SPIRITS IN THE MATERIAL WORLD

Lisa Walker:

I was at the Arts Academy and had been studying jewellery for about six years. My pieces in metal were getting smaller and smaller and more detailed. At the side of my bench, I just started sticking some fabric and stuff on cardboard. I kept adding odd materials to the table and started buying and using the tools needed for these materials – like scissors and glue. There were times after the first explorations, when I really wanted to work in metal. My first reaction was, ‘Oh wow, so all this that I’ve been doing has actually been a way to go further in my metal work’. So, I spent a few weeks at my bench soldering and it was a bit of a struggle. One day, I just put the torch aside and went back to my other table and started focusing on the new materials. It took me about six months to realize some of these first pieces I was making were for my mother’s friends. There is an amazing culture of women who are really staunch, strong feminists here and it is a large part of my life in Wellington, really. And some of those new pieces were starting to reflect that part of me. In fact, Otto mentioned seeing a change in my work and that was the first time I could look at it and say those words.

To get to the understanding – to take it seriously – to realize my work had changed, that I wasn’t just working in metal anymore and was looking at different materials, was a process that took a while to accept. But once I did, I understood the new world I’d entered – the huge possibilities and the many lifetimes of research that this way of working would allow for and keep me interested in. To come to that moment, that realization was a big process; it still is.

It is a constant process. Epiphanies, of course, are not just about materials or objects. They are about ideas: things read, seen, heard. I go through lots of different things to get to a moment – but a moment comes all by itself. You can’t plan it. There are many, many, many, many examples of moments that seep into my work. They are all influences; it’s how the work exists.

LW: My resonance and response to the materials that I find are, of course, connected to what I do and what I am interested in, and how eventually my pieces exist. But, I think that’s a really nice question. That’s what makes me a jeweller. My creativity – although I’ve struggled with that word because it can have such a hippie-hobby association to it — but still, it’s a word that makes sense to me, it is definitely all combined. They are all bound together; I would be very, very reluctant to separate them.

Jewellery is initially made, or least it is a strong factor, to make the wearer more beautiful. That is very much about the wearer: making something pretty, making something attractive, making something positive and gorgeous and beautiful. How do we translate that beauty expectation in jewellery and sort of twist it around into something different?

I’m always searching for this and it’s a wonderful search. I have no idea what it will bring. I don’t know what that object is until I make it. I can’t envision it beforehand, but it has to have those qualities.

Things are written that I’m so free: anything goes. She is so open. Everything can be jewellery. And I’m thinking, Yeah, actually no. That’s not the case at all. I’m selective. I’m incredibly selective. For a material to arrive on one of the shelves here… nothing enters my workshop – not even through the front door – without me sort of vetting it.

Sometimes I make something and look at it and ask where can I place this piece? But – what if I can’t place a piece anywhere? What if I can’t find a little recipe for myself that makes sense, which pulls it in as jewellery? What happens when I make a piece that is not in any kind of stereotype, but there is something about it that we sort of recognize? There is something that might gel in us in someway, or might make us a little bit more comfortable. Or, what happens when you feel uncomfortable? What happens when we look at something and think, holy shit what is going on here? I don’t recognize this. I don’t understand it. I don’t think I relate to it. But, there is something there that I know is good. There is something that I know is speaking to me.

LW: I just love that; it’s totally chaotic. You read it and just start to feel claustrophobic. The feeling is both disturbing and yet familiar somehow – like those moments I look at something I do not recognize but know will influence future work.

Lauren Kalman:

Very early in my career I just made physical objects, jewellery and sculpture, but even then I was incorporating electronics, sensors, motors, and so on. I have always been interested in understanding and responding to all of the mediums I work with. I started working with photography and video in graduate school because I was doing temporal, performance-based actions – these necessitated documentation outside of the action. Pretty quickly, the images moved from being documentation of work to the work itself. We are so used to the ubiquitous presence of photography, and now video, that I think it is easy to assume they are passive vehicles – but there are histories, politics, and power dynamics associated with them. I realized that considering them as much as the objects and performance was the responsible thing to do.

