Filthy Trash: Interview with the Artist, Written by Dr Helen Williams, Northumbria University

In the below interview, from Summer 2021 (Figure 45), Moye explores  with Helen Williams the aspects of the novel that most intrigued her,  giving an insight into her research practice and the role of the female  artist in tackling eighteenth-century bawdry. 

Helen: Do you want to talk a little bit about what kind of impact the  pandemic had on the kind of work that you produce? 

Katrin: Yes, because that became a really big factor for me in this  project because I was talking to the curator here, Patrick Wildgust,  

The Shandean 34, 2023–2024 ISSN 3049-4788  https://doi.org/10.3828/shandean.2024.15 

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in 2018, 2019, planning and making work for an exhibition. I hadn’t  decided what exactly I was going to make, but I knew I wanted to  make something based on Staffordshire figures, which were a popular  eighteenth-century domestic decorative item. Then the pandemic hit.  And actually, that was quite fortuitous for me because that gave me  a lot of time and mental space to think about the project 100% and  really focus on it. So actually, that really helped me, but conversely  the pandemic did put many roadblocks in my way. Everything that I  wanted to do, everything that I was planning to do, suddenly I couldn’t,  and I had to keep negotiating my way around these barriers that the  pandemic put up, very much like the narrative of Tristram Shandy. 

Helen: Of Tristram having all of these, you know, misadventures and  cross accidents befall him, not only in his life, but in his attempt to  create art, you know, and to capture that life in book form.  

Katrin: So, things, external events, happen to Tristram and other  characters in the book. 

Helen: Life, that chapter of accidents. 

Katrin: Yes, yes. And I did feel kind of … It did, it did make me  laugh, actually, though. I felt like I was somehow sucked into the book  and I’d become a peripheral character, by having all these issues and  problems. And then, oh, there was a rumour going around about how  the supplier of clay had run out of clay. And that was it. What am I  going to do now?  

Helen: Stockpile it with the toilet roll. 

Katrin: Yes, exactly.  

Helen: We talked about recycling clay at one point. Did you do that?  

Katrin: We did, didn’t we? We had lots of conversations about how  I was going to approach the novel. And you told me some really  interesting things about the physical descriptions of actual paper, which  really intrigued me. 

Helen: About it being torn up or burned ... 

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Katrin: Do you remember the butter paper?  

Helen: Yeah, in A Sentimental Journey, where Yorick is enjoying his  breakfast then realises that it’s a fragment of a manuscript, and then  the narrative turns into the sort of adventures of this manuscript. He  tries to trace it back to its source to find out what happens in the end.  And, you know, there are a series of accidents. Yeah. But yeah, paper  being recycled is a sort of motif that happens in Tristram Shandy as well,  isn’t it, with Tristram’s fragments being repurposed as curling papers  and having to rescue them from that woman’s head. Yeah. And that  anxiety that the fact that his fragments might be so close to her brain  she might absorb these ideas.  

Katrin: Oh, really? Oh, well, that reminds me of the sealing wax. The  anecdote about Dolly and her sealing wax, which is presented on this  sculpture here. So, you sent me an essay to read about the impres sionable female mind being represented by sealing wax. 

Helen: Yes, by Amelia Dale. 

Katrin: Yeah. Could you just refresh my memory about the Dolly  episode?  

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Helen: So, it’s like an allusion to John Locke as well, isn’t it, about how  ideas are generated in the mind, but what Tristram — and Sterne —  does with it quite cleverly is to create this metaphor of seal and wax  being mouldable in the hand. And what’s quite significant about that  moment in the novel is that it’s this female character, Dolly, with her  hand in the pocket and the sealing wax in her pocket and … You  know, we talked about eighteenth-century clothing, didn’t we, and  how pockets were actually quite an intimate part of somebody’s attire.  They would have been beneath the clothes, you know, and it’s like,  very, very close to the body in a place of intimacy that you wouldn’t  really expect anybody to access, to be able to see. 

Katrin: Not, like, a pocket like this [Katrin gestures to modern  clothing]. It was a separate garment, wasn’t it, that you could sort of  wear as an undergarment. And actually, the shape of the pocket, seen  from above, is quite suggestive.  

Helen: Yeah! And I guess that the contemporary anxieties that Sterne  is playing on in that scene are to do with how we generate ideas,  how we pass on information, but also about the sort of the gendered  anxieties around that, about how women’s ideas might be particularly  sexualised, if you like, or might be prone to reading perhaps too much  between the lines.  

