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For UK-based artist Oli Kellett, the last four years have seen time foregrounded in his increasingly experimental work and practice, with both his most recent series – (2019-2021), which we discuss in-depth below, and the ongoing Soap Drawings (2019 –) depicting plain pencil renderings of individual bars of soap as they diminish in size – indicative of his growing fascination with the ephemeral.

It’s a radical aesthetic departure from the dramatic tableaux of his first major body of work, (2016-2022): a trajectory from beautifully shot representational photographs, awash with high-contrast chiaroscuro lighting, to a newly pared-back, powerfully minimalist arts practice.

The beautiful, large-format photos of people in contemplative poses suspended in the soft amber of sunlight at the cross roads cede to the visual austerity of monochrome marks scratched in cups and bowls by the unconscious journeys of many spoons directed by different hands. The sense of the sublime remains. But in Life Drawing, it feels closer to the source, indifferent to artifice.

After four years of global travel and endless urban exploration, the underlying question in Kellett’s photography – how does one best live their life? – began to inform the artist’s own journey and the daily creative practice he wanted to cultivate. Veering away from the results-oriented approach of obtaining ever more “successful” images, and increasingly enriched by Zen Buddhist philosophy, Kellett’s endeavours became process-driven and propelled by a meditative focus on profound realities hidden in plain sight.

He began Life Drawing in 2019 after recognising the accumulated etchings left by myriad individuals in miscellaneous crockery over time, and condensed months, years, even decades of somnambulistic tea-making or greedy ice-cream guzzling in each mesmerising photograph.

Despite the provenance of each work, which illustrates the rather unexceptional activities incidentally inflicted on the most ordinary of objects, the resulting images allude, intentionally or otherwise, to hugely existential themes. Space and time, the individual and the universal, collapse in on themselves in these beguiling photographs, whose ever-present central form is the eternal circle.

Kellett’s photographs offer various embellishments on the circular motif. One can perceive a brooding vortex leading to another dimension; an X-ray taken of a spherical eyeball; an incandescent sphere; or the woven fibres of a bird’s nest. Sometimes even graphite scribbles, guided by the ceramic vessel, that evoke the automatism of the American artist  .

In their humble origin and presentation, it’s hard to deny that Life Drawing channels the ethical principles at the heart of Taoism, the Chinese philosophy whose principles include “naturalness, spontaneity, [and] simplicity”, in addition to the core tenet of “” – action without intention! Themes of enlightenment, being, and universal “oneness” woozily emerge through these unaffected works, the unconscious actions of Kellett’s kin and anonymous individuals rendered visible and whose actions form the groundwork of these mystical and life-affirming images.

Below, Daniel Pateman speaks to Oli Kellett about the evolution of the Life Drawing series: discussing, among other things, the reason for the departure from his formative photographic practice; how Zen Buddhist and Taoist philosophy emerge in his most recent bodies of work; and how he was able to technically render the faint scratches in crockery and transform those accumulated marks into such visually arresting images.

Interview with Oli Kellett

DP: Hey Oli. Great to speak to you again. Can we start by talking about what instigated your transition in 2019 from the Cross Road Blues project to the Life Drawing stuff? Because from an aesthetic point of view at least they are very different.

OK: So, I think after working on the Cross Roads work for four years, I felt a little bit towards the end that I’d put a lot of pressure on myself to continually up the standard of the work. The idea of going out and taking the chance on finding a good picture every day, I didn’t think was conducive to the practice-led style I wanted to cultivate. I probably began to question the idea of chance more, and how you could create art through chance because…I don’t particularly like work that purely relies on chance. I’m much happier with artists like , who have an idea and then the work comes out of the idea.

DP: You like having a framework, some parameters to work within?

OK: Yeah, and that’s why Cross Road Blues suited me in 2016. The chance element was still there in terms of who’s going to show up but…I just began to question the idea of chance and didn’t want to rely on it really any longer.

DP: I suppose you’d already spent a long time on the one project as well [2016-2022], so maybe you felt like you’d exhausted all the possibilities of that concept. As you’ve said, it kind of wasn’t satisfying you anymore, artistically or creatively, and if it wasn’t a way you wanted to work anymore, it was time to move on.

