia Gallery, curated by none other than the “Fitzrovia Flâneur” himself, Clive Jennings, stands artist Joe Hesketh. She is alone, but would be just as easily identifiable in a line-up of thousands. From her platinum blonde hair, artfully teased into horns, to her primary coloured couture she resembles nothing less than a bird of paradise who has crash-landed in dreary old London, only to discover to her delight, that the birdbath has been filled with champagne. She has gallantly remained behind after the gawpers have left, to guide me around her latest show, Seduction and Sedition.
“It’s been brilliant. My show opening was packed out. This first picture is of Sylvia Plath. It’s about a poem she wrote called Face Lift. Sylvia is buried around the corner from my house, where I live on the cusp between Lancashire and Yorkshire.”
Hesketh is more than just a frequent visitor to Plath’s grave. “I actually had a word with her.” So what did Hesketh and the long-dead poet chat about? “I said: ‘Come on Sylvia, give us a hand’, because there’s that many poems
she’s written I needed to pick five that spoke to me for this exhibition. After our chat, I connected with her poems immediately.”
On the face of it, Hesketh’s approach to her subject might seem a little unusual, until you confront her giant canvasses for the first time. The blurring between what Hesketh sees in front on her and what she puts on her canvasses is the result of an artist who seems to exist happily on more than one plane at the same time. She has also been spending a lot of time recently chatting to the Pendle witches.
“I walked from where I live in Pendle, to the spot in Lancashire where the witches were hanged. I wanted to pick up vibes, information. I hoped it would influence my work. I was fortunate to receive an Arts Council grant for my walk and my work. A great gig and it worked. You can see the pictures behind you.”
Indeed they are among the most compelling pieces in the show. Visceral and bloody, they shriek from the walls of this quiet Fitzrovia gallery, echoing the screams of the women they portray. One painting is called Tits Up, and depicts a trial that took place in 1612.
“The judge, Roger Nowell , wanted to make a name for himself with King James I. As soon as men began colluding with each other, it all went tits up for the women on trial.”
In all, Hesketh painted five witches. Another painting, simply titled Drunk, portrays the women in a dungeon, which serves as a metaphor for organised religion.
The idea for Lady Lazarus, “My Marilyn’, came about after further conversations with Plath, and is inspired by Plath’s poem Nine Lives. “Plath imagined she would return after death, rise above everyone and become a famous figure. That’s why I chose to paint her as Marilyn [Monroe]. One of the most famous women in history.”
Although sizeable, it’s actually one of Hesketh’s smaller canvasses. Many others were simply too big to fit into this gallery. Hesketh describes the process of painting these pictures as if “I had kidnapped Plath. On the wall of my studio was a vast collection of information I had gathered, strung up in front of me.” It hangs next to a “death mask” which bears an eerie resemblance to Michael Foot.
I’m interested to know how Plath sounds nowadays. “Well, she doesn’t have a northern accent. More like an American in London. I don’t think she likes the place she was buried in. The poems she wrote about the place are horrible.”
The Plath pictures were due to be exhibited in a local church. “It was all arranged then the vicar came back from his holidays and banned the show.” Hesketh still doesn’t know why. Oddly, she didn’t bother to contact Ted Hughes to ask what he thought. “He’s dead!”
Other nightmarish visions are just that. “Things I dream about.” A self-portrait does nothing to flatter the petite Hesketh. “That’s because I like to imagine that I am more of a heavyweight artist. So I like to paint myself bigger than I actually am, to give myself more presence. ”Does it help? “Ooh yes. I think so.” Like much of the work on display, voluptuous doesn’t begin to describe what I’m looking at.
Although a fan of modern art, Hesketh never attends gallery openings in London. “I would. But no one ever asks me.” Perhaps her contemporaries are afraid that no one would notice the art on the wall were Hesketh to be admitted? She politely demurs and instead shows me a remarkable piece of work called Tyre Swing. “It’s about Jiminy Cricket, siting on your shoulder.”
Hesketh has even painted herself wearing a pair of support knickers (to get into the comfort zone) as she “swings on the swing of life and tells herself that her painting is going really well” but there’s another, meaner Joe in the background. “Me telling myself: ‘It’s all a load of crap’.”
Which one is the real Joe? “They’re both me. But the mean one is there all the time.”
For an artist who, like Dali, Warhol and Grayson Perry, is perhaps her own greatest creation, Hesketh seems unusually occupied with death. Albeit death in primary colours. “That’s me covering up. Blind people with brightness and they don’t see what’s really underneath.” Another picture called Fit, featuring a figure with “voluptuous boobs” is actually about Hesketh trying to “make the different parts of my life fit together”.
One aspect that must require special consideration is Hesketh’s own practice as a modern day Pendle witch. But which kind of witch is she? “I’m an orange witch”, she laughs. “In between black and white.” And like all good (and bad) witches, she is not adverse to a spot of hexing. “A good friend recently lost an expensive diamond ring. I told her I would find it and I did. I can’t tell you what I said, that’s private witch stuff, but it worked.”
Doesn’t this scare the people closest to her, like her boyfriend perhaps? “Everyone is scared of her”, interjects Jennings with a laugh.
Admiring a painting in a gallery is, of course, not the same thing as actually wanting to wake up to it every day but Hesketh claims that her pictures (sadly out of my price-range) are actually bought by “perfectly normal people”. Among her fans in designer and TV makeover specialist Lynda Barker who apparently owns a painting called Rubber Ring which features a woman with “green tits”.
Hesketh works in a 300-year-old mill, which features in many of her paintings, including Butter Fingers, which is “all about losing it”, and certainly the crows, witches, discombobulated figures, self-harmers and crash-test dummies that are on display, not to mention one long-dead poet, all add-up to creating the impression of a woman who lives closer to the edge than many would feel is advisable, and yet there is something so deeply-centred, so friendly, so Lancastrian about Hesketh, more Glenda, Good Witch of the North, than Wicked Witch of the East, that you can’t help but be thoroughly charmed – by her paintings, yes, but above all by Hesketh herself.