Tuesday Riddell makes spellbinding works with the ancient art of japanning

It’s rare that medium and message mesh as harmoniously as in the work of japanning artist Tuesday Riddell. Her multi-stage technique dates from the 17th century, and includes painting wooden boards with up to 30 layers of shellac: a resin secreted by the female lac bug, native to India and Thailand. As it happens, beetles are also central characters in Riddell’s work. Richly detailed scenes of insect and animal life appear among mushrooms and plants on gleaming black panels, all rendered in a lustrous palette of gold, silver and inlaid mother-of-pearl.

This is no realist documentation of nature: the scenes are laden with an atmosphere of midnight magic – more A Midsummer Night’s Dream than David Attenborough. Moths fly in mysterious formations; ladybirds gather in a halo of light emanating from a flower; a snake burrows its head in a bluebell.

Riddell’s process begins with observation. A keen explorer of London’s wilder corners – she talks with enthusiasm of forgotten corners of graveyards, where the grass grows high and biodiversity still reigns – she documents details of flora and fauna through photographs and videos. But when it comes to drafting her designs, she mostly relies on recall, drawing both on her urban explorations (‘Going behind the brambles in the park,’ as she puts it) and a childhood spent exploring the Lake District close to her family home in nearby Newcastle.

Riddell has long been fascinated by a sub-genre of Dutch still-life painting called sottobosco (after the Italian word for ‘undergrowth’), which was star ted in the 17th century by the painter Otto Marseus van Schrieck. ‘He was known as the Snuer, because he spent so much time with his nose at ground level observing wildlife,’ she tells me. ‘I really relate to Van Schrieck because I spend so much time doing the same thing. Ever since I was a little kid, I've always had my face in the grass.’ Van Schrieck and Riddell also share a similarly eerie, dark-hued aesthetic – this is the forest floor at deepest midnight. In her work, however, there’s an added ar t deco inflection: the swooping of stems and the sinuous lines of snakes recall the decorative design from that opulent period of the early 20th century.

Japanning originated as a European imitation of East Asian lacquerwork – using it to decorate furniture became a fashionable pastime for ladies of leisure in the 18th century. Riddell discovered the technique in 2018 during a Painter Stainers’ Decorative Surface Fellowship at City & Guilds of London Art School, which she signed up to after completing a bachelor’s degree in fine art painting – a medium that she says never felt quite right for her.

She’d previously only seen japanned objects during childhood visits to National Trust properties. ‘Japanning is endangered: it’s not taught much, except on a few conservation courses,’ she says. ‘The fellowship brings life into techniques that aren't really used anymore.'

The longwinded process of japanning may be one reason for this craft’s current obscurity. To make her work, Riddell must first sweep a brush laden with shellac – an alternative to the urushi tree sap used in Japanese lacquerwork – across a wooden panel, onto which she has sketched her design. This must occur in one fell swoop – the maximum size of each panel is determined by the length she can achieve in one fluid motion. (As such, her largest ar tworks are polyptychs – made up of nine panels measuring up to two metres put together). This brushing action is repeated between 25 and 30 times. Between applying each layer, Riddell must wait for the shellac to dry enough to be sanded and polished to achieve the mirror-like shine she is after. Each layer requires an exacting level of focus: ‘You could destroy a panel on the final coat if you’re not careful. It’s daunting.’

Once the layers have been built up, she carefully gilds on silhouetted forms of gold and silver leaf, then dusts over powdered gold to create shaded gradients of colour – and the images she had in mind. Each fragile leaf is applied with a brush that she first sweeps over her face – picking up the merest trace of oil will allow the metal to stick (it’s not unusual for her to go home with glittery eyebrows at the end of a hard day’s gilding). Finally, she uses black paint to add delicate lines and detailing. How long does this all take? ‘It’s so seasonal I can’t really say. When it’s hot each layer dries quickly, but in winter they dry slow. I can probably do about five pieces a month.’

It's clear this is not a craft that everyone would be happy practising day in, day out. ‘I can sometimes spend a whole week just sanding and polishing. I think you've got to be a very specific sort of person to be okay with that.’ She is, she believes, the only contemporary artist in the UK making this type of lacquerware. Alongside a lack of teaching, barriers to entry for aspiring japanners include the cost of materials and the necessity for expensive equipment. Riddell uses an air-fed respirator and a small extraction room to filter out shellac fumes. Nonetheless, she says there could be a bright future for her chosen craft – if enough people encounter it: ‘Those who learn japanning become obsessed with it. It's just such a beautiful process; the effects are like nothing else I've seen.’

Her south-west London studio is in Merton Abbey Mills, which was once a factory producing William Morris textiles for Liberty & Co (‘They used to wash all the fabrics in the chalk stream outside my window’). The great craft champion would have approved of this current occupant. Riddell works slowly and carefully, largely to please her own tastes, with occasional commissions dotted in her calendar. Her works are popular with collectors whose love of art is equalled by their love for the natural world, she says – ‘people who see magic in both’.

For her solo exhibition In Shadows at Messums London this summer, Riddell will show 20 works inspired in part by science fiction movies and biology books such as Merlin Sheldrake’s Entangled Life, which explores the extraordinary lifeform of fungi. At the show’s centre will be her largest work to date: an as-yet-untitled piece made up of nine panels, together standing over two metres tall. It combines observations of the stream outside her studio – brimming with trout, despite its urban course – and details of Hill Top, Beatrix Potter’s Lake District farmhouse (‘I was obsessed with her as a child'). Both are given a fantastical twist: birds decorate trees with foxglove flowers, while dragonflies collect reeds to build structures. ‘I want to capture what I see going on in these places – and also what I would want to see,’ she says. Both inquisitive and imaginative, Riddell reveals the magic hiding in plain sight.