OK: Yeah, it was those things. I still loved the project. I think I was ready to try a completely different way of working. I had no plans and I didn’t expect to make such a big shift in terms of material and method. I mean, it’s not photography, it’s not chance based, it’s kind of a daily thing. Which is the absolute opposite of what the Cross Road Blues work was. I mean, I really was keen to get back to the most basic form of art, which was pencil drawing, and I found the soap series was something that renews itself daily; the light is different in the soap dish, the reflections are different.

DP: I guess I was talking more about the Life Drawing images, what the link was between them. So, it’s still photography…but it’s an interesting hybrid between drawing and photography, because the “drawing” – etching might be a better word – is already there in the cup but you kind of have to bring it into being and make it visible.

OK: It was more a case of knowing that Cross Road Blues was coming to an end and just spending more time at home. I noticed these marks in bowls and I think I was quite in tune to look for them because I’d been drawing the soaps and that’s probably why I noticed the marks in the bowl and thought, ‘ah, they’re really interesting’.

But what I was most interested in was that these looked like drawings that had been created by somebody else. I was still a little bit in that ‘chance’ headspace, in that I was going around the charity shops buying these bowls, not knowing anything about who’d owned them or how long they’d been used for. And I really got quite a thrill out of that, those first six months.

I went to hundreds of charity shops down in the South East, from Canterbury all the way to Brighton, and all the towns and villages in between, trying to find these bowls. And in that respect, it’s not all that dissimilar to Cross Road Blues, where you walk out the door and try to find a picture. And I really loved the fact that I didn’t know anything about these bowls or who they belonged to, but I knew if there was a way of getting these marks off the bowl and onto the piece of paper, they would look unlike anything else I’d really seen before.

When I finally did figure out how to photograph them, I realised they all became circular. Then that led down this kind of Zen Buddhist, Enso circles path…the circle being the universal, eternal shape. And what photography is so good at is capturing a moment.

What I liked about these bowls so much is that every mark has been created in a split second. So, whether you’re stirring your tea or scrapping some ice-cream out of a bowl, it’s a real quick second. But when there’s hundreds of thousands of them all together, you suddenly get this shape which is this universal eternity, it’s forever, the circle, with no beginning and no end.

I felt it encapsulated what a photograph represents. I mean, with all the kind of street photographers from the 1960s, when cameras became handheld, suddenly it was about capturing a moment with a handheld camera that can last forever, that can never be repeated. And that’s what always excited me about photography.

DP: Yeah, and in that sense then they’re completely unique. I guess the photographs aren’t because you can make copies, and I think you do have a number of different editions. But the images themselves are basically co-authored, like you said, the accumulation of all these actions from anonymous people over time, so in that sense they are unique, wholly singular drawings.

OK: Yes, they are, but they also reference time. And I think at some point the concept of time became a much bigger focus in my approach to work. What with the Soap Drawings since then as well…and with the Life Drawing cups and bowls you’re compressing time into a single moment.

For example, a friend of mine’s mum’s Yorkshire pudding bowl has been used for a hundred years, and they use it purely for mixing Yorkshire puddings. So that’s a hundred years’ worth of Sunday lunches in that one image, and suddenly, that reveals something really interesting.

DP: And for you to be able be capture that compression of time in a single photo is pretty amazing. Did that piece make the final cut in the series?

OK: Yeah, I used that one and it turned out great [Life Drawing #2]. It’s very well used. You almost can’t make out individual lines. It looks something more like a murmur…a radial murmur [laughs].

DP: Just tying the work you’ve done in the last five-to-six years together – Cross Road Blues, your Soap Drawings and Life Drawing – would you say that the Life Drawing series kind of distils the topics and themes you’re most concerned with? I know you said you’d developed an interest in time. Because even the Cross Road Blues images resonate with stillness and a sense of spiritual revelation and I guess time kind of freezes in those images as well. Do you think those ideas also come through in Life Drawing, that kind of ephemerality?

OK: I think with the Cross Road Blues definitely the stillness, and yes, spiritual revelation as you say. That and guidance is exactly what I found through the work. And continuing that into the upper two projects since then – how do I word this? – I guess I’m more willing to experiment with how to achieve this idea of…enlightenment perhaps.

