PM: I often play the sort of buffoon patriarch. And there is a female pairing. Ronald and Nancy Reagan, Jesus Christ and Mary Magdalene, Adam and Eve, Donald and Melania Trump, Walt Disney and White Snow, Adolf Hitler and Eva Braun. It’s an archetype that establishes a kind of polarity. Who is holding the power at various points? It can switch. It’s an image and an exploration of masochism and desire. I think there's something to the death drive. I think we're caught in a trauma we can't resolve, and by not being able to resolve the trauma, we just simply repeat it. And what's the trauma? The trauma is existence. And what are we going to do with that?

SE: Right.

PM: The actress Lilith Stangenberg and I, we’ve probably done a hundred performances with the Adam and Eve/Adolf and Eva couplings, since 2019.

SE: I wanted to ask you a bit about drawing. You've talked before about drawing in character.

PM: Yeah.

SE: How does that work? How do you get into and out of the personas you deploy to make the drawings, to make the work?

PM: You know, I've done this, this thing of talking while making these types of drawings. Not all drawings are done this way. I mean, like, the script drawings, I don’t do them as a character. I don't really talk very much during these script drawings. And the script drawings are sort of like what might happen in the film, right?

SE: Sure.

PM: They're almost storyboards to a degree. Some are quite loose, some are quite detailed. That's a whole other form of drawing. But I started doing drawings in character quite a long time back. I think, I don't know, in the 80s or something. I'd always painted flat on the ground and would paint on top of the painting. So, there was a performance element to painting, right? I don't think I ever painted on an easel or leaned against the wall, until recently. It was always flat on the ground and I was on top of it. When I did the pirate project, I talked as a kind of pirate through the whole drawing. When I say ‘as a persona’, then you imagine me becoming a pirate or channelling a pirate. No, it's not like that. I would just talk and use the voice and use a kind of alternate voice, like, a cadence of some sort.

SE: And how does it affect the outcome?

PM: It removes Paul, in a way. The judgments are not the same, the critical ... how I view what something is. I mean, it's still in a way there, but, um, I'm really functioning like the character, especially these kinds of … like, a pirate, he doesn’t give a shit, right? Like, it's a kind of liberation. I'm trusting what happens. I was, just this morning, thumbing through Instagram and I came to something about Federico Fellini. Fellini talking about how he lets the film tell him what to do next, right? And there is something to that. It's not like I am a pirate. I'm really paying attention to the drawing. But it is something where … something else is being allowed to happen. And I don't make the same judgments. In White Snow, I made drawings with Elyse. Elyse didn't draw but she was there as White Snow and kind of adopted a character, almost like she was a model for Walt Disney’s art. Like his muse in a way, right? But as two buffoon characters, the way that the muse works with the artist, we're actually making a joke about that. And she's very aware of sabotaging the muse, the traditional notion of how we understand a muse, like she's sabotaging that. And ... with the A&E drawings made with Lilith, we’re both buffoons. The drawings are made on a large table, eight by 12 feet. The drawing itself becomes like the arena or the stage. And Lilith's free to do whatever she wants to the drawing, and she's free to do whatever she wants with me, and I'm the same. And, um, I sometimes become really focused on the drawing, talking in character, while she'll be in a pretend state, pushing into it, affecting both herself and me. Her mere presence on the drawing affects it completely. I’m not sure how it works, it has something to do with the interaction between us, and the letting go … We both move into something. And each action and drawing is different. There's no, um, there’s no pre-talking. It simply begins.

Excerpt from Middle Plane Issue No.9 (Summer/Autumn 2024). Read the full interview by ordering your copy here.

Photographer: Colin Dodgson