XV. Interview with Megan Lailey AKA Lails, artist & illustrator

Megan Lailey, VHS Still(s) Life, 2019, digital illustration

Influenced by history, pop culture and plants, Lails creates playful and unexpected work that celebrates colour, form and composition. Through fantasies, daydreams, and intuition, her work explores how we connect to the natural world, to one another, and to ourselves in this digital age. Lails lives and works on the traditional, ancestral and unceded territory of the Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), Stó:lō and Səl̓ílwətaʔ/Selilwitulh (Tsleil-Waututh) and xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam) Nations. In her conversation with The Empty Set below, Lails discusses her plant preoccupations and art affectations, as well as Elizabeth I fashion sense and why we should be excited about the opportunities afforded by technology.

I've always found, even amongst so-called self-confessed punks, the retention of various hierarchies. One of which is, in aesthetic terms, the value of the 'supra-surface' over and above the so-called 'superficial'. What role or how key is the aesthetic consideration of the surface for you, both as a consumer of art and a creator of art?

Aesthetics don’t necessarily come into play when I view art. My background is in art history and many, many times, learning about the history, theory, or artist’s intention behind a work are what makes it compelling to me. If I’m shopping for a piece to hang in my home, yes, aesthetics are the first thing I look for but I really encourage curiosity when viewing art. It’s too simplistic to dismiss a work on whether or not we find it visually appealing. Art serves many purposes and it’s not just something to hang on the wall. 

That being said, in my practice, the look of a piece is always the starting point. I’m interested in making art that I find beautiful and unexpected. By initially focusing on aesthetics, I can create a work that evokes a particular mood. If I look at something I find beautiful, I feel transcendent. The play of colour and shape can elicit joy and happiness. These visual strategies are a way to immediately convey a deeper message. My practice implicitly recognizes that visual attractiveness can allow viewers to connect with a work more readily. By creating visually compelling pieces, I hope to allow viewers to enter into the work more easily to experience positive or peaceful moments. 

During a conversation we had once, you mentioned that your praxis has both emerged and been postponed on account of moments of angoisse and ennui. Being that Lails – the umbrella under which you make, show, and sell art – has existed in various forms for the past half decade, could you speak on the ways in which anxiety and depression shaped not only your artistic approach and outlook, but also your aesthetic relationships with the quotidian? For example, it seems that most of us neither really think about nor consider plants unless they're being destroyed en masse in the most apocalyptically spectacular ways – the Amazon on fire, for instance. How do you go about renewing your relationship with say gardens, grasses, and flowers?

The ability to look closer was enabled by my experience with anxiety and depression, and this in turn, inspired my subject matter and practice. My interest in depicting plant life came out of a time when my sensitivity to stimulation was in overdrive. It’s a cliche thing to say, but that anxiety was a gift in a way. I’m much more observant and aware of my surroundings during elevated periods. Along with it’s natural beauty, the settlement known as Vancouver has incredible gardens and other artificially introduced plant life but because there is such an abundance of these gardens, it can become a mundane, everyday sight. During this period of stress however, the flowers and the colours and the shapes struck me in a way they hadn’t before. This thing I had dismissed as unremarkable, was a miracle to behold. I’m sure any gardener reading this is thinking, “Well, of course!”, but it’s such an embarrassment of riches out here that it really took a mental illness to reveal the beauty of this town. Thankfully, I’m feeling much better but the flip side of that is that I’m not picking up on every little thing like I was so I have to be more intentional when searching for inspiration. It’s not jumping out from every lawn and flowerbed like it once did!

Whether commercial or private, professional or amateur, I'd put even money on the assumption that most people think of the combination of art and plants as primarily a painterly affair. I think most people (have been conditioned to) expect the Bosschaert, de Heem, Cassatt, Bollongier and/or van Gogh aesthetic, and as such 'plant art' as bound to hyper-realistic still life. In what ways is your own style and approach to mark-making, and other graphical qualities like line and shape, a response to these tropes and cliches?

There are so many fantastic artists that paint in a hyper-realistic way but I’m interested in highlighting the aspects of plants that stand out to me. My visual style and language is influenced by fashion, pop culture, illustration, and design. I’m interested in the ways colours and shapes play together. I like a bold block of colour, and I like flatness. I paint, but I don’t think my work has a painterly quality to it. It’s much more illustrative. I take care to smooth out the brush strokes and sharpen the lines. All of these choices are intended to frame the plant in a new way. To add dynamism and contrast. To celebrate the geometries of nature.

