MW: Is it important is it disgusting? 

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ML: Yes. Life’s not a clean business. Memories bleed together into fused recollections, tainting and flavouring each other depending on where we are up to when we remember. We are visceral fleshy bodies that smell, sweat, weep, bleed and shed. These excretions can be taboo, but are no threat when translated into paint. Paint is beautiful and seductive, even when it looks disgusting. I need that in the work, a push and pull between seduction and disgust. It helps the work feel like real life and more humane to me.

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MW: Your work walks a line between care and violence, can you elaborate on this tension/punch/battle of wills? 

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ML: It does walk the line. I think the battle of the wills is the perfect summation. My work is not an idealised vision of motherhood. It is just how it is, how it is experienced day-to-day in terms of the love and the grit. The manipulations we perform and/or endure to negotiate our way through the simplest of actions, like dressing or teeth cleaning. They are precarious moments that need navigating by both mother and child. They are also precious moments. It is about the shifting interactions and repositioning the overlaps. The ebb and flow of individual willpower to pull apart and come together through tantrums and loving trust, to be separate and united. Often it is on the knife-edge for the viewer to decide which way this is going to go. Again it’s a sensation of an open moment, not a prescribed, delineated narrative.

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MW: Who are you looking at painting-wise in your own practice?

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ML: Interesting you ask painting wise. I have been recently looking at Maria Lassnig, Emma Talbot and Nick Goss. I’ve just been introduced to Claire Tabouret’s work and saw her paintings for the first time at Almine Rich Gallery today. It’s a great show and well worth a visit. Oh, and I am also very into Hannah Murgatroyd's work. I am sure you are saying to yourself that there is also a lot of drawing going on in that mix of painters!

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MW: Yes, I'd agree - I first saw Emma Talbot's work in the flesh at the Drawing Room last year and Hannah Murgatroyd's at the Draw Now fair earlier this year and I engaged with their works as drawings. Even though paint is involved in their construction I feel that it has been applied as a drawn mark, with the same immediacy of intention as works made in the traditional sense of drawing, with dry media. I am very aware though that I am not a painter, and have been concentrating on monochrome drawing for a good 17 years, so it would be good to know how you feel about my definition? Perhaps, if an artist is a painter, then the tools most readily to hand to make drawings would naturally include paint and why should we separate them? It is very hard to articulate that line between them and a very interesting line it is!

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ML: The intention to make a drawing is a good way to put it. But intention doesn’t necessarily mean that that’s what will happen in the end. Other things can sneak into play. For me drawing is a very direct experience between heart, thought, eye and hand. I cannot definitely draw a line between painting and drawing. I say, let them bleed together and collapse into each other.

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MW: What do you do next? How do you develop?

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ML: I still feel a loss not working with my son's painting, but I am finding and developing my own voice again, taking on board some tactics I have learnt from my son's approach to making. I am working on handkerchiefs. These by contrast are very small intimate pocket-able moments to carry with you. You saw a few of the hankies at the Ghost Changing Room exhibition at Wimbledon Space. They were a gift from my grandmother to my family. They have a great visceral history as well as patterns or insignias, which I am responding to. I am about halfway through this series, revisiting domestic events. I’m also making work on tea towels and pillowcases, some of which reference my family history. I’m looking forward to seeing them accumulate all together at some point, maybe in a solo show. For the moment what happens next in the work will mirror what happens next in life. Let’s see what the future brings.

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