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2023-12-16
Interviews with the artists 2023 #24 Jack Kirne
Urban Schemes versus Rural Escapes
Jack Kirne is a writer and unionist based in Melbourne, Australia. His work has appeared in various publications including Necessary Fiction, the Meanjin blog, Subbed In and the anthologies Growing up Queer in Australia and New Australian Fiction (KYD).
You are a writer and you also work as a unionist. How does your political activism inform and influence your art practice, if it does?
That's a broad question. I think often: doing union work, you meet so many people. So you're always being exposed to sort of different characters and different ways of seeing a problem, which is really productive, I guess, when you're writing, because you've got this bank that 's always being refilled. I think I also get to see people, I guess, at their worst a lot of the time. When they call the union, it's not because they're in a good place. Often they're really having a hard time. So I think I find a lot of very intimate stories with people that, again, provide this kind of material of the world in a way that's very different to my regular life, where I think people are usually trying to be quite optimistic and have fun. I think also those different kind of political perspectives that come with people talking about politics has forced me to kind of nuance my view of the world. And invariably, not consciously, but invariably that ends up influencing how you write and what you think.
What do you think are the most challenging aspects to be a writer nowadays?
I think perhaps the most challenging thing is, in Australia, and I'm sure abroad, the sort of death of small presses. I think there are less and less places for people to get published. What does get published is increasingly conservative or playing to a particular market. And so I think the project of writing, for me anyway, is about trying to sort of think about your community of people who are making art around you. So it's those writers that you like and working with them and sharing work with them. And that is being a different way of kind of making writing that isn't about the book or, you know, finding a wide readership. It's about finding people who care about this craft that you're doing. Remember reading an interview a few years ago that was talking about the novel as going the way of the easel painting. And I think there's some truth to that . But when your art form becomes obscure, well, then it goes from being this thing that is kind of lauded and celebrated and becomes something that's quite intimate. So that's a challenge, but it's also something I find humbling and moving about that.
Even if Sardinia is not the location of the novel you wrote during your stay, what elements of the island do you think had an impact on this novel?
Oh, well, actually, the final sequence of the book will take place in Sardinia, which was not something I sort of expected. So the escape into goat life will take place in Sardinia. It sort of in a funny way that only became clear once I was here.
Part of the reason why I wanted to do this residency was because I'd sort of joked about this goat life thing for years and being somewhere remote and doing that was one of the things I found really appealing. And once I got here, I mean, I knew that that fantasy was silly. But being here has been on one hand totally magical and very inspiring to see how community works. But also, then you speak to people and they'll say the same things about wanting to escape to the big city, you know, and how, you know, they can 't find a job or they feel like they're at a lost end. And they have this dream of escape into the city.
So for me, that sort of produced like what I can imagine is kind of the full circle of the novel, this dream to escape into the countryside and then realising that the escape in the countryside is just to find another place where people want to escape to the city.
Is the rest of the novel set in Australia?
Yes. In a big city. So I mean, the middle of the book is just the characters pulling off a bunch of like schemes to steal a bunch of money to then elope into this house in Sardinia.
Okay. Okay. Okay. We are curious. Very, very curious .
Yeah. I mean, here has been so inspiring. Like, there's just so much. I mean, I think also because the community has been so welcoming. But you just walk into places and people tell you all kinds of really odd stories about this place. And so when you start to put them together, what you build, I mean, it's not Millis. It's sort of like a mythologised Millis that sort of collapses the wider populace into this like imagined island. But it's all there and it's just so exciting. So I actually felt it was that night of the choir performance and we ended up with a big community dinner. I felt that like that was the sort of end of the novel in the sense that this is the most, it represents the dream of kind of this community and everyone coming together. And yet there are all these kind of sinister elements kind of working in the background.
Did it also shape like the way the characters move or interact or behave? Like seeing all this?
Not really. I think, as I said, I had a very clear idea of sort of what they wanted. I think it just sort of clarified what I was trying to do, which was good. Yes, cool.
More info about Jack on his website.
