Jade Magenta Williams: A Smart Price Way of Life

Sara Jaspan

Sara Jaspan speaks to Jade Magenta Williams about her current solo exhibition, ‘A Smart Price Way of Life’ at PAPER Gallery in Manchester (1-15 May, Saturdays only, 11am-5pm).

Isolated against a plain white background, the series of objects depicted in ‘A Smart Price Way of Life’ arrive in a monochrome haze of pink that heightens their slightly dated appearance. A 10p packet of Space Raiders, a crumpled Kwik Save carrier bag, a teaspoon from the 1996 Tetley Tea Folk Collection, a BT phone box, a VHS copy of Trainspotting – The Green Edition, a pre-paid electric meter token, a Spice Girls branded Cadbury’s assortment box.  

These are all artefacts either from or that evoke Manchester-based artist Jade Magenta Williams’ memories of childhood – a childhood spent living in North Wales in the 1990s, shaped by the popular culture of Britain at that time and by her experience of growing up in a family dependent on the welfare state; a system that drastically under-served them, along with countless others during the period, as it does today. The title of the series speaks to this, referencing the ‘value’ range of products that helped sustain her and her family’s no-frills (or, ‘no-thrills’, as she quips) way of life. Each object has either been scanned or photographed and then printed on pink printer paper of the kind she used to draw on when she was very young, before being collaged onto white A4 paper.  

Williams graduated from a Masters in Fine Art from the University of Salford in 2020 and ‘A Smart Price Way of Life’ at PAPER Gallery marks her first solo exhibition. The show was originally set to open in October but was impacted by Covid-19 restrictions so will now run 1-15 May. Here she shares some of the ideas and experiences that inform the work.  

Sara Jaspan: I understand that your aim for this body of work was to ‘make tangible’ your earliest memories of childhood. Could you explain what lay behind this drive? 

Jade Magenta Williams: I was thinking a lot about identity and how the environments we are raised in influence who we are as individuals. This led me to consider the aspects of my own identity which I feel define me. There has been increasing discussion in recent years surrounding the marginalisation of societal groups with the aim of combatting discrimination and the perpetuation of damaging stereotypes. I spent the last year of my undergrad, and the start of my master’s, exploring gender representation within visual culture – what it means to be a woman in the 21st century, how women have been represented throughout history and why, and how women choose to represent themselves. However, I felt that there had been limited (albeit somewhat increasing) discussion surrounding class and social hierarchies within contemporary art.

I grew up in a family reliant on the welfare system. Some would consider us working class. However, technically we were part of the underclass. The hardest part about growing up in relative poverty was not the lack of security but being subject to hateful vitriol and damaging rhetoric from people in more fortunate positions. Rhetoric such as, ‘poor people shouldn’t have children’, ‘people on benefits are un-aspirational; they don’t try hard enough’, ‘council estates are rough and dangerous’, and ‘poor people are unintelligent and uneducated, dirty, lack morals’. Or, the assumption that the state has provided you with a grandiose lifestyle (think: holidays, luxury items, large houses etc.). 

I have grown increasingly more curious with age as to why people are so concerned with, and in particular critical of, the lives of the most underprivileged in society. This rhetoric derives from the eugenics-based notion that social deprivation is the fault of the individual, related to inherited characteristics, a sort of human defect if you will. I wanted to provide a narrative on class from the perspective of someone with lived experience, with the sole aim of debunking myths surrounding class stereotypes, in particular those which I find to be damaging or false.

SJ: Could you describe your childhood and experience of growing up in the 90s? 

JMW: I grew up in a small castle village called Hawarden in North Wales, which has a population of just under 2,000. My world was very small, I played out on my estate, the next street, and the park across the road. My school was just a stone’s throw away. We had a Co-op, post office, chippy and a duck pond. The nearest supermarket was up the motorway, which we would walk up to get our shopping. The best days would be getting the bus to Chester with my mum. We didn’t (and still don’t) have a car, so eight miles on the bus was pretty much as far as we would get. I had three siblings (of which I am the eldest). I could read by 11 months and learned the alphabet before I went to school. My mum was incredibly encouraging and spent so much of my youth reading to me, buying me books, crayons and pens etc. The TV was off a lot and CDs were often playing on repeat. My parents were young, and Mum was into all the good stuff. She exposed me to everything I like today really! Nirvana, The Cure, Pulp, Suede, Supergrass, loads of Britpop (it was the 90s, of course). 

