So, to begin – how did the idea for the book Twenty Entities and Nichola’s film The Romance of Bricks come about? Were the two of you friends beforehand?

(L) I’ve known Nichola since we met in London, 1977. We’ve worked together on projects, collages and drawings, a couple of performances. We live around the corner from each other and our kids have grown up together. She has always been a fly on the wall with a camera, capturing embarrassing dance moves, post operation scars, happy times, foul moods...

(N) I think I must have met Liz in another life. We just fell in with each other and got each other’s weird humour.

(L) Before making Romance of Bricks, the projects we created together were not exactly just for fun, but had us in stitches laughing!

Liz, your artworks are so tactile and fascinating - they really spark curiosity. On the face of it, they are quite strange and some might say grotesque or odd – is that the reaction you want to encourage in people?

(L) To put it bluntly – I make them for myself without imagining what others might think. For years they felt so personal I didn’t envisage anyone else ever seeing them. The first time I showed them was in The Electric Palace cinema in Hastings. I was comfortable with that and they looked relaxed, being in the dark most of the time. One dropped off during a film.

I don’t know what the name for the invisible judgemental person is, the one who looks over your shoulder when you’re working... Anyway, this person stays well out of the way when I make the Boxmen. It would be too boring for them, watching me tear up paper and endlessly gluing, not much decision making is involved until I get to the head.

When I make the face, I often favour the friendly jowly look rather than streamlined and unapproachable. Even when the only facial feature is a gash of mouth, you are in the presence of someone reflective and complicated. 

People have very different interpretations of the thoughts, personality and even gender of the Boxmen. It reminds me of the dog I had called Rufus (he stars in Nichola’s film); when I used to park him outside the shop, people would come in and say “your dog seems even more depressed than normal today.“ Five minutes later someone else might say “He’s such a serene old soul.”

I can see that they might be thought grotesque initially, but if you’ve seen a few of them you’d realise that for Boxmen, having arms made of twine so you can be hung up, is completely normal.

Nichola, what was your initial reaction to Liz’s work?

(N) I love how playful Liz is! It’s like holding on to that thing you have when you're little, when you never stop making things up because you don’t yet know what life could be. She has her own very different world – and sometimes our worlds collide. When we work together it's often irreverent.

Did you find it easy to encapsulate Liz’s world throughout the film Nichola? I really felt as if I was almost underwater and immersed whilst watching it. The use of sound and Liz’s narrative was almost dreamlike.

(N)I have a compulsion to film because it intensifies what I’m looking at. It makes every day even more interesting than it already is. I had filmed Liz’s world a lot over the years - we often went out and did things together, so we already had a collection of filmed moments.

How collaborative was the process of making the film? Did you feedback to each other throughout the process or work separately?

(L) Because Nichola is already an established film maker, with completely her own sensibility, I didn’t want to have any say in what form the film should take. At some early point in the process it became clear she was doing a film portrait of me. I could sense it taking shape – sometimes, such as in the dream sequences, it was a very mysterious cloudy shape. It was always exciting to see the footage.

I gave her access to my untidy clutter of studio and home and she came out with heaps of paintings and drawings, some of which I didn’t realise still existed. It was a bit of a nightmare pinning down the titles and dates of artworks for the purpose of documenting them, as they change and are not always definitely finished.

(N) Filming mostly happened with Liz and the editing was with Sam Sharples, who I have also worked with for an enjoyable eternity. So the film was made with a lot of intuition and instinct, balanced with the disciplines of archiving her work and events in her life. Some tender and painful events, some just unexplainable. I draw up everything before and as I’m making it. I inhabit a film and become soaked in whoever is in the work. There are a few times when you think you might be drowning.

Do the words or objects come first in your process, Liz? And for the book, is the text a careful edit or unfiltered?

(L) The book has remained true to my first idea for it – to be a series of images of Boxmen accompanied by text you would read out of interest rather than a sense of duty. I wanted to recreate the atmosphere of the few years I lived in Derbyshire and ended up with a Short Story, which goes back to being a child. So it is a very pared down autobiography, in which waiting and dreaming and hoarding are given their rightful significance.

How did you find putting your work into a book? Did you enjoy the process?

(L) My vision for Twenty Entities was based on an alphabet book I had when I was three. Instead of the usual whimsical illustrations it had very sharp and bright colour photos on the right and clear text on the left. There was J for Jam opposite a massive spoonful of strawberry jam. I wanted the images and enlarged details to be similarly sharp and I was pleased with photographer Antony Makinson for making this happen. 

I got someone else to decide on the order of the images and enjoyed the delegation process. After this the book came together very neatly, as I had conceived it as a whole. The most exciting part was deciding on the cover – although my hands look a bit wrinkly, it adds a touch of glamour!