Right now, I am working on multiple projects, largely as spin-off to bodies of work I have done in recent years, which allows me to delve more deeply into topics I have touched on in the past. I find a significant amount of overlap in my projects and I am pretty fluid in allowing them to merge together or fracture off.

Jewellery has such a deep history and I feel the need to connect to that history, address it, and reinterpret it in a contemporary context. For example, I reference ornamentation from religious architecture and devotional items, churches, ex votos, funerary objects and so on. I am interested in paying reverence to power or magic through crafted objects. For me, there is something that feels very genuine about that gesture, with its’ combination of awe, fear, love, desperation, and thanks. I make a lot of very simple juxtapositions or combinations to bring these historic references into a contemporary environment through paring them with contemporary objects and bodies, or slightly shifting their function or form.

LK: My practice of making art is about analysing, processing, and synthesizing a variety of relatively familiar social constructs and cultural images and objects. Because my work references culture and society, it seems to inherently seek to communicate to an audience. This makes the viewer central to my process.

I have thought of the images and objects, for the most part, as interdependent. The images cannot, of course, exist without the objects, but the images are what give the objects context. The context of being worn demonstrates a bodily discomfort that hopefully has a corporeal resonance with the viewer. The physicality of the object is one of the benefits of working with traditional or familiar materials, like metal. Most of us have a familiar experience with the taste of a metal spoon on our tongue or the discomfort of stainless steel dental tools scraping against our gums.

I think of the images as a medium rather than documentation. In some of my work, I have been trying to mimic ecstatic expressions of martyrs in paintings depicting religious iconography. These historic paintings and sculptures convey narratives, sometimes through singular images without the use of text. With these images, I am trying to find a place that conveys pain, bliss, and transcendence in one expression. But then, the same facial expression is also similar to sexual ecstasy and can tangentially reference visual depictions of orgasm. Through the gesture in the image, I am trying to marry these histories: the spiritual and the corporeal. The objects literally help to force the gesture.

LK: I think of the use of photography in ethnographic documentation: the politics and power dynamics present in the act of white, Western, males photographing people of colour (often nude or semi-nude) and then disseminating those images. More directly related to my work, I also think about the use of early photography in the documentation of hysteria in women (an ‘ailment’ that was associated with the feminine). These images of women held in psychiatric hospitals, were restaged for the camera (with long exposure times as it would have been impossible to document most ‘attacks’ in situ). These re-enactments depict the women as aware and posing for the camera. Many are strongly sexualized, with exposed thighs or longing looks. There is a distinct power dynamic at play between the person imaged and the person taking the image (taking being an apt description of the process).

I am personally biased; photography and video are central to my practice. Though no expert, I am interested in photographic history and theory and have some knowledge of the subjects. There are so many connections to fashion photography: the objectification of bodies (particularly women) in images, and the politics and power dynamics that occur when these images of the body, consumer or luxury items, and photography intersect. I would like to see more jewellers take into account the histories that they are reconstructing when they take images of their work.

For many years, my images have been set in a void rather than in a recognizable space. My newest goal is twofold: I have an interest in architecture and its’ impact on bodies, and a desire to move beyond the studio images I have become accustomed to making. So, in my next work I will be exploring existing spaces and thinking about how the context of the space might impact the objects and actions in the images.

Misha Kahn:

In a funny way, this is one of a few things that feels like it happens chronologically in the studio. Usually, whenever I’m appropriating an image or riffing on an iconic piece I do it, at first, kind of begrudgingly, with an ‘I’m already bored’ attitude. As soon as that is even partway out of my system, I start ignoring more and more of the logic of the reference and delve deeper into a lucid ‘anything goes’ imagination. I never have any reference material around when I’m working. If I’m trying to recreate a historical mirror in plastic, I’m only going off of my memory of the object. So many things get bungled in this first step that they can become the start of a new variation.