We had a lot of hard times, which were perpetuated by my father’s behaviours. But I have so many fond memories. I got to spend a lot of time with my mum, which I am really grateful for. We had a modest life; ‘no thrills’ I like to say. That’s why I named the show ‘A smart price way of life’, in homage to the understated nature of it all. We didn’t have our own home, a car, holidays, days out. There was nothing grandiose about any of it. We took each day as it came; we were resourceful and creative. 

SJ: Has your relationship to or understanding of that period shifted at all as you’ve got older? 

JMW: As I grew older, I gained a greater understanding of the socio-economic and political factors that were partly responsible for the poverty that many people like my own family experienced. My parents grew up in Thatcher’s Britain and the effects of that period were very much felt throughout the 90s. There were certain obstacles that kept my mother in what must have been an isolating position. Really basic things that most people would take for granted were extremely difficult. Banks wouldn’t let her join to open an account due to her small income; the DWP only counted the male partner in their statistics, meaning my mum technically didn’t exist; and male partners had to sign all giro cheques (our sole income) before they could be cashed. She didn’t exist statistically for over a decade, wasn’t offered any help, and had limited control over her own finances. I feel that many people were let down in that era and simultaneously vilified. I don’t have a rose-tinted view; the music was great but I’m very glad to be here in 2021 (albeit with our own set of generational issues). 

SJ: And yet I initially interpreted a degree of nostalgia when I encountered these images. Do you feel this is also part of the work in some way? 

JMW: I think there is bound to be an element of sentimentality when dealing with images and/or objects from your youth. However, each image/object is associated with an individual memory of mine, and (as with the nature of memory) some associations are positive and/or negative. I’m intrigued to see how people respond to the work, and whether they will be seduced by the nostalgic element. It wasn’t necessarily my intention, but the work definitely allows for this seduction – particularly the images which reference pop culture and consumer products as they possess greater universality. 

SJ: Are there specific stories or memories tied to each object? If so, could you share a few? 

JMW: The image of the kitchen cupboards is a nod to the council issued cupboards seen in every British council house throughout the 70s, 80s and 90s. You still see them in some of the houses today. This set up is identical to the ones in the house I lived in till I was nine years old. There is nothing luxurious about having the same government issued kitchen as the next person. 

The image of the switch with a red light above it is a switch for an immersion heater. People reliant on benefits often struggle with the ever-rising costs of fuel and often have to prioritise one essential bill over another. When I was young, we had to use an electric meter, which you would purchase tokens for at the local post office. This is the most expensive way to pay for energy, but it was our only option at the time. When there was no gas left you could turn the immersion heater on, which would heat water up using your electric. However, this was costly and would use up your electric quickly. If your energy ran out at night you would be cut off until you topped up again so we always had emergency candles and matches at the ready! (The laws have since changed and you can’t be cut off between 6pm-9am.)  

I put the cigarettes and ashtray in there to provoke, in a way. My parents smoked for all of two seconds in the 90s, but there is a damaging assumption that those on welfare spend all their money on cigarettes and alcohol. This is my attempt to poke fun at that rhetoric. 

Asda and Panda Pops go hand-in-hand. Going to the supermarket was an event for me and on good days I would get really excited walking up the motorway thinking about strawberry ice cream and jelly flavoured pop. Not all supermarket trips were great – a lot involved working out how to make £3 last days.

I included The Lightening Seeds’ single ‘Lucky You’ rather ironically. I used to sit and play with the pull-out tabs which you could use to line up the symbols on the fruit machine shaped cover. My dad used to gamble and would sometimes disappear for days with the family money. The song is about someone who lies in spite of the truth. I definitely didn’t feel lucky in those moments. 

SJ: Are many of these actual objects from your past or have most been sourced retrospectively e.g., via the internet? What fuels your desire to collect in either form?   

JMW: They are a combination of both. Some are objects I own, such as The Lightening Seeds single, my mum’s Jamiroquai t-shirt and Cure mixtape, my National Insurance card, and the Jarvis Cocker inflatable. I was working with what we still had from that time, which isn’t a lot. We moved around a little after I turned nine and lost a large majority of items from our collective youth when my dad was supposed to clear the house. When I was 12, he destroyed most of our family photos after my mum asked him to leave. The Select magazine (along with the rest of my mum’s entire magazine collection) was lost in the move but I somehow managed to source one during the project. A lovely woman named Fee who runs a vintage store down south kindly sent it to me from her physical store. It arrived intact and still within its original replica cereal box. It even contained the 25-year-old sealed Nik Naks, Kellogg’s Corn Pops, and Riesen chocolate! I guess my sense of loss and a desire to preserve are my biggest motivations for collecting. 

SJ: Would you say any of the works also celebrate working-class culture at all? 

