Circus interview with Mia

Interview by Jono Coote

Sitting on a video call at the tail end of November, Mia Roberts rubs her hands together to aid circulation as we chat. It is the first really cold night of the winter, energy prices are soaring, art is seen as a luxury by a government all too aware that a thriving creative scene gives people the tools for dissent and informed political debate. Those employed in the retail and hospitality sectors are similarly financially belittled in what is to all intents and purposes a cold class war and the end result is that her heating is off and she’s fucking freezing. As the rain bounces off both of our windows, and with the occasional interlude to divert her two cats from whatever nefarious projects they are scheming on, we get into a discussion which covers the North Wales skate scene, working with CIRCUS and Clown Skateboards, the appeal of wood carving and, overarchingly, the nature of art in the age of austerity. 


How was it growing up in the North Wales skate scene? It seems to have such a gnarly vibe for a string of small towns, in the sense of everyone skating all day, going for it, building their own obstacles etc. 

Well back when I started skating it was a really heavy drinking scene, all metal ramps, there were no real good facilities. You had Yannick Hammer and that, who would only skate street because that’s all there was in their areas. I think that’s why Yannick has that ethos of wanting to skate particularly crusty, gnarly places - because it’s representative of that mentality of skating anything, no matter how rough it is. There are some things I’ve tried to skate with Yannick, he’ll get a trick on it but I won’t have any clue how to step to it.


Jasper Clough started a bit after me, he’s always skating, and Rob has been a massive influence on everyone really. He helped to get Bangor Bowl, he’s got the bowl in his backyard. A lot of the younger skaters, little Jasper and Barney and that lot, they grew up learning to skate in those and that developed a definite style. So I think a mixture of Yannick, with his wanting to purposefully skate any crusty spot possible, Jasper and this dedication to getting as gnarly as you can and expressing yourself on a board, and Rob as the architect of these spots that people have brought the Yannick and Jasper ethos to - it’s kind of become one thing, where you’ve got people like Charlie, Aden and Barney. Barney has got the most crazy surfer style, it isn’t very tech but he’ll lean so far into a grind in a bowl that he’ll almost flip when he does it. That scene developed from the core people, Rob, Jasper and Yannick. There were obviously plenty more before then, but they were the ones that developed the whole ‘Keep North Wales Gnarly’ vibe.


DIY plays a massive part in that I feel. You lot just had your DIY additions to a local skatepark knocked down, right?

Well Dan Williams, who ran D88 until he passed away, was a massive influence as well. With the DIY stuff, Rob has always been on it, Jasper is always wanting to do it. All of us will help out with it as best we can, but it was Dan who got me into building stuff. I originally wanted to build some curbs and maybe a little concrete kicker at this spot in Holyhead where we all used to skate flatground, which is where I started skating. When Dan came back from Thailand, he had much bigger plans. I wanted a small kicker, ended up helping him out and he made it three times the size. Then he built a quarter using Rob’s knowledge of whippy transitions. We all pitched in but Dan was the main orchestrator in Holyhead that got me into building stuff. Then you had Rob building the Ghosties years ago, Jasper and Pedr (Parsons) building what became the D88 tombstone, which I helped with. It’s hard to skate that thing - essentially a wall with a quarter up to it, steeper than Rob’s shallow end. Sox did a front blunt on it, which was crazy. After that, me and Jasper added the extension with a plan to make a bowled corner which would blend into that steeper ramp. It that got smashed down, even though we made a whole health and safety thing. We thought we’d blag it and make it look semi-official by sending an application through to the council, but they must have either seen through that pretty quickly or taken no notice of it. It was worth it, it was good fun to skate at the time. Hopefully more of the young lot will get into that and start adapting and building new spots when they get to that point.


I guess that’s the thing with DIY spots, you’re not expecting it to last forever but at least you’ve got something to skate yourself for a bit, learned something new about concreting or even just increased your skill at mixing and finishing the concrete. Then the younger skaters see you do it and realise they don’t have to skate the thing, no matter how good it is, that the council have had built for them. 

I feel like maybe it’s a mental thing, but an obstacle you’ve built yourself always feels better to skate on, even if it’s not built as well as it could be. You’re always learning something, though it can definitely test relationships and friendships because everyone is so passionate about it. It’s definitely more fun doing a frontside grind on a quarter you’ve built yourself than doing it on some mellow council quarter. Half the time the council will have this idea that consulting all the kids and everyone in the area means you’ll come out with a good park, while most of the time a lot of the younger kids don’t really know what they want. When they get it, it doesn’t really result in longevity, it doesn’t really help with progression. With Rob, Jasper and everyone, they’re of the mentality that if you build something gnarly in the first place people are going to adapt to it and skate something that will last them for ages. If you build something easy then they’re going to learn to skate it, get bored, move on to something else and then the park is obsolete. If you want to create a facility that lasts a long time, consult the people that know best… Sorry, my cat is at the door. He sometimes pushes the door shut, locks himself in and then starts meowing.