2023-12-16
Interviews with the artists 2023 #23 Nils Olsson
Editoriality as a collective process
Nils Olsson is a writer, editor and senior lecturer, primarily active at the departments of Literary Composition and Comparative Literature, University of Gothenburg . His research has probed aesthetics and modernism in general, as well as Gertrude Stein’s writing in particular. His teaching is mainly focused on editorial practice and creative writing, with special attention to collective processes and extended notions of publication. His latest book (“r.”, 2022) is an experimental treatise on “editoriality”, which explores the limits and possibilities of the physical book through collaboration, chance, algorithmic writing, and alternative modes of distribution.
Your current research is focused on making connections between the concepts of publication, community and food , food sharing. How did you arrive to this step of the research?
The act of making something public is always a collective endeavor. So, it all goes together. Even if you take someone who’s a self-published author, like the woman who runs the bar in Milis, Irene Lai; well, even in that case, someone else is running the print shop, someone else made the paper, etc. So, from a material standpoint, publication is always a collective effort. And of course, we can talk about where you find the formats, the inspiration, the genres you are writing in, and so on.
There’s always a collective kind of machine involved.
The food thing is basically just me being into food and wanting to find a way to combine interests so I can do more fun stuff. That’s like the honest answer. But then again, food, the meal, is something that has to do with so many things related to sharing, collectivity and the communal, but also in a broader sense with regards to distribution and cultivating and collecting things, putting them together, sending them out – basically editorial practices.
So, I haven’t really arrived anywhere. I’m just trying to think about in what ways food is related to my work on editoriality. Thanks to this residency I have been able to take a few steps by being invited to work with the Food for Thoughts project.
That was my second question: you were one of the artists involved in the second episode of Food for Thoughts. What did this experience give to your art practice?
It provided a situation where I together with someone else – or with several other people actually – could try to combine thinking about editoriality with cooking, with sharing food, sharing and presenting a meal. It was an opportunity to conduct an experiment, to try things out –trying out a concrete format for working with food in an aesthetic and critical situation dealing with editing and making a publication.
Personally, I prefer to work with what is handed to me. I prefer to react to situations or surroundings. Which of course is because I’m a critic and a scholar first and foremost. I need something to work with or react to.
And in this case, there already was a format, there was a situation, there were collaborators, so that suited me very well. In contrast to, let’s say, sitting down and just from nothing planning out something that’s going to invent stuff from nothing. I don’t think I can do that. Actually, no one really does that, and I don’t think that’s what the world really needs.
So many words, ideas and things are and have been produced and uttered that it’s more a question of what to do with them. How do we take care of the stuff that is already here? To take care of, understand, challenge, get rid of, recycle … The world is there. It’s not to be invented anew in that sense.
Your work is focused on the concept of editing and publication . What do you think about the future of the physical book in the digital era?
Channeling media thinkers Marshall McLuhan Friedrich Kittler, and their respective notions about how the history of technology works, we become aware of a medium as such first when it is replaced by a new medium. Fifty years ago, we didn't really think about the book as a machine. The codex was something totally natural, a dominating technique for holding knowledge or information together.
The digitalization, of basically everything, made us become more aware of the printed book as a kind of mechanism, as a kind of machine, as well as a bearer of different kind of values. When you write a literary review, of a novel for instance, you don’t begin with: “This is a 500-gram object, built up of different leaves of pulp, which you’re supposed to open and operate with your hands, read it from, left to right (in the Western world), etc…”
I’m have no clue what the future of the physical book is, but my point is that the fact that it has been partially replaced by screen-based media and audio books has at the same time made us more aware of the book as an object. It certainly hasn’t made us forget about it.
Vinyl records sales have increased a lot during the last 20 years. And of course, the market has been driven partially by hipster dudes with lots of facial hair who treasure their hi-fi equipment. Sure, it’s a cultural identity kind of thing; a material culture thing. And one could perhaps see some similarities in how our relationship with books has developed, at least partially, for some of us.