And just through reading a lot while making Cross Road Blues, I’m willing to experiment with how to make work. That series was a lot of the time about trying to find some enlightenment in a person’s posture or the tilt of their head, and a lot of the work since has been more about me trying to find some kind of enlightenment through the work myself. At that time, I knew nothing about…[pauses]

DP: Taoism?

OK: Yeah, I knew nothing about that of course…and I’d never stopped to think about any of life’s bigger questions. So, Cross Road Blues allowed me to have that time to think and…y’know, when you spend upwards of a thousand hours on your own walking the streets in different cities, these kinds of questions just come up out of nowhere.

That led me trying to explore these kinds of topics myself. With the Soap Drawings, I’ve kind of gone down this road of having a bit more discipline and restraint in order to do what I’m doing. I quite enjoy that now. I don’t want to change what I’m doing. I like seeing how that can change my life for the future.

DP: Part of what attracted me to the works is that they seem wilfully different to the overly processed, representational photography we’re often inundated with these days. These are very still and contemplative. You look at them and, personally, they make me feel calmer; I feel like you can kind of take a breath. They’re mysterious and a refreshing reminder to slow down and be present, and I think it’s powerful the way that you have approached the work. Even if you didn’t intend it initially, I really connect to the philosophical ideas channelled through the images.

OK: Yeah, and that’s the exact feeling I want these pictures to communicate with people. That, y’know, today is today and right now you’re part of an eternal moment. As you’re stirring a cup of tea, you’re not an individual on your own. You’re part of a giant, giant universe or eternal life or whatever.

And I guess I wanted people to be humbled by them. I mean, that’s how I feel about them. That’s what I wanted the work to show. Both the Cross Road Blues and the Life Drawing. And my ongoing Soap Drawing studies are kind of a continuation of that.

DP: The act of creating the Soap Drawings sounds like a slowing down for you. Every time you do one, every day, you have to have such incredible focus you can’t be anywhere else but where you are, honed in on the work.

OK: Yeah, yeah, and this comes down to meditation as well, which is something that I’ve done separately for the last four years. The benefits of a continued, repetitive, almost ritualistic approach to making work is something mediation has taught me. Meditation is a great teacher.

DP: So, one of the main things I wanted to ask you about was the technical process behind the creation of the Life Drawing photos. It’s fascinating because the images look so deceptively simple. Unless you view the actual image up close and see the incredible level of detail, people might just assume someone has just taken a pencil and drawn hundreds of circles and random marks on paper.

OK: So, when I first started doing this, I put a camera above the cup and took a picture with the macro lens, before realising that you only get the tiniest, tiniest depth of field. Maybe it’s about half a millimetre. You’ve got the base of the cup in focus and the rest is out of focus.

At this point it didn’t look anything like how I imagined. In fact, it didn’t even resemble a cup anymore it was so distorted by the focus. So, if I wanted the lines running around the inside of each cup to resemble graphite drawings on paper, I was going to have to find a way of focusing from the very bottom to the very top, because a pencil never becomes out of focus. It can be blurred and smudged, but that’s not the same as being out of focus. There’s a computer program called Capture One that allowed me to control the focus of the lens, half a millimetre at a time.

So, the cup is on the turntable, the camera is above that, and I have a flash somewhere else in the room. I have some frosting like tracing paper around the cup, which eliminates the highlights of the shadows even more. Then I would take a picture with the focus set to the very base of the cup, and then over the next 50 to 90 pictures the focus would be increased to the very top, and then I’d rotate the cup around 20 degrees and set the focus at the bottom again and do it over, again and again.

This is about a four-to-five-hour process. And then I took it into a programme used for focus stacking, which is when the focus from top to bottom is compressed into one single image – so 90 images into one image – and another programme that would stitch all of those 12 segments together…hopefully [laughs].

And occasionally it works, and sometimes it doesn’t work, because maybe along the way I’ve nudged the cup or something and then the images can never line up. Which is quite the most disheartening thing. And that’s why it took me so long to do the whole thing. Because once you’ve spent four or five hours doing that, and you finally put the images through the programme and find they don’t align…because it can’t be stitched by hand, it’s just so complicated. It needs this crazy programme to do it.