MK: What I was interested in about the mall is how its’ overstimulation can bring you into a trance. Walking around so much attention grabbing graphics and situations sort of brings you to an ultimate calm. To me, that makes it an escapist place and very complex. It is an eerily, stale cacophony with an element of aspiration to emerge looking better – intertwined with an inevitable sadness. My pieces feel very celebratory and American but they also have to encapsulate some sadness. In hindsight, I would have preferred to try to capture the emotional aspects of the experience without using all the mall imagery.

I always want my environments to feel a bit like a jungle. I like to affect the floors and walls and ceiling so you can really get lost in the experience: situations where people aren’t trying to focus on a single, perfect object and decide what they think about it, but instead they enter an emotional space. When you walk through the woods, you don’t remember specific trees or exposed roots or moss patches, you remember a feeling – like a feeling of troll-i-ness. I want people to remember a feeling, not a specific object. Maybe a moment stands out to them and they can take an object home as a memento.

MK: I remember so many little odd moments from that job.

It was my first time observing how an environment could get made. I wasn’t coming up with any of them myself, but just being a little cog in the hot glue process was quite revealing. Those windows are so layered, visually but also conceptually. Is there a better word for that? I hate that vapid word. Every window has some very obvious literary pun – something that feels exclusive but is actually accessible to most passers-by, and then there are tons of tiny moments hiding for the more serious gazer. I love that. I always run my own projects through a similar filter, like leaving clues that are easy at first and then get more exciting and difficult.

There was also a moment I remember when I was painting this branch for one of the displays, and it looked so, so shitty. I asked if we could make it glossy or do something else to it, and the director quickly said ‘the window adds the gloss’. Sometimes it isn’t about making a perfect object but about creating a scene so the pieces are what they’re supposed to be. That feels like the difference. To me the fine line in my work is to make sure I’m not removing the part that makes it human: the sadness. It can be really jovial but there has to be some balance. I’m not making a wonderland; I’m creating something that feels like a surreal and parallel simulacrum to our lives.

MK: I try to work in a studio setting where I do things in a way that feels truly intuitive and open throughout the entire process. But it’s hard when you stop to realize that every single product we buy at the store is a result of a material culture that craves regularity and consistency.

If you go to the art supply store, the supplies are so standard that part of (your capacity for) creativity has already been lost as soon as you enter the door. Buying a pre-stretched, rectangular canvas and putting paint on it is only letting you (potentially) get loose on the final step: the paint-adding step. But really, you can start by making any shape you want or weaving any goofball canvas…

Or, for example, it would feel much more challenging to build a house that’s not a square with 16″ on centre, 2×4 studs – because those are the stock items our system produces. If we decided to build a house that just left every line at any 8-foot angle, we could instead make a lot of interesting shapes while still using these readily available materials. I don’t think that building a more exciting space is illogical, or simply a reaction to Home Depot, its just being open to possibility. It seems to me that we can completely ignore these readily made prompts (and materials) and not be antagonized by them.

However, I also run things through a filter of ‘Is this a prop?’ Did I go out of my way to make it zany and irreverent, lumpy with a wavy edge, just for the sake of it not being square? I don’t ever want to do that, and sometimes it feels like that happens. That’s the boundary for me. If something is so easy to make as a square and I’m gluing and hacking all this shit to it just because I hate how easy our culture makes making a square – then I’m not having a very nuanced relationship with the present.

Creating that very real relationship with the present seems like a much more exciting challenge than just being content with an aesthetic of looseness. I think people can tap into their own looser logic in a lot of ways. It is super important to think about creativity from the very, very beginning. To me, truly loose logic means feeling free to really start at Point A and go wild.

Basically, being a (good) artist or designer requires going down your own unmarked trail into the depths of a messy, dreadfully un-scenic, brush forest and hoping to stumble upon something magnificent, so in that way there is always a sense of blind faith and intuition. Many of the basic associations of the ‘artist as shaman’ pitch is this whole notion of being in a sort of whacked out hippie trance. But to me, it should focus more on allowing yourself to live in a world of your own logic, your own intelligence and thought — if you start with that as your foundation, any inspiration can get run through your immediate filter and emerge as something other-ly and special.