The artist, Miriam Elia, is probably best known for her series of very funny spoof children’s ‘learn to read’ books. I first met her about 10 years ago when I interviewed her for an article for Spiked after one of her works, exhibited under a pseudonym, Mimsy, was pulled from an exhibition, curated by the art group, Passion for Freedom*, because the police claimed the exhibit presented a provocation of terrorism against the gallery and threatened to charge an exorbitant security fee if it wasn’t removed. ISIS threatens Sylvania was a series of 3D tableaux using the Sylvanian Families miniature toy-sets to create idyllic scenes, where sinister miniature masked ISIS terrorists lurking at the edges, threatening invasion.
Miriam had already been busy stirring things up with her entertaining little book, ‘We Go to the Gallery’, which gently but sharply mocked the social pretensions of the art world. In this interview, she tells us about the development of her successful business that has emerged from her work as an artist, and about her run in with Penguin who tried to charge her with breach of copyright of the Ladybird logo. And about how she enjoys finding new ways of pricking hypocritical bubbles, not least the effects of lockdown during the COVID.
Miriam takes her inspiration from the traditions of satire in art, but like satirical artists from the past, such as Hogarth and Ralph Steadman, and her grandfather Ralph Sallon, a celebrated caricaturist, she is as committed to the aesthetic underpinnings of art and its subtly subversive potential, not in making bald political statements, but in challenging deluded groupthink and pointing out pretensions and hypocrisy — in a way that is often instantly funny but also challenging. So she explains about how she approaches developing her art, how the ideas emerge and take shape, and the centrality of the visual image.
We also talk about the contemporary threats to freedom of expression, its impacts on artists in Iran and the recent uprisings there, her concern about her Iranian friends, such as journalist Hengameh Shahidi, currently imprisoned in Iran for ‘propaganda against the system’, the impact of antisemitism on artists, and why Miriam thinks the Jewish tradition is so important to the survival of Western civilisation. Finally she tells us about her forthcoming publication which is about Moses … but not quite in the way you might expect.
Miriam’s work can be seen and bought at Dung Beetle Books.
(*You can hear more about the work of Passion for Freedom here, an earlier episode of ArtsFirst, in conversation with Manick Govinda and Passion for Freedom’s founder, Agnieszka Kolek.)