The limited editions, the small networks of small presses making precious objects – a materiality reflecting the preciousness of poetic (or even intellectual) discourse. But then again, today more physical books are printed and produced than ever. It doesn’t seem to decrease. So, I think the question of the physical book is one thing, and then another question would be: what’s the future of literature or poetry?And in what ways is literature as we have known it connected to, and will or won’t continue to be connected to, the physical book? It won’t be in the same way. I don't think so. And I don’t think it should! Literature is about inscription, and there are many practices of, and surfaces for, inscription. The book is actually a pretty recent one. Printing isn’t that old, relatively. And it has been superseded by other techniques, as in digital formats. So, literature, I’d say, is something that potentially takes place when an inscription is made. Even just saying a word out loud is kind of an inscription into the ether, the air. It’s certainly not very archivable, it goes away immediately, and thereby becomes all the more precious, perhaps. While carving letters in a rock has totally different longevity. They are just different kinds of inscription surfaces, both potentially serving as vehicles for literary practice. I don’t know what the future is for the book, but neither the book nor literature is going away, and perhaps neither of them are dependent on each other.
More info about Nils on this website https://www.gu.se/en/about/find-staff/nilsolsson
2023-12-15
Interviews with the artists 2023 #22 Giulia Ricciotti
The memory of the stones
Giulia Ricciotti was born in Italy in 1984. She graduated in anthropology at the University of Bologna but since she was a little girl she became familiar with the world of photography and thanks to several scholarships she was able to study in countries like Colombia and Argentina.
She started to publish in some photo magazines in Argentina and around the world like Ballad Of, Curated by Girls, Girls on Film, Chicle Mag, Pompayira Mag, Splendor Mag and Whitelies Mag.
At the same time she started to collaborate with an important fashion magazine in Buenos Aires called Regia Magazine and she became one of its most important writers.
During the past 10 years she has participated at several exhibitions in Argentina and Italy but she also started a self-taught gastronimal career.
Cooking was always a significant part of Giulia's life. Cooking was something she learned from her family, and she has always worked in restaurants throughout her life.
Cooking for friends was the initial step, but she gradually increased her culinary activity by cooking for different customers.
His experience in restaurants throughout the world, such as New York, Portugal, and Mexico, led her to collaborate with several chefs and organize various pop-ups.
She is currently residing between Italy and New York, where she works as a photographer and continues to organize private dinners.
You arrived with a specific project in mind. How did it evolve during the residency and why?
It was not easy to find materials, to develop rolls that I'm used to, so obviously the process takes longer, also considering the fact that we've had a bit of bad luck with the weather. I had to make some modifications in my originary project. I couldn't do the work on the rocks of Pinuccio Sciola: I just took the photos of them.
But I thought that, having a very small space, maybe this would have been an exaggerated surplus because the portraits I did of the people with the rocks came out very well. I decided to focus more on that and also add other things like a printing experimentation on the carasau bread or some small canvases with small details. These changes had more to do with technical and material aspects, not conceptual.
I was inspired both by meeting the people and by the places I went to photograph, like the nuraghes.
Your project relates people to the landscape, what is the aspect that interests you most about this relationship?
It is linked to what Pinuccio Sciola said about Sardinia and the Sardinian landscape, which is linked to stones. This presence of the stones is much stronger in my opinion than in other places in Italy and there is something firm but flexible in the stones and something ancient but at the same time extremely soft and gentle. It's something that I have also found in the older inhabitants of Milis who seem a bit tough but then they are very soft. They have all their memory, their desire to recount their past, their life, to be present, and they have these signs of time that are the same signs of time as the stones. This is also true of the houses themselves, which are built with basalt, with local stone. There is such a strong contact with the land.
You were one of the artists involved in the first episode of the Food for Thoughts format. Did this experience give you new stimuli for your artistic practice and which ones?
I did more installation with food. Some were things I'd already done, others were things I tried and a bit of innovation. I'm quite happy, especially because it was the first time I had a collaboration with someone. I'm talking about Isabella Morrison: it was a good challenge for me to learn from someone else, to take suggestions from someone else, to exchange opinions and create something together that I think worked very well.
I'm very happy with the collaboration with Isabella. We managed to achieve exactly what we wanted, which was to make people feel comfortable, to have this experience of closeness with each other... I think that's the most important thing.
Did you find a link between what you did here at the residency and what you develop in Food for Thoughts?
Stones and found objects were involved in both projects. Objects that I found during this month, walking around, observing, made part of the installation that I made in Food for Thoughts. I like the concept of finding objects that for us can tell something or link with the earth, and with the concept of origin that was the topic of the dinner of Food for Thoughts.
