Welcome, Joy!
OLIVER EALES
Oliver Eales is a difficult fucker to interview. Fiercely determined to defy characterisation, he strikes pre-emptively against the lazy categori- sation of his work and his attitudes by reeling off what he is not. He is not, I shall say for the sake of brevity, a great many things. He will con- cede only that "I believe in complete autonomy". And it is because of his commitment to absolute autonomy that the artist rejects all other attempts to pin him down in his convictions.
His is an autonomy delineated by resistance. He says that in both his life and his work, and he considers the two to be inextricably inter- twined, "it is the act of defiance that is important". In striking against the limits of our freedom we are able to recognise and engage our lib- erty. He speaks of friends jailed for their graffiti and acknowledges that "it is only after you've been locked up" that the street artist can be considered "to have made it".The incarcerated artist has tested the limits of his creative freedoms against his physical liberty.
Oliver Eales is over and again determined to reiterate the indivisibility of freedom. Freedom of action, thought and imagination are not to be considered separately. Discussing the recent, unwelcome interference of the government in his personal life he spits "it is interesting how the state can get in the way of someone's ability to love". He later rails against the corporate appropriation of street art as an associative mar- keting tool that "corrupts" the image by enslaving it. It is against this that his life and work protests.
The extraordinary vitality of his work seems to be a rebellion against the fact that "life is", as Oliver Eales several times asserts, "meaning- less". He does not seek to "create new meaning" as the artist is so often urged to do. Instead his vitality is the greatest symptom of his freedom, and of his enduring resistance to authoritarianism.
"Welcome, Joy", Oliver Eales explains, were the dying words of mission- ary John Eliot.The phrase resonates with the artist, who recognises the phrase as being a "simple bit of consciousness" devoid of associative meaning, simultaneously meaningless and profound.The phrase defies literal comprehension and operates instead as a mantra – it is free. Re- peat it.
We conclude our conversation by talking of Charles Lamb, the great English essayist and poet with whom Oliver Eales shares his birthplace. I read later a quote by Lamb describing the man who rejects the artifi- cial constraints of society, who "weareth all the colours, fearing none". Such a man is Oliver Eales.
