One’s an alien. Both are mutually gifted. Tiffany Tondut’s close encounter sheds insight and intrigue into sub-culture’s most promising double act, Pavla Kopecna and Paloma Faith.
Paloma Faith, the Dalston-grown soul singing seamstress of 40s style vibes and modern chimes, is sitting perched in playful conversation with her photographer Pavla Kopecna. The two are discussing how they might conduct their first collaborative interview, with Paloma suggesting that Pavla be the ‘Andy Warhol-esque figure’, who “would sit there with hardly anything to say while the other one chatted away, like, desperate for fame or something, but when he (Andy) did speak, it was something random and profound”. I’m amused but not in the slightest surprised. Referencing past iconic figures in relation to their own cultural standing is only natural for these expressive young artists, whose collective assorted influences range from Billie Holiday to Bjork and David Lynch. Influences aside, though, I can’t help but feel the nature of their working relationship would have naturally aspired to this dynamic anyway.
Today, there is something of the Toulouse Lautrec about Paloma’s show-girlish nature. She’s a ruffle of deep chocolate furs and soft lace, with her gamine glamour caught up in damask powdered skin, kissed by a soft wreath of darkly gathered hair. She whirrs with the vibrancy of a long kept secret while stories seem to dance like fire about her aura. And by the way, her smiles are plentiful under sparkling eyes…
It's a Woman's World, 2007
Pavla is markedly different. The Prague born British immigrant is a composed portrait of sleek feline elegance with a killer Louise Brooks’ style bob and a structured avant-garde approach to style that articulates her determined ‘protestant work ethic’ and artistic intellectuality, most probably nurtured through her Goldsmiths and Cambridge scholarly education. From this you might garner the two women come from opposing schools of thought - Paloma belonging to the Romantic and Pavla to the modernist Classical, which to an extent they are, but whereas in textbooks these two schools clash, here they combine to galvanise a very ‘natural’ and prolific artistic collaboration.
November saw their latest alliance hung from the walls of Cecil Court’s Tenderpixel Gallery, where Paloma played stiff for Pavla’s debut Hollywood Murder series, chronicling the corpses of 20th Century starlets while exploring the death of identity under the mask of character complexity. It was only a year ago that Paloma first discovered Pavla through the many ‘flattering’ photos that began appearing on her Myspace, and from there she took “more of an interest in her, because I liked the photos so much.
1920s from the 'Hollywood Murders' series, 2007
I thought, if I were to take pictures of myself, then that’s how I’d like them to be”. Since then, the girls joke that Pavla’s become “like a stalker, following me around everywhere I go.” Since the beginning of their relationship, Pavla’s indeed been documenting Paloma’s career progression with the professionalism and zeal of a President’s journalist. It’s forged a strong bond between the artists who find it important to take risks for the sake of their work, and Pavla continues to interpret the performer’s multiple personas while simultaneously achieving and perpetuating the creation of the ‘Paloma Faith Myth’.
“It is all about the image,” Pavla tells me. “I’m looking to create the sort of fairytale, timeless story from my photography… Paloma’s very good at creating that too because she does the job of a stylist, make-up artist, a performer…”
“She’s making me like a mythological thing…” contributes Paloma. “It’s like a detachment from the real me…I’ve created a mystique that I’m happy with. It’s like having many masks. It’s not about my ego, because people generally associate singers with ego, but it’s my image only really. Everywhere I go I’m really publicising this name…not my ego. What’s that film when there’s like, this big Lord of the Universe or something and inside it’s controlled by this little kinda alien thing that’s really small and weak?” Like Men In Black? “Yeah it’s that kind of thing” she laughs. “You see there’s these huge characters and then there’s me. When Pavla photographs me she knows that. She knows that there’s this thing more interesting than reality.
I’m not interested in being seen brushing my teeth or whatever, because I do that myself and it’s really boring”. Which is why Paloma’s palette of costumed personas is a visual library well stocked and animatedly annotated over in the grip of her soulful voice. She is a changeling, or perhaps a nymph subject to Ovid’s Metamorphosis, and one who openly admits that everything she represents is outside herself, merely what she wants to become, as opposed to what she actually is; constantly feeling as though she’s not quite achieved her transformation like it were something always just out of grasp. But that is the intrigue of ‘image’ as idea, in that its playful reflection glints at artful deception through smoke and mirrors. Paloma Faith the performer can never be Paloma the tooth-brushing diminutive alien, for one intelligently pulls the strings while the other sings intoxicatingly of heartache and ‘broken dolls’ through burning incense. But this way, Paloma maintains complete control of her ‘act’ - never becoming the tragic heroines she portrays but safely echoing them from a post-modern perspective, choosing to play the role rather than live the effigy itself.
Songs of Innocence & Experience, 2007
“I’m obviously drawn more to the 40s and 50s glamour but I’m not stuck there. If you listen to my music, I definitely have a strong modern sound. It just seems obvious to me that before we move forward into 2010 onwards, we should look back and appreciate what’s gone before. I’m definitely not one of those persons living in the past. I’m not precious about that time. I could never truly re-create those sounds anyway because it was true to how people were living back then.”
“A lot of people I really admire have gone into the mainstream, like Terry Gilliam and David Lynch, but they still retain that kind of charm and allure, and I think I have enough of that to relay into my music what I admire in them.” What deserved and poetic splendour it is then that the animator-turned director Gilliam has offered her a part in his latest fantasy adventure, The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus which will begin rehearsing this December. Drenched in full theatrical bloom, it features a Doctor who has the power of guiding the imaginations of others…And with gigs lined up like sardines until then, the myth-making machine Pavla and Paloma will be hard at work guiding the entire universe to their favour.
Words: Tiffany Tondut
Photography & Post-Production: Pavla Kopecna
Styling: Paloma Faith