I like to present these simple objects to the people. And it is more or less the same thing in a different way that I have done with my project at the residency: presenting objects that we always see around us, but presenting them well, put in a frame, so we can maybe observe them and give them a new definition, a new meaning.
More info about Giulia at his website: https://giuliaricciotti.com/
2023-12-15
Interviews with the artists 2023 #21 Jessica Gorlin Lidell
Pieces of life into murals
Jessica Liddell is a mosaic artist based in Philadelphia, PA. She specializes in architectural ceramics. Her work can be found in public and private spaces throughout the United States. She fabricates her own tiles out of clay and glass. Enthusiastic about her medium, she often teaches children and adults, leading them in collaborative mural products.
You have a business as a mosaic artist. You work a lot by commission. How do you find a balance between the external request and your personal artistic touch?
It can be hard. I try to deliver what people want. I think my work has a specific style that I bring into my commissions. However, sometimes I have to consider myself more of a technician than an artist. I'm taking what somebody wants and I'm translating it into tile. Sometimes, if I have a particular vision, I have to set that aside. I guess it's a balance. The way that I combine handmade ceramic tile and commercial tile shards feels unique to me. I use the same technique or approach almost every time so there is consistency.
A big part of your work is made of public art interventions, like community art. What is your process? How do you involve the communities? Do you have a particular approach, participatory approach?
My approach is always different depending on the situation. In some cases, I might have hundreds of people making tiles. When they are complete, I take them and put a mural together myself or with an assistant. At other times,people from a community will be involved with the assembly of mosaics I'll teach them my process so that they can help cut up tiles and put everything together. Usually, the tile making part of my projects is always done by project participants. When you see pictures of community projects I've done, I haven't made many tiles on those walls. I take on more of a role of facilitator, providing materials and instruction so that others can do the work.
Sometimes I bring stencils, stamps or cutters relating to a certain theme so that making the tiles is easier. I often tell people specifically what to make so that everything comes together in a way that is visually coherent. I also incorporate a lot of words into community projects. Frequently people feel insecure about their ability to draw, so I like to give them the option to come up with a word instead. When they create a tile with the word in it it feels creative but in a different, interactive way. When the mosaic is finished, the public is able to get up close to it and read what the tiles say.
And here at the residency, did you find a difference between your practice by commission, the daily practice and your time at the residency ? Which new things did the residency bring to you?
In my daily life, I have to focus more on the business side of being a full time artist. I always have so many things needing my attention and a busy teaching schedule . I don't feel the same freedom just to, “be an artist”. You won't find me sitting outside painting with watercolors, when I'm at home, in Philadelphia. I just don't get to explore my creative process very much. To do that research and development is so important and I know that but it's hard to make time for it.
That's the primary thing that I wanted from this residency- time for myself. I have definitely had that here and it's been an amazing gift. An ability to really think about and reflect on my studio practice over the last few years. I think it's been a challenging time for artists through COVID. I have really been able to process everything that has happened with my work and plan future projects, really move forward. That must sound strange here in Sardinia, because things are so much slower paced but to make a living as a professional artist in the United States can be very stressful. I will make it my goal to take the wonderful things I have learned in Milis and bring them to my life back home.
More info about Jessica at her website: https://www.bellamosaic.com/
2023-12-14
Interviews with the artists 2023 #20 Isis Hockenos
Colours of reality and dreams
Isis Hockenos (b. Marshall, California, 1986) studied painting at Sarah Lawrence College in New York and printmaking at Il Bisonte in Florence. Using oil paint, India ink and gouache, Isis explores ideas of loss, mortality, shape-shifting, transformation and identity. Through vibrant visual narrative, the often quotidian activities represented in the paintings display their subjects’ unsettled interiority. She bases the scenes on her own memories and experiences, often using personal photographs as source images. As the subjects in the paintings evolve into new, barely-recognizable characters and places, they wobble between the familiar and the unknown. The physical traits and moods that emerge in the finished paintings can be likened to Carl Jung’s shadow-self, but unlike Jung’s shadow, these qualities are not necessarily in conflict with how we hope to be understood. Yes, there is an obscenity in the exposure of this shadow-self, but it is only obscene if our mind is unaccustomed to its visibility. Working toward an awareness of our shadow gives us a more complete and honest understanding of our own motivations and experiences and how we relate to others. These paintings are not meant to shed a rude and bleaching spotlight on those secret and private chambers of ourselves. Instead they act as a reminder that those parts exist, allowing us to regard them as hallowed and necessary parts of the whole. Isis lives and works in Los Angeles, California.