You mentioned D88 before, how long was Dan back in North Wales and how integral was he to the scene?

Well he was back and forth between here and Thailand, but he came back when the idea of building something was coming about and he was the main person to push that and get that going. I had very limited ideas and plans for that space and he was like, “Let’s just go for it.” His attitude and the way he approached things, I learned a lot from that. From Rob and Jasper as well, but at the time in Holyhead it was Dan that wanted to push it. He’d be up at 6 or 7 in the morning, go to a builders yard to buy a ton of cement and drive it to the spot in his van, then reverse his van super quick in the hope that when he stopped suddenly all the cement and sand would fly out the back door. I had a really good time building stuff with him, he was always really stoked on building stuff and doing stuff like that. A lot of the younger lot in Holyhead were influenced by that. He got stuff done quickly just by being motivated and doing it, with the help of Rob as well - most of the things built around here have Rob’s tree roots stuck in there in some way. But yeah, Dan was a big part of getting things done, and I hope we can keep on that way as part of his memory.


Definitely. I know you’ve got some cash from the Clown DIY fund, I imagine you’ve been thinking up plans for that?

Well essentially Jasper is the person who organised the Clown funding. Because those other obstacles got smashed down, and we were originally going to build the bowl corner with that money, the next idea is maybe building an undercover spot as we don’t have one around here. Jasper also had the idea of adapting different spots in the area, making certain spots really good to skate or even fabricating things that you could move around. There are a lot of different ideas being thrown around. 


The main thing with building obstacles now is having a consensus of where to build it - some places around here might be great ideas, or might see the spot knocked down in an instant, so how do you utilise funds to make the most of them? We might test certain spots, build a little bit somewhere and see if it gets knocked down, adapt a spot and leave it for a bit to see if it survives. There’s this spot, it’s not quite a bank and it’s not quite a wallride, but it has a curb at the bottom; all it would need would be a little sweetener and it would be like those whippy banks in Leeds Uni that you guys skate. That’s a possibility, we just need to see if the concrete gets removed and if it doesn’t we can make it into a really decent thing.


I know Jasper has fabricated a kicker and been using it in places, I don’t know if you’ve seen that? He had one of those keys for popping up drains and one day the police almost arrested him and took his drain key, so he got a fabricator to build a kicker to the exact specification of a board being stood up underneath one of them. It’s made out of corrugated metal so it makes that sound as you go across it. We’ve been taking that around, rub bricking things, getting curbs going.


Moving on to your artwork, and kind of going on from what we were talking about before I started recording, successive Tory governments have long made it clear that the arts are not their priority. Do you see culture having suffered as a result of years of conservative rule, or conversely has it acted as a stoke to the fires of protest art? Or, more likely, a grey area combination of the two?

I think things are always better when you have the resources. It’s funny, there’s always that Tory notion that people who don’t have money are just lazier than everyone else… sorry, the cat’s being a dick again. Whenever I have a video call recently, they’re both at it. Anyway, every time I’ve been given the resources to do something, it’s easier, which should be pretty self evident. I think that there will always be people making artwork, and it will always thrive in both negative and positive situations because people react to things and people want to make things - it’s just part of people, part of being alive. I think it’s probably resulted in art being more subversive, more negative, things have gone in that direction more as people react to their dire living situation. I just can’t wait for the Tory government to be out really. You can’t really make any more excuses when you’ve been in power for twelve years. A lot of their policies, the idea of trickle down economics etc., work on the assumption that people should make profit from other people. Me and Jasper were talking the other day, trying to figure out how capitalism could be moved towards a more socialist and syndicalist system. 


You’d need a widely unionised workforce with power taken away from companies like Amazon, and a nationalised public sector where the power doesn’t reside in one place, but there are different public utilities which are separate and democratically elected entities. Then if people don’t like something they can change it, if someone is doing something corrupt, they can be voted out. There’s no one government with people mediating what people can and can’t do. It would take a higher level of tax, but as a result people would get a much better system where everyone gets a say in what we do. I don’t even know if that’s what your question was, it’s freezing here and I might be waffling. 


I mean, we were both chatting earlier about how the money just isn’t there for the majority of the populace to work in their preferred creative field. Apart from a very lucky few, you can’t just be a writer or an illustrator or a painter, you have to work a part or full time job which hopefully allows you at least some freedom to indulge in your ideal creative outlet. 

