Phone Tag: Interview with Kate Newby

Posted on April 23, 2017 by Linnea

Kate Newby, They say you’ve got to live there for a while, 2016. Bricks, coins, white brass, pink silver, yellow silver, bronze, stoneware, porcelain, glaze, bottle top, paper clip, nail, glass. Courtesy of Michael Lett Gallery. Photo credit: Alex North

I speak with Kate Newby about her practice and current projects in this Phone Tag interview. From landscape and everyday materials, Kate brings a sensitivity to her environment to create what she calls “situations.” The New York-based artist is originally from New Zealand. However, she has been in Texas on a residency, and so we recently Skyped about how her approach to objects is informed by her surroundings, how art became a profession, life in New York, and her need for the female voice.

Phone Tag is a generative interview format, where I ask each participating artist five questions (plus others as the discussion meanders). At the end, I ask him or her to introduce me to a working artist whose attitude and work they find interesting and inspiring, who I then interview with the same five questions.

*****

Kate-Newby, Not this time, not for me, 2017. Mortar, concrete pigment, silver, white brass, bronze, porcelain, cotton rope, blown glass, glass, stoneware. Courtesy of Michael Lett Gallery (exhibited at the Sculpture Centre, NYC)

Linnea West: “So, you’re in Texas now for a residency. Could you tell me a little bit about what you’re doing?”

Kate Newby: “I’m in San Antonio at Artpace. It’s my first time in Texas. It’s also my first time doing a residency since I did one on Fogo Island in 2013, so it has been quite some years since I’ve been in a residency situation. I’ve only been here a few weeks, but I think the time is going to fly. The residency is set up in a way where you work in a studio for two months, which then becomes your exhibition space for the following two months. There are three studios and three artists in residence. So there’s the pressure of an exhibition at the end but I