Katrin: Because they’re so impressionable. 

Helen: Yes, but there’s also, I think, a really nice metaphor with that  concept of impression and of imprinting, which is also quite characteris tically Sternean, in sort of alluding to the printing process as well and,  you know, the method by which the words and texts and the narrative  are imprinted and impressed upon the page. In a way which would  have been so much more visible and with which eighteenth-century  readers would have been much more familiar, you know, like reading  a printed text and seeing the way in which those letters are, you know,  really three dimensional or raised. 

Katrin: Yes. Yeah.  

Helen: So, like our brains.  

Katrin: Yes, that was what I was thinking. First of all, I was going  

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to concentrate on recreating these paper items, like the screwed-up  chapter. That didn’t make it in … 

Helen: … because it was too good (like my best research, everyone!). 

Katrin: Exactly. Yeah. So, then I thought, I don’t know, I just went  through loads and loads of different ideas and themes, and then this  one of the sealing wax just delighted me in a way that I thought, you  know what? I’m just going to concentrate on the dirty jokes and the  innuendo.  

Helen: You do such a good job of making them three dimensional,  actually. You know, like they become very visual.  

Katrin: Yes. And it is quite a visual book, isn’t it?  

Helen: I think so.  

Katrin: Because there’s a … isn’t there a connection with Sterne and  the theatre world? Did I hear?  

Helen: Yeah, that’s right. With Garrick. And also with Hogarth. I  think Stone was really sort of savvy about making sure that he was  connected with the celebrities of his age. And so, I think it’s important  to remember that Tristram Shandy was a book which, you know, when  the first volumes came out and when he realised how successful they  were, he went straight to the first artist of the age, William Hogarth.  ‘Can you do the frontispiece?’ ‘Can you do an illustration?’ And that  book is really unusual for that period in being designed as a book with  illustrations from its first edition. So, the subsequent volumes came out  with illustrations; that really characterises Tristram Shandy as quite a  luxury book, actually, in that period. And he does something similar  with the Sermons as well that becomes like a collaboration with Joshua  Reynolds, the foremost portrait artist of the day. He gets his portrait  done by Reynolds, which becomes the frontispiece to the Sermons, and  there’s something about that collaboration with the art world, which  I suppose makes Tristram Shandy really unique, but is also reflected in  Sterne’s own sort of preoccupation with how his book appears as a  visual artefact. You know, it’s a very much a novel which has visual  effects which are intended to lead us.  

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Katrin: It’s a book. It’s a book as an object as much as a story to be  read, isn’t it? He made sure that every book had a different piece of  marbled paper. Is that right? And every single one was not a copy  but was unique to itself. I really love that. I really like that kind of  crunchiness of that book, for me. 

Helen: It’s a book that sort of throws you out of the narrative all the  time to remind you that you’re reading a book, a piece of technology,  that works in ways that actually you might have been accustomed to  ignore, like pagination, for instance. So, Sterne skips a few pages. I think  it is still the only book in the world where the odd numbers appear  on the right-hand side and the even numbers appear on the left. The  pagination swaps in a way which is yet to be replicated. 

Katrin: So, there’s all kinds of visual tricks, and it reminded me of  stage in some parts of the narrative where he’s describing exactly how,  for example, his father’s lying prostate on the bed. And it’s almost like  it’s a stage direction that you’re reading. So, it was kind of quite …  it’s a very visual book. 

Helen: Dr Slop’s fall is another one of those scenes, like a vignette,  where it is described in such meticulous detail that you can see it.  One of the moments that is quite memorable, I think, is when Walter  Shandy’s trying to get something out of this pocket. It’s the opposite  pocket and it’s so low down. It’s really, really awkward. And you can  just feel almost every muscle, as well as seeing the contortions of his  body, and I think that style of detail, and building up layers of visual  effect, is part and parcel of what makes the humour work so well.  

Katrin: So, the humour is the thing that really caught my attention  and made the book such a joy to read because it’s kind of, you know,  it’s written in the eighteenth-century vernacular, so it is quite hard to  get going with it.  

Helen: The sentences are very long. 

Katrin: So, if you’re not used to reading that kind of book, it’s a bit  kind of, oh, it’s 900 pages of this or however many. So, the humour  really kind of swept me along. And then we had a conversation about  the place of humour and gender in the eighteenth century and how at  one point Walter says, ‘I wouldn’t allow Mrs Shandy to read a novel’.  

