Becky Liberty is a visual artist whose sights are set on uplifting Nottingham and its communities. While sitting in the Project Space during installation week, Becky spoke about the reception of her work while studying in London and the dynamism of her evolving artistic skillset.

Do you think moving back home after graduation was a trigger to start looking at Nottingham as a source?

I started it when I was in London. I think there was a lot of nostalgia and homesickness. I realised I was the number one fan of Nottingham when I was away from Nottingham. I started making this project and then that triggered me to move back home. I was making this work in London for people who didn’t understand it, for people who didn’t have a connection to it. I wanted to come back and get the community involved. I had a season ticket probably before the pandemic; after the pandemic I moved to London, so then I couldn’t get to the games anymore. So, I’ve been out of it for a long time. I don’t want to be this fraud! It’s about me, but it’s also about me as part of this wider community of people who get overlooked. When I was doing the work [about Nottingham], I’d be in a critique and no one would have a clue what I was talking about. I think it did incline me to come back home and get that sense of community again.

I think that is a really important and fresh perspective on the London-centric pressures about going down there if you are ‘in the arts’. You are so right that it depends what work you make and it depends on what you are trying to say. Your message and who you are talking are here.

What does your process look like when starting a project? Is there a hook or a cue that gets you going?

I know it sounds silly, but I really like phrases and sayings. The t-shirt I’ve got in the exhibition came from ‘blood, sweat and tears’, and then I started thinking about every other way I could explore that within the project I was already doing. It’s ended up being a t-shirt covered in blood, sweat and beer. I like a pun, I like twisting things that already exist. It’s so silly and obvious, but that’s how it works in my head.

It seems so playful. Contorting things that already exist in a way you see fit. Bringing word to image, too, and words being your inspiration is such a fun inspiration. Also, there’s something quite relevant about that and your work being about local communities and dialects.

100%. It does go hand in hand with football and what I want to be making. I think football has such an amazing visual language, sound, and phrases like football chants and quotes. I have all this material laid out in front of me. There’s this chant that goes, ‘tits, fanny and Forest’… We’ve got lace, women, underwear… It’s about how it all ends up tying together.

“...the big wealth and power of Nottingham in the Industrial Revolution was down to these women in poorly lit rooms, hunched over a bench making these lace trims and things like that. Their eyesight’s fading, they can’t feel their fingers, they’ve got arthritis now. It’s all built on the back of these women. I guess this is a kind of tribute to them.”

Talk to me about your larger-scale artwork for the show and how that compares to your previous work.

I think the bigger the better. I think sometimes you have to be realistic about what you can achieve with the time and budget you’ve got. I always think back to A-level art. Back then, that’s when you’re doing photo-realistic paintings and that’s all you do. You just had to show you had skills. My teacher then really brought us all out of it by cutting up big bits of canvas for us and making us do these massive bits. It was great. [Bigger sizes] make everything more impactful, I think. If you draw a face really small or you draw a face really big, there’s so much more you can do with the larger one. There’s only so much information you can put in something really small. I get less and less interested by it. In my work, I have ‘my’ disciplines that I like; things that I lean towards that I say are my favourite practices, but when I have a project, I kind of make whatever the project calls for. I will make a little book, but I wouldn’t say that’s what I do. I don’t reach for that because it’s just too small. [The project] called for a small and tactile thing that time.

That sort of flexibility in your practice is valuable and quite fun, don’t you think? You can put your creativity wherever you see it lead.

Yeah, I find it so fun, ticking off all these skills. Yesterday, I was making tassels for the scarf on my quilt and I was like, ‘Wow, now I know how to make tassels on a scarf!’ That was weird. I didn’t even know how to sew a year ago, but now I’m making myself pick up all these new skills.

Would you say you like learning?

Definitely, I think that’s a big part of it. I get quite frustrated, though, because you limit how much good you can get at something because of repetition. That makes you improve, but I kind of get stuck into something and then stuck into something else, so I’m kind of picking up the basics of everything. It does limit, though, how good I am. I do get kind of lazy with it too [by doing] shortcuts; I’m not doing seams properly… I’m not making garments to last. I’m stitching things together in a mish-mash way, but I think that is also a part of it. It’s a means to an end. I think a big part of my work and doing this sewing is that link to the feminine craft side of things. Female labour is such an important part of it. Sometimes, I am sat there hand-stitching stuff and I’m like, ‘Yes, my ancestors were doing this,’ but on the other hand, I’m like, ‘No, let me do a shortcut way,’ because that’s feminist in itself. It’s something I’m exploring through my making.

Becky Liberty, ‘*Tits, Fanny & Forest’* (@beckyliberty)

It sounds like you are narrating and re-narrating the process of these material art practices. You are blending the intricate with the brash… I guess someone could see it as mixing the masculine and feminine in terms of stereotypes with making.

There’s a lot of history and in Nottingham especially, the big wealth and power of Nottingham in the Industrial Revolution was down to these women in poorly lit rooms, hunched over a bench making these lace trims and things like that. Their eyesight’s fading, they can’t feel their fingers, they’ve got arthritis now. It’s all built on the back of these women. I guess this is a kind of tribute to them. I’m not doing what they’re doing, but the process relates to them.

Has that intention and motif in your work been long-standing in your practice?

It’s definitely more new with my Nottingham work. I’d say I’m a screen printer; that’s my job. But I do think the process has to be for a reason: it has to mean something. ‘Why are you putting an image on a bit of paper?’ Print is kind of a bit dead as well, so it has to have a meaning. I’m into political propaganda and stuff. If I was angry about something, I’d make a print about it. But I’d started to think more inwardly about it all — ‘Who am I? Where do I come from? What am I interested in?’ Obviously, I’m from Notts, I’ve been going to football since I was really little with her and her friends, as opposed to my male family members. They’re not actually arsed about it. It’s a massive part of my personality and who I am.

Interview by Orla Sprosen.

You can find out more about Becky Liberty’s work on Instagram (@beckyliberty).

For more insights on the EM25 Graduate Project and to hear more about the latest news at Surface Gallery, head over to our Instagram.