If you had to choose three keywords for the series of works that you developed in the residency, which words would you choose and why?
At home in LA my work was becoming increasingly tight; super controlled and precise in a way that was personally satisfying, but was not conducive to paintings that I want to see– that I think the world needs. With social media and AI generated imagery dominating our visual stimulation, literal representation is something we have in abundance. During my time in Milis I have been forcing myself to exercise control, manifested in trying to limit the detail and the fussy little marks that I’ve found myself making in the past year. So, one word would be suggestion. Making a suggestive mark, simply letting it be and trusting the viewer to fill in the rest. Also, in that same vein, taking suggestions from the things around me and not feeling the need to represent something grounded in a specific time or place. Even though the mood can be very distinctly of a place, like the cork trees and the rocks at Su Riu de Sa Ide, there is suggestion in how I'm portraying the energy of the scene and also suggestion in how I'm receiving that information from my environment and then translating it into the painting. So there’s the first word!
I think that many of my paintings have kind of an uncanny, disorienting quality. This is in part because the colors are often very bright or slightly sickly and at odds with the mood or subject matter of the piece. The color scheme comes from how my body is absorbing information from a particular place more than how it appears in a literal sense. For instance, in the Cork Tree series, the dry plants and bare trees were not quite so present when I visited the location, but in the finished painting they represent the moodiness and introspection of a seasonal shift and are in line with fleshy rawness of the interior of the tree’s trunk. In those paintings I was applying a lot of self-control to leave the marks rough and to allow them to help me tell the story. The residency has enabled me to leave each painting for a couple of days and just observe it from the corner of my eye. If I skip this step and I just keep working, tugging on a thread, I run the risk of unraveling the entire thing. It takes control to allow loose ends to dangle free. I don't know if I like control as one of my words, but it is an important part of how I’ve felt this month.
And what relationship is there between your painting and your interest in food and cooking?
For me there are so many parallels between cooking, my manner of living and my art practice. In each I bring different materials together, raw and independent, combining skill, knowledge and history to meld them into something entirely new. It’s exhilarating when I’ve discovered that they're better off in harmony, serving the whole, when a blank space and some raw materials weave a narrative a new narrative.
I see this play out in my physical spaces as well, in my home and in my studio... each part of my life does not feel like a practice. The way that I arrange a shelf or compose a painting or assemble a meal… It's like the same instincts are activated. They seem to come from within as opposed to being an applied outside methodology. For instance, the colors I choose to paint a wall will simultaneously and unconsciously show up in my paintings. The pattern on a beloved skirt might appear in the way I plate a salad.
It seems you like to interact with what is out of the canvas. Like for example photograph the painting in relationship with other objects. Or in your exhibition, where you prepare also the area of the world where the paintings were. Why this interest from and what does it mean for you?
I guess that relates to the previous question, especially when I’m hosting an event or a party, it can feel like the guests are entering into the world of the paintings. Sometimes it's subconscious but I’ve also produced events where that is the explicit intention. The objects that might appear outside of the canvas (in the way it's photographed or exhibited) are not simply an effort to make a particular impact or to send a particular message. It's more that I really feel each painting to be a glimpse of the world as I see it. Sometimes including other objects alongside the paintings helps make that connection for people.
I've exhibited paintings in built-out environments a few times and I go back and forth on whether I like it or not. My impulse drives me in a “more is more” direction, but then I'll see the paintings on a plain white wall and decide that they are better off speaking for themselves. But, six months later, I'm hanging tassels and brambles from the ceiling and painting patterns all over the walls. So… I suppose right now I’m divided on that. I wonder if the addition of tangible objects from the real world is an attempt at keeping the mythological at bay. The mythology that is spun in my work is not fantastical or whimsical. It feels, to me, very grounded in my version of reality. I think it can help the viewer step inside of a world that does, after all, contain a bit of magic.
More info about Isis at her website: https://www.isishockenos.com/