JMW: I think the main aspect of working-class culture that I wanted to celebrate was the tenacity of those individuals who keep going despite the various barriers and difficulties they might face in life. 

SJ: Consumerism has also been stated as a theme. Could you talk a little about this? 

JMW: The work is about consumerism in the sense that the I often feel individuals are judged by what they consume. Whether that be in the literal sense of objects and things (the clothes you wear, the food you eat, your home and everything inside and outside of it) or in terms of culture, the recreational activities you participate in, the things you do, and the places you go. 

The work is a commentary on my own lack of economic capital. However, its existence within the vacuum of the contemporary art world, and the show’s existence within the formal gallery setting, highlights my cultural capital. I think there’s something interesting about this juxtaposition.

SJ: What is your experience of being a working-class person operating within the arts today? 

JMW: During my undergrad I dedicated myself to becoming immersed in the local art scene in an attempt to understand how it operated and decipher my place within it. I met a lot of people from all over – some really great people, but also people from backgrounds so completely different to mine I wasn’t sure if I could relate to them. People who I shared interests with but who couldn’t really understand what it’s like to experience hardship.

I think my biggest struggle was when I was quizzed about my finances. When I was struggling to pay for materials in my third year and was told: ‘You just need to beg, steal, and borrow’. Or when I missed the international trips and was asked: ‘You don’t have a passport? But why?’ A fellow student even asked: ‘But how will you jet off to Paris on the weekends?’ It became increasingly apparent that some people’s idea of hardship was very different to my own.

I experienced a lot of talk about areas being rough and dangerous; areas in which I and my family lived. I’ve always disliked when an area is referred to as ‘rough’ as I think what it really implies is that the people who live there are rough. In a second-year lecture, we were shown Lucian Freud’s portrait of a DWP worker, Benefits Supervisor Sleeping (1995). The tutor asked if anyone knew what the DWP was. No one answered apart from me. When I explained it was the Department for Work and Pensions, a fellow class mate responded, ‘The dole? Isn’t that those scroungers?’ I asked him not to use that term as it was derogatory.

My class awareness has definitely been heightened over the last four to five years. I am very pleased with my achievements, and I feel like I’ve worked really hard for them, fought even at times! I believe in trying your best and being nice to people. I think that’s what genuinely get you where you want to be. I am honoured to be showing at PAPER – it’s a fantastic gallery space and David Hancock and his team have done a lot to support artists like myself!

SJ: How do you see this body of work in relation to austerity and rising levels of poverty in the UK today? 

JMW: The work I have made is essentially a reminder that poverty does exist in the UK. It existed in the 90s and it exists now. The faces of poverty are all different and sometimes those who are struggling are reluctant to speak up through fear of judgment. Little has changed since I was young, however now we have the depressing introduction of food banks and celebrities campaigning for free school meal extensions. Benefit sanctions are rife, as they were in the 90s. Then they were just called ‘end of claim’. Sometimes you would be waiting for your cheque only to find that your claim had unexpectedly ended. They would send you a 30-page form to fill in and you would have to wait almost a month to receive any money again. Poverty is still rife, along with the prejudice surrounding those who are subject to it. The pandemic seems to have sparked slight discussion around flaws within the welfare system, however I hope these discussions continue in the future outside of this context. To anyone who thinks it is an easy way of life I would ask: ‘Would you want to live it?’. 

SJ: When did you first start making art? And what has your journey been like since? 

JMW: My creativity was encouraged from a young age by my mother who advocated my wish to pursue art. It really started with an easel from the Early Learning Centre when I was three. My career was almost thwarted when a homeless man tried to walk off the bus with it shortly after my mother purchased it! I left school at 14 due to bullying and never achieved my GCSEs. I struggled to get into college for three years until I was accepted on to an Access to HE course in Art and Design at Coleg Menai in Bangor. Internal mayhem with staff on temporary contracts affected the delivery of teaching, however the life drawing sessions in the first term were really crucial to my development and furthered my interest in drawing and painting. I was accepted onto the Fine Art course at Manchester Metropolitan in 2013 but the timing was off. By the time I came back to study Fine Art at the University of Salford in 2016 I was really scared of arts education. However, I had nothing to fear. My experience at Salford was fantastic. I gained a lot of confidence, knowledge, and crucial insight into the art locality. That’s why I came back to do my MA in 2019 (which I completed September 2020). I spent most of my undergrad painting and drawing. The medium has since changed but the essential crux of my work has remained the same: I make work about lived experience and the complexities of being human.

‘A Smart Price Way of Life’ runs at PAPER Gallery in Manchester until 15 May. The gallery is only open on Saturdays, 11am-5pm.