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It would … I would only allow her to read a sermon and that ties in  with how humour was the preserve of men and not women. And I  read something really interesting about how a guffaw or a belly laugh  seems really, really unladylike and you mustn’t do it because a shout  of laughter is seen as a very similar thing to an orgasm. So, because  they’re involuntary bodily responses, so you must keep your body under  control, Madam, and so to laugh was not allowed.  

Helen: So, there is a sort of hierarchy, if you like, of how you’re  allowed to respond to humour in the eighteenth century, and men  are held to this as well, and there’s a kind of response which is polite,  and there’s a kind of response which is uncouth, and you’re right that  the sort of belly laugh is something which would be frowned upon in  polite society, but which men could, you know, undoubtedly get away  with, yeah, much more than women. But you know, Sterne himself  plays with the idea of the female reader throughout the novel, in a  way which undermines Walter’s expectation that women shouldn’t  read fiction, right, in the sense that Tristram might be of a different  generation but he absolutely imagines that the person who is reading  this book is potentially ‘Madam’ and that she might read it in ways  that he implies that we should not be encouraged to follow. And Sterne  even wrote about this in his letters too. You know, when he moved  on from Tristram Shandy to writing A Sentimental Journey, he described  Tristram Shandy as a work that women might read in the bedroom, but  A Sentimental Journey they might read in the parlour. And he’s sort of  setting up a distinction of respectability without ever suggesting that  women shouldn’t read Tristram Shandy or don’t read Tristram Shandy, but,  actually, it’s more an issue about what you read in public or, yeah,  reputational reading, perhaps.  

Katrin: So, don’t take Tristram Shandy on the Tube.  

Helen: Yeah, or put a different a cover on it. 

Katrin: So, I felt that and then you said something about how the  whole entire nine volumes could be seen as an exploration of male  sexual anxiety, performance anxiety, and once you told me that I  really twigged.  

Helen: Yeah, I think, like, impotence, in the broadest sense, is absolutely  one of the main themes of that novel.  

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Katrin: Yeah. So, it’s a very male sort of gaze, really, very male centred.  Helen: And also, one which is anxious about inadequacy?  

Katrin: And yeah, the female characters are almost behind the scenes,  apart from the widow.  

Helen: But even then, all of the characters are filtered through Tristam’s  perspective, right? Because he is a first-person narrator so everything  and everybody we meet is sort of clouded by his perspective and there  is no sense in which we are encouraged to take what Tristram says at  face value and certainly not really encouraged to treat things the way  that he does, I guess, so his ideas about the people that he describes  are perhaps not Sterne’s ideas or our ideas.  

Katrin: And that was the same thing with the double entendres that  I noticed: don’t take anything at face value. That works in that way  as well. Yeah. So … so that’s what I decided to do.  

Helen: And the thing with Tristram is, you know, his narrative might  run away from him, and he might not have control over his writing  in the sense that he might let slip double entendres without realising.  But Sterne absolutely knows.  

Katrin: So, what we were going to talk about was the humour and the  dirty jokes being a really central part of the novel and how possibly I,  as a woman artist, was trespassing ground that was forbidden access  to me. 

Helen: Did you feel as if Tristram was warning you off?  

Katrin: I did. I did feel a bit naughty, and I’ve never made such rude  things before, and it’s kind of, it is in that tradition of, totally not like  really kind of salacious, none of them are sexy — I don’t think —  

Helen: But they require you to do a double take, don’t they, in the  same way that I think a lot of Sterne’s text requires you to do a double  reading: ‘is that what I’ve just read?’ So, I think it’s really interesting  that, you know, that the quotation that you’ve got on the piece here  is in Dolly’s words — actually this one, isn’t it? [Helen gestures to  the sculpture shown in Figure 45.] You know, it’s obviously filtered  

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46 Katrin Moye, ‘’Tis an inch, Sir, of red seal-wax’ (2020). Image  courtesy of the artist through Tristram’s narration, but still, you know that the joke, if you  like, is one articulated by one of the female characters. You don’t get  many of those.  

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Katrin: No, you don’t. So, I’m really glad that Dolly got her chance  to shine. 

Helen: And her pocket out. 

Katrin: And her pocket out, yes. 

