28-year-old artist Boo Saville has earned herself a reputation for aping. The Slade graduate who has been an active part of South London’s notorious !wowwow! art collective, churning out much-loved Biro drawings of all sorts of naughty monkeys. But as her first solo show approaches, this young artist has found herself working less as part of the pack, and instead turning her pen to the iconization of the inevitable. psychoPEDIA got into deep conversation with Boo in the holy surrounds of an East London church where she introduces us to her good friend, mortality:

How did you know you wanted to be an artist?
The first thing I was ever good at was copying. It sounds strange, but as a child I was just really good at it. I loved the meticulous approach to drawing. When I went to art school–- an idea put in my head by my sister [Jenny Saville]–- it just seemed like the most romantic thing ever – I had to start validating what I did.

What inspired you about copying?
Copying became like cheating as everything became about life drawing and space and analyzing your work. As it turned out, that was all intermittent. Once college was over and I returned to my obsessive lifting of images. Forming !wowow! on leaving school meant I had a self-made network of people open to my way of working.

Where did monkeys and death fit in to all this?
I started drawing monkeys from images in the Natural History Museum. This is where death first came in. It wasn’t from actual monkeys, I could have found them in the Zoo. But these monkeys fascinated me, because these monkeys were dead. The drawings were really popular, but suddenly I got bored of everything being so nice. I’m not nice! I realized if I wanted people to understand what I was trying to say, I must be very explicit. Which is why I suddenly just thought, “Death!”

Corpses aren’t too easy to come by, so where do you find your source material?
I spend most of my time finding and figuring out what is a good image or is not. I have a book by Marco Lanza, Living Dead: Inside the Palermo Crypt, which is incredible. Pictures of faces with paper-like skin hanging off them. I spend a lot of time in museums like the Hunterian and the Pitt Rivers in Oxford. Philip Pullman mentions it in Northern Lights. They’ve got shrunken and trepanned heads, some really clumsily done; long dead relics of people looking for the enlightenment we hope comes with death in life. Trepanation supposedly lets the spirits in.

It's supposed to return you to a childlike state by reopening the hole in your head you're born with. It closes over as you grow up, which is why adults get stressed and bored. Drilling it back open reinstates that wonderment at the world.
Like being slightly psychic. It’s so much more extreme than taking drugs, taking an electric drill to your head. I read about this farm in America where, when people die, they leave the bodies in different conditions-- one in a stream, another in direct sunlight, so they see the effects each has on a decaying corpse. It’s supposed to help murder investigations. I would love to lift images from that but I reckon they aren’t too open to artists nosing round plus, I don’t know how I’d deal with an actual dead body.

Have you ever seen one?
I saw my granny. My sister and I took pictures, which is highly illegal. We went in with our cameras hidden from the undertaker under big coats. I also did Anatomy for Artists alongside first-year medical students at the Slade. I watched one dissection in this enormous room with 15 cadavers lying on stretchers stinking of formaldehyde. You walk past cabinets of instruments with names like ‘Bone-crushers’ and ‘Bone-nibblers’. None of the bodies look human. They are reused, so are sometimes there for months.

The most shocking?
There was one standing in a tank sliced down the middle all the way to the ground. From one side he was smiling and you can see his hairstyle and a tattoo. That is when it is really creepy, when you glimpse a life; that he was into this or loved that person because you walk around and see his insides!

Is there a theme of the physical in life versus the physical in death in your work?
I like images with a dual nature. Christ on the cross can be really bloody and gory but at once soothing and redemptive. Anthropological remains have the same effect. You are confronted with an inevitability everyone fears– the violence of death– but it isn’t scary. But it’s not the life I am interested in. I get a real kick out of the abstract quality of an image. It is not until I am in between works that I start considering its place.

With that in mind and since your work is so concerned with death, do you ever consider what sort of legacy your work will be upon your own death?
I have never seen myself as a mother, so I guess my work is the same narcissism as having children. I remember going to the Baselitz retrospective and wondering how an artist who has worked over decades would view his body of work. Whether the crux of what he did was more apparent in his salad days, or in the more ambitious works success has allowed him in later years. My own ambitions are always on a small scale. Not to win the Turner Prize, but just making one piece to facilitate making the next. But the more work you do, the freer you become, and wider horizons open up-- until, I guess you return to my original subject and you speed towards the eventual end of your mortality.

~Iphgenia Baal