DP: I also wanted to discuss whether Cy Twombly might have been an influence, because for me, when I consider the Life Drawing work, it invokes automatic drawing, given these have been created from sort of unconscious actions over time. In that sense I’d call them automatic drawings that you kind of recognised, materialised, and brought into existence.

OK: It’s tricky. I mean, aesthetically they look like some of his drawings. But I think they come from such a different place. There’s more connection perhaps to the performance artists from the 70s. There’s a chap called who’s probably the most famous. Another British artist called . And these people kind of stood in a gallery with their arm outstretched and just drew these circles. But that’s not automatic drawing though, that’s more expressionist.

Going back to the drawing of the circles, it goes all the way back to the Renaissance artist , who drew a perfect circle with a brush in order to win the approval of the king to paint one of the Venetian cathedrals.

Then of course there’s a Rembrandt painting as well where he’s got two circles in the background of his self-portrait. So, the idea of drawing a perfect circle freehand is one of those massive ego things you do to prove how good you are.

Going back to the automatic drawings, I find the surrealist approach a more interesting and accurate place to come from. I mean, the thrill of these is that I don’t know where these cups and bowls have come from, or who’s made these marks.

As you say, all I’ve done is gone to find them and photograph them and presented them. In the same way that did with , he just took pictures of anonymous writing on walls and presented them as work, he didn’t know who’d written them.

DP: That kind of thing does fascinate me, what you’d probably call found art. The day-to-day stuff you’d find on a wall, in the street, the expression of the ordinary person that’s then been repurposed. So, it’s really cool that you’ve actualised it and drawn attention to these quotidian cutlery marks. They’re both very ordinary and quietly profound, and for me, your Life Drawing photos very much seem to echo the principles of Taoism and Eastern philosophy. They certainly channel the principle of wei wu wei…

OK: Action without intention – yes!

DP: Which is exactly what these are, aren’t they? Because the people, whoever has been making the marks, they haven’t been aware that they’re helping to create a future art work, or even fully aware of what they’re doing. They’re like all of us first thing in the morning, just part of the flow of life absent-mindedly stirring a cup of tea or coffee.

OK: Yes, exactly, and that’s what is so beautiful about that, what’s so beautiful about photography. It’s the ordinary that’s captured that then takes on a life of its own, because you’ve captured a moment that can then live eternally as a print. Yeah, action without action, I know what you mean.

DP: Did you want to maybe talk about the symbolism of the circle generally, and what that means to you?

OK: So, the circle is very important to me now because the Soap Drawings are an ongoing, process-based work without a true beginning or end. After one bar of soap gradually gets used up, I’ll begin another soap on a new soap dish. And I think again it all comes back to the Life Drawing work, and the idea of the process being more important than the end result.

So, this kind of continuation of a project…this can continue forever for me. Yeah, going back to the circles, the circles have enabled me to appreciate the actual process of making work more than I did when I was just chasing a great picture.

DP: You’ve also mentioned before about the circle representing the eighth stage of enlightenment in the Ox Herding images [in Zen Buddhism these are 10 pictures which depict the journey towards enlightenment].

OK: Yeah, the Ox Herding pictures are interesting. And I only really kind of appreciated that…one of the pictures of mine just looks identical to one of the Ox Herding drawings, which is the kind of emptiness. And that’s the process of meditation isn’t it, of enlightenment, to become empty. Yeah, I mean the link to them is there…I just don’t know exactly how.

DP: It could be incidental. It sounds like you were driven by inspiration rather than any preconceived desire to explore Taoism. But when you look at it retrospectively it all adds up. [The commentary by Guo-an Shi-yuan, the twelfth century monk, alongside the image of an Enso circle notes that “the circle symbolises the all-encompassing emptiness that constitutes the ground of all things”.] I mean, the individual and the universal definitely seem to merge into one in your work.

OK: Thank you, that’s quite a compliment. I feel linking the individual with the most universal of experiences is what artists have attempted to articulate for hundreds of years, so it’s very kind of you to recognise that.

Oli Kellett will have his third solo exhibition of work at in London later this year, planned to coincide with the release of a monograph on his Cross Road Blues series.