Yeah, like I was saying before about the Tory idea that people who work hard make more money. If I’m really rich, I have the resources to be able to take my creative projects to fruition. In that respect, whenever the government slashes funding in the arts, it means less resources for creative people to adapt and put that out there. But then, just as much, you might also get a reaction to that and it could be a lot more subversive in nature.


Do you think that skateboarding acts as a kind of gateway to creative practice that you may not otherwise have? Through both the sense of DIY which permeates throughout and through the semi-egalitarian nature of the scene, in that the person filming the videos, shooting the photos and putting together the magazines is probably at the skatepark or spot next to you?

That’s true, and I think that skateboarding is particularly good at promoting creativity even through the idea of it. I don’t know if it’s whether creative people are more likely to start skateboarding, or that skateboarding helps people become more creative through its purpose, which is to reevaluate your surroundings. Maybe that works in both ways, creative people flock to it to express themselves and people end up being more creative as a result of it. 


There is that divergence in the scene and types of skating where it feels like, as skating gets bigger, then the corporations and people trying to make money out of it… I think Lance Mountain said something similar, in that they are trying to put a box around what skating is. “This is your arena,” making a training facility for future Olympians, when I would rather skateparks that feel like DIY obstacles. Make something that people look at and wonder how they can express themselves, on this piece of wood, with this obstacle. It seems like every time skating has got too able to be judged in a sports environment, it crashes because it gets boring. People start doing the same thing… you see it in street contests, people doing the same tricks, same lines. 


I guess the classic contest lines people talk about for years, Tom Knox at Baysixty6 or Busenitz at Tampa, are from skaters who have grown up skating the streets. Going back to your artwork, it is often crowded with figures and details twisting around each other, a chaotic, sinuous succession of scenes - for me bringing to mind artists from Ed Templeton to Nick Blinko, but who do you find influences your style? 

So the way I work… I don’t know if you ever think about how you think? So at the end of the day, I’ll walk down the street and there are so many different things happening, in the sense of thoughts, things I’m interacting with, social interactions that I’ve experienced and barely even remember because I’m just going through the motions. If you actually think about it, it’s really not linear. You might think that the way your day was structured was a linear thing, but if you think about all this stuff going on it’s a constant buzz of different interactions and influences that construct your existence. I find that very interesting, so what I try to do in my work is make an image through amalgamating these different local things. I might take an aspect of something from an interaction I’ve had in the day, a conversation I’ve overheard, local folklore, something like this local guy called Toffo who got stuck between a local football stadium fence, because it all makes up existence and how you perceive the world. 


When my Nan passed away, over a year ago now, I made a piece of work for the Arts Council. I went in to see her before she passed, she wasn’t very well and she’d fallen out of her bed so my mum woke me up in the middle of the night to help her get back into bed. We drove over, I remember I went to help her off the floor and she had this kind of slumped look. It was such a strange thing to have seen a grandparent, who you see as this matriarchal figure - almost beyond human in some respect when you’re a child - slumped on the floor. It made me think about life, death and existence as a whole. It was an interesting and shocking thing. I got her into bed, held her hand and stuff, it was the last time I saw her really. When I made that piece of work, the thing that stood out was that I ended up making the main character a boxed in figure with the walls closing in, this claustrophobic thing of death creeping in, whilst also having the character as best I could in the position of my Nan slumped. The character wasn’t my Nan, it wasn’t linear like that, but it’s interesting how my brain has burned the image of that figure into my head and I had to apply it to something. 


The figure may not have anything to do with anything like that, but I feel like the best representation of life when I’m making anything like that is to try and put all kinds of things that may have no relevance together, because they all make up how you think and what’s in your brain. Mashing them all together makes an image that other people can take things from and adapt from. That’s the way I try and work, making an image using 30 or 40 different narratives which get mashed into one image and eventually it creates its own narrative as a result. I want to represent the chaos of how your brain works, I guess.


There’s plenty of theories out there exploring the idea that what we can perceive with our five senses is only the half of what is actually happening in the world. There’s a lot more happening in the world beyond our ken. I think that, with creative practice, it has become over the course of centuries one of humanity's major ways of unpacking more through what our subconscious catches.

Yeah, definitely. It’s a weird one, when I was at uni I used to always try and create narratives and meaning behind things. Then I realised that maybe it isn’t for me to do that, it’s for someone else to do that. What I need to do is just react to existence in the moment, not try and overthink it. Maybe it has no value or meaning, I mean the only importance it has is perhaps the value you put on it yourself. That’s the way I’ve been doing it, trying to make it more true to how I react to things because that’s all I know really. There will always be someone doing something more technical, or interesting, than what I do.


But what one person sees as more technical or interesting is going to be different to another. How the audience perceives the art isn’t necessarily the way the author intended it.

