An interview between Paul Hetherington and Hephzibah Rendle-Short in London on 23 October 2013. Hephzibah Rendle-Short reflects on her joint practices as a visual artist and a psychoanalyst, and discusses points of connection between the two.
Hephzibah Rendle-Short and Paul Hetherington
Hephzibah Rendle-Short, born Brisbane, Australia, now lives in London where she divides her time between practising as an artist and psychoanalyst. In 2012 she was awarded a practice-led PhD from the Royal College of Art in which she used the ideas of Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan to unravel her painting practice. Since then she has deployed a variety of strategies she finds at hand to reconstruct it. The show future anterior at Clare Hall Cambridge (2013) was one presentation of this; Uncompanionship Right Now–Table. Face. Vessel., a two-person show at the Slade School of Fine Art, London (2015) was another. For this last she made hand built earthenware objects that stack in a non-modular fashion: while faithful to the tropes of painting she borrowed techniques from the field of ceramics.
Paul Hetherington is Professor of Writing at the University of Canberra and Head of the International Poetry Studies Institute (IPSI) there. He has has an abiding interest in the visual arts and edited the final three volumes of the National Library of Australia’s four-volume edition of the diaries of the artist Donald Friend. He won the 2014 Western Australian Premier’s Book Awards (poetry) and was recently awarded an Australia Council for the Arts Residency in the BR Whiting Studio in Rome.