Helen: We were reflecting on your approaching this novel as a female  artist in that tradition of sort of extending the narrative of Sterne’s text  and shaping its legacy through material culture. This is a tradition in  which, you know, female artists have participated since the 1770s, with  the likes of Angela Kauffman and her 1770s — iconic, now — portrait  of the Maria character, which became sort of printed and reprinted,  reproduced on ceramics, for the next few decades and the same with  Lady Elizabeth Templetown, who produces the silhouette designs of  Maria and of the Bourbonnois Shepherd, which become part of the  

47 Katrin Moye, ‘Stay Home, Save Lives, Protect the NHS’,  Albarellos (2020). Earthenware clay, white slip, underglazes, lead-free  glaze. Courtesy of Katrin Moye 

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Jasperware collection for Wedgwood. Those were middle class items  in people’s homes and those female artists sort of popularised those  characters in what became a design movement. I mean, do you see  yourself in that tradition? 

Katrin: It is very much on the design end of the art spectrum  that we get female contributors to the manufacture of pottery in  Stoke-on-Trent, right from Lady Templetown through to Clarice  Cliff in the ’20s and ’30s and then Jesse Tate for Midwinter a bit  later on. And so, I’m quite intrigued by how women artists are kept  in that domestic framework of ‘you can display these things because  they’re used in the home’ rather than being elevated in a gallery  setting and not seen as art for art galleries but as for your home,  for your domestic scenery, so I do feel as a maker of functional  ceramics I’m very much inside that tradition. So actually, this project  has given me a chance to break out of that because these are not  functional in any way. They are being displayed in an art gallery  and that does feel different for me. Yeah.  

Helen: But also, situating them within the literary house museum as  well has also been an important part of that. 

Katrin: I feel like, in a way, I was validated by making work based on  a ‘proper’ work of art, which is Tristram Shandy, so these are not things  that I’ve made up out of nowhere, I’ve responded to a text that was  already in existence, so … 

Helen: Is that about text or is that about the research process?  

Katrin: I think it’s about … I’ve done this before. I’ve responded to  literature in different ways before and I think it’s possibly partly because  I’m, in a very female way, unsure about the validity of my own voice,  so if I’ve got something to say, who’s going to want to hear that?  [Helen raises her hand] Well, yes, I am getting over that slowly. But  that’s where it all started for me. Who’s going to want to see a piece  of art that I’ve made? But people are going to want to see a piece of  art that I’ve made based on another piece of art that’s already firmly  established in the world. 

Helen: And your exhibition features artwork that responds to the  COVID-19 pandemic as well (Figure 46). So, they’re not strictly tied  to Tristram Shandy.  

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Katrin: I made those during and after this project, sort of in the thick  of the pandemic. And I did feel like I’d pretty much gotten over myself  and found my voice as an artist.  

Helen: There’s a politics to those pieces in the same way that I think  there’s a politics to these.  

Katrin: Yes, there is and they are found texts in the same way. So,  I’m quoting Boris Johnson, Dominic Cummings, and, you know, the  whole … those three-phrase slogans that we heard over and over again  when Dominic Cummings was still the main advisor — hands, face,  space and protect the NHS, save lives — those kinds of things. So,  they are on the medicine jars and jugs that I’ve made, translated really  badly into Latin because I thought that the clumsiness and awkwardness  of Google translating these phrases into Latin really imperfectly is  another way of illustrating the problems with communication and the  misunderstandings and the misinterpretations that happened, so that’s  another layer of commentary on what was happening last spring, last  summer. Yeah, yeah. But then I did, I did feel that I did have something  to say because I was going through it as well.  

Helen: So yeah, I think bringing those two collections together really  helps show the way that, you know, life is sort of interrupted art, in  the way that you described, you know, Tristram getting in his own  way writing his own narrative, but also the pandemic affecting your  own practice. 

Katrin: Yeah. And making lemonade out of lemons.² 

HELEN WILLIAMS 

Northumbria University 

NOTES 

1 Some of these pieces can be viewed online at Katrin Moye, ‘Filthy  Trash: Nine Dirty Jokes’, accessed 15 November 2024, https://www. katrinmoye.co.uk/projects/filthy-trash. 

2 For an overview of some pieces from the Filthy Trash exhibition,  see the film ‘Filthy Trash – a Collection of Literary Sculptures by  Katrin Moye’, YouTube, accessed 15 July 2024, https://www.youtube. com/watch?v=-mdxW_6DeLs. 

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