I’ve started to realise that the majority of people, when they see a piece of artwork, before they’ve read anything about it they’ll have a feeling and that feeling is related to what experiences they’ve had. That really is more important. The point of my work is not, “This is the big plan for the work I’ve been doing,” it’s just existence; “These are the different things that have been going through my head.” I think everyone takes something different from an image or piece of work, so why should I try and influence them rather than reacting to what I experience? Existence is only the meaning you put on it yourself, when you come down to it, because we’re all going to die and that’s it. For some reason I like making pieces of work, so I guess I’ll just do it until I get bored.


So how did your connection to Clown and CIRCUS come about? Would it have been the original incarnation, or the revamped version?

It was the restart when I first became aware of them, but Benny Fairfax was on the team years ago, right? I can’t remember how we started talking, but me and Jeff were talking on social media about CIRCUS and everything related to that. We had a chat on the phone after that and I really liked what they were trying to do with art projects to help community initiatives. The stuff they’re doing with DIY projects, all of that, it’s really good and really nice. So we started talking, then just got on it really. It’s been good to see all the different things that have been going on. 


Going against what we were saying earlier, I guess the bigger skating gets then the more money goes into it and projects like this. But, I don’t know if that money always goes in the right direction, so I’m not sure if that works. I guess it would be good to see more of the kind of stuff Clown is doing going on with other companies, I’d like to see more of a push towards helping community projects, things like that. Putting resources into the hands of people who want to build things means that you get a unique range of obstacles being built, which is wicked. 


What have you created for this collaboration with CIRCUS, and what informed the work you made?

So I think that’s how we got talking actually - Clown were following me on social media and ended up seeing the piece of work I’d done for the Arts Council which we were talking about earlier. The piece of work is a plant pot that has all these different characters coming out of it and we were originally going to do a few boards which took a cut from that piece of work. After some back and forth over what would work on a board visually, I took the idea of the plant pot with the characters in it and remade a new piece which was similar but ultimately it’s own thing. Eventually, through a back and forth conversation about what would work on a board, it worked out - we had some trouble with colour schemes, but I think in the end we’ve decided to go with black and white.


It’s an adaptation of a carving which has been remade digitally, mostly because if you make a carving you have to get an image which is really hi-res and taking a picture of a carving is quite difficult. What you have to do really is get the carving sorted, bring it into a digital medium and make it that way. It’s still got the carving marks you would have anyway, I’ve just brought it onto a computer to make it easier to transfer to a board graphic. I think we’ll try and do a print of it at some point as well, so maybe we could try some different colours then.


You’ve been talking for a while about starting a screen printing business too, looking into whether it’s viable, what is it about that which appeals to you?

Well I think carving has an aesthetic which is quite visually appealing, and with future art projects I’d like to work with sculpture. Using the medium of carving and printmaking is what I started with, doing prints of these woodblocks, but the woodblocks themselves had more of an impact than the prints half the time and I’d end up just displaying them. I kept making larger and larger woodblocks, as I didn’t feel like I’d quite realised… you know when you learn a new trick on a board, you don’t want to film it until you really think you can do it? I felt like I hadn’t perfected what I wanted in the medium of carving, so I kept making them. With the last one I did I felt like it was close to what I would like to have done, so now I’ll start making sculptures and bringing this three dimensional element to my work. We’ll see how that goes. 


With screen printing, I still love the medium of printmaking and I’d still love to teach screen printing at some point. As a way of getting out of the banal existence of working in retail, I think it would be something I would really enjoy. I’ve set up a light exposure unit in the garage, in the attic I’ve got a screen printing set up going, but I’ve yet to bite the bullet and actually start making some work. It’s hard when you’re balancing other stuff, but I guess you’ve just got to start doing it and it will work out. I know I could spend more time on it, but I still want to go skating and stuff. 


Sometimes, however much else you’ve got on, skateboarding needs to take priority.

When I stopped drinking and stuff, I don’t think I couldn’t have done it if I couldn’t skate. It might not be healthy to put so much of your mental health on one thing, but I don’t think people who don’t skate can really… I love it so much I’ll go to sleep thinking about skateboarding, tricks I want to try or things I want to film. I’m not very good at it, but it doesn’t matter. The main thing is that I love being around people who are that obsessed with it and I can’t function without it. 

Board and Print Release.

The release Germinate by Mia Roberts will see the focus from hand-printed boards shift to the power through paper at the Circus new home. This dual release of a limited run of boards printed in the UK (25off) and the first official paper print release (46off) from the new Circus home in the USA will be the official handover from the UK to the USA. Both the board and the print designs are an adaptation of Mia's carving work which she is acclaimed and celebrated for.

The board will be released on clownskateboards.com – 16th Feb @ 11am GMT

The print will be released on the Circu Famil Store – 16th Feb @ 11am ET


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