When I started my practice in 2015, I was inspired by the artist, Miranda Lorikeet, who created these dreamy illustrations in MS Paint. I thought, and still think, her use of the program was brilliant. Paint comes standard on any PC so there’s a low barrier to entry, and working in a digital medium such as Paint, really lends itself to that flat quality that I wanted to convey. Because Paint was so low-stakes, I was able to develop my style without having to invest in supplies or technology. Now I work in Procreate on my iPad which is more user-friendly and editable, but Paint was a great lesson in meeting yourself where you are and getting started with what you have.

I often think of Tolkein's green-blooded Shepherds of the Trees when I really think about plants. I also think about xylem and phloem, chloroplasts and chlorophyll, the operations of change, the alchemy of sun, sugar, and sand – plants; these fascinating, hardy, and diverse change engines. In short, I rarely think of plants as still. How do you go about conveying energy and dynamism in your work? 

Very true! Plants are always following the sun, opening up in the morning, folding in at night, swaying in the breeze. They’re not static. To convey this, I like to utilize composition and colours. I try to use the canvas in such a way that the leaves are moving across the page. The way I render shapes also gives a slight shifting quality to the plants. There’s a bit of a wobble to the leaves. They’re splayed out. It’s this bountiful thing. 

I also love contrasting colours. Combinations that seem a bit ugly, I like to pair them together to see if they work. I use a lot of green, which, of course, I’m painting plants. But they’re not necessarily complementing greens. They have different undertones. One of my favourite strategies is to pair a chartreuse or lime green with a dark forest green. That works to bring out the different shapes of the plants while giving a lush, jungle-like quality to the scene.

I’ve also been using background gradients as a way to create mood and guide the eye. I’m really looking forward to exploring that effect more in future work.

Megan Lailey, Yaletown, 2018, acrylic on canvas

One of my favourite aspects of your recent work is its latently hypnotic quality. To me it has a sort of Green and Purple power that makes me imagine that if I'd be invited to either Aja or Puck's houses for bitter tea or sauteed shrooms, your work would be up high on their walls. What is the value and role of fantasy and daydreaming in both your own life and your art?

Throughout my life, it’s been important to reimagine the current reality in order to create a new one and daydreaming is an essential part of this process. We think of daydreaming as a childish or unserious practice but I’ve found it’s critical to allow oneself space to imagine. Not just think, but to imagine all the possibilities and fantasize about what could be. That’s one of the reasons my art is so colourful and stylized. Yes, I’m representing very real plants and objects, but I hope they are done in such a way that the viewer feels transported to somewhere lighter. A glimpse of how the world could possibly feel if there was less criticism and more freedom to be. Very pie-in-the-sky I know, but it’s really about giving yourself a break. Being kinder to yourself. Create a safe space for yourself in your mind and see how that translates to your day-to-day.

Most of what I know about Elizabeth I comes from an assortment of History Channel documentaries, Elizabeth: The Golden Age, and The Virgin Queen. My knowledge here mostly subtends some characters around her to varying degrees of concentricity – Shakespeare, Marlowe, Dee, Kelley, Walsingham. Tell me about your passion for history, Elizabeth I, and particularly the queen in relation to remaking, fashion, and fabric. 

As a child, I loved learning about Egyptian, Greek and Roman history and my interest in historical lives only grew from there. I remember reading Measley Middle Ages from the Horrible Histories series and being absolutely fascinated by intimate aspects of peoples lives. Their hygiene, their belief systems, their humor. I find comfort in learning about challenging periods in history because, despite everything stacked against us, we continue on, and I draw strength from the people that came before us. I also love knowledge. There’s a pleasure in learning. It doesn’t have to be for any practical purpose. That being said, the more you learn, the more you understand why our present day is the way it is so historical knowledge can also be a very galvanizing and empowering force.

In terms of my practice, I think of Elizabeth I especially because of the value placed on fabric and clothing during her reign. Elizabeth is known for her love of pageantry and fashion and her deft use of soft power, but the remarkable thing is, we have next to zero pieces of her clothing. This is due to two main factors. First, because she inherited a kingdom on the verge of bankruptcy thanks to her pops, Henry VIII, she couldn’t afford to have new fabrics made everytime styles changed so she recycled her clothing to make new outfits. Second, because fabric was so valuable, her remaining pieces of clothing were likely gifted to those close to her following her death. It’s estimated that Elizabeth had 2,000 pieces of clothing in her lifetime but the Bacton Altar Cloth is considered the sole surviving piece of the monarch’s clothing.

Cut to our current age when clothing is being produced on a scale Queen E could barely imagine. Along with it’s shameful human rights record, the fashion industry is one of the world’s major polluters, producing 10% of human-made carbon emissions, and using the second largest amount of consumer water. What if we started to value fabric and clothing in the same way people did in Tudor times by reusing and repurposing materials until they simple disintegrated? In fact, it’s really only since the end of WWII that we’ve latched onto this idea of new, new, new. There are so many lessons from history that can help us create a more sustainable clothing future.

What are your feelings concerning current technology and its relationship to contemporary art and fashion?

It’s an incredibly exciting time. There are so many new ways create and share your work with the world. 

Thinking about history again, artists have always used new technologies. Whether it was a new way of preparing pigments or understanding perspective, I think every artist during their time could say, “This is an incredible time. There are more creative possibilities than ever before.” Because of course, everything is new to us when we are living through it. We don’t have the gift of hindsight until it’s over.

The remarkable thing to me is not how we are creating but how we are sharing our work. We’re at a very interesting time in terms of technology and the promotion of art. Instagram has recently announced that they are shifting their focus from photographs to video media to compete with companies like TikTok. Since its debut in 2010, Instagram has been a platform that has allowed visual artists to launch their careers through images. With the focus shifting to video media, will practices become more performative to create content for Reels? There’s also many visual artists and craftspeople who would prefer to stay anonymous but data shows that personal content (media that features the creators face or tells a personal story) performs better, and with video content being tied to physical performances (lip syncs, outfit changes, etc.), how will an artist grow their audience while remaining out of the spotlight? Additionally, artists gain a handle on one way of working, and then the technology changes over night. Burn-out is real and producing new content multiple times a week isn’t where I want to put my energy necessarily.
That said, I try not to view technological changes and acceleration as harbingers of doom. Our number one skill as human beings is adaptation and creatives will find a way to work within these new systems. 

Once you said to me, and again I paraphrase: 'I can be an environmentalist and aesthete both'. It seems to me that as an artist, one would hope to explore, discover, and expand what can be/what one can do as an artist. Another way I think about this pertains to Remix Culture and, more specifically, how the underlying ethos thereof broadly appeals to or influences artists of all stripes. It seems an unavoidable condition of how the Internet has necessitated a type of multitab thinking and feeling in late digital capital. Within this melange, how do your concordant interests manifest in your art praxis?

That’s the beauty of being alive in 2021. It’s a wild time but there’s more possibility than ever before. The digital age has accelerated and really fortified the blurring of societal boundaries and roles. Liminality is becoming more common place. It’s this idea of “all the browser tabs are open”. I’m thinking about rococo interiors and global warming and Real Housewives all at once and they blend together to influence the visual style and content of my work. I love that we are multidimensional beings and that we have the ability to be passionate about diverse topics.

Multi-tab thinking is also a survival mechanism. We can’t afford to work in silos. Compartmentalization is one way to deal with the complexities of our world, but it’s not going to be successful in the long run. What we do in our corner of the earth, affects the other and we have a responsibility to one another 

Megan Lailey, Gingham and Toile, 2021, acrylic on canvas

Tell me about the new website and I.G page – provenance, goals, and your thinking behind both?

*Insert plug for Lailsart.com and @lailslails here ;) But seriously, I appreciate you asking. While I’ve remained consistently active on IG over the past few years, my website needed an update. I wanted to create an online presence that I could direct collectors and clients to so it needed to be well curated and easy to navigate. When you land on my IG or website, I want you to instantly know what my work’s about.

I plan to approach art licensing companies next. For many artists, it’s not realistic to have a career solely supported by sales of original work. Original pieces can be cost prohibitive for collectors and they take time to produce. Licensing is a democratic way to distribute your work. I also think licensing can offer artists a chance to work smarter not harder. Artists can submit work to their licensing agents and the company will photograph, produce, and market the final product. It’s a way to handover some of the administrative and business aspects of an art practice and free up creative time.

That said, I do want to take considered approach. We really do not need more stuff in the world so how can I create and produce in an environmentally ethical way? Is that even possible in the Anthropocene? I’m still in the midst of this process.

As aforesaid, there seems to still be a real hierarchised stigma and benighting shame hovering over the idea of eating – comfortably or piecemeal (no pun etc.) – off one's art. How, as an artist, do you navigate the issues and debates concerning profitability while simultaneously keeping your own ethics in view?

I am very much in the camp of ‘ask for what you want’. The worst they can say is ‘no’. I recognize this is often easier said than done and there can be dynamics and barriers at play which may affect one person but not another but if the fear is, ‘I don’t want to ask because I don’t want to be a bother.’, you’re not being a bother! You’re inquiring. You’re working towards your goals. If your message is ignored or you get a flat out ‘no’, it’s ok! You haven’t don’t anything wrong by asking. 

I think Millenials and Gen Zs have a more sanguine attitude when it comes to art and commerce. Millennials came up in a time when Facebook, Instagram and blogs were a new vehicle through which to create a personal brand, gain followers, and earn an income and Gen Z is carrying that forward in new ways. Again, I feel fortunate to live in our current age because it is not only accepted but becoming increasingly expected that artists should be compensated fairly for their work. There’s a very strong push from creators to be paid appropriately. Hopefully, it will be strong enough to create change within the industry. 

During one of our conversations, you told me something that is in every way terribly fascinating – that certain contemporary clinical schools of thought now consider fantasy and daydreaming to be a mental illness. This makes me think about our discussions of the comforts of personal nostalgia, the dangers of negative escapism, and daydreaming. Where, in your opinion, does all this leave the imagination – some pathological excrescence, or something, like the spirit of our youthful imaginations, we are desperate to re-access? Can we imagine as we could? Is your work in some way a gesture back to a time of more imaginative bandwidth? How do we keep unbridled imagination alive and share it without being reductive, ashamed, and self-effacing as a default?

I admit I had to research this a bit because it was truly a headline from TikTok that grabbed me. The OP might have been referring to the condition of ‘Maladaptive Daydreaming’ which was coined by clinical psychologist Dr. Eli Somer in 2002. Dr. Somer defines MD as “extensive fantasy activity that replaces human interaction and/or interferes with academic, interpersonal or vocational functioning." People that experience MD play out very detailed scenarios in their mind. This can happen over a period hours without the person experiencing the passing of time. It’s not the general act of daydreaming that clinicians are looking at, it goes beyond that, so I want to stress that I don’t mean to conflate MD and general daydreaming, and I also don’t want to be glib about a condition that I don’t have personal experience or medical knowledge of.

In my life, daydreaming has been a powerful coping mechanism in times of stress and a tool to imagine new possibilities. I see it as a very positive practice. I wouldn’t liken it to manifesting though. It’s more a free flow of ideas. It’s unstructured mental time whereas manifesting is meant to be intentional. 

My inclination towards fantasy certainly informs my practice. When I work on a piece, I catch myself thinking, “In nature, this leaf would fall this way or that shadow would lie here, but wait, I don’t have to do it that way because I’m not working in reality.” I can work in a way that feels more intuitive because I’ve strengthened that daydreaming muscle. 

As a child, I had an incredible imagination and I think most of us feel that way. I don’t know if it’s fully possible to get back to that childlike state, but I think imagination is an incredible thing that we need to protect and encourage as best we can.

It’s so interesting that shame came up in our conversation. It’s one of those things humans really don’t like to think about. I didn’t set out to consciously explore and reject shame through my work but it’s become clear to me that my work really is pushing back against the shame of being earnest, the embarrassment of loving something so wholeheartedly. In a way, it’s a celebration of fandom. 

My work is an unashamed embrace of colour, joy, fantasy, day dreaming. All of these things that as children, we innately appreciate. And we have so much enthusiasm too for the things we love. Talk to a kid about their current interests and they light up. They can talk endlessly about that topic. At some point, by direct criticism, or the shame-filled stew of society, we get the message that being excitable is embarrassing. Of course, there are ways we can express joy as adults; concerts, comedy shows, festivals, social media, but these can be very prescribed and performative. What are you a total nerd about? That’s what I’m interested in. We need to stop coming down on each other’s harmless reasons for joy. It may not be for you, but it’s for someone, and it makes the world a better place for everyone if we are allowed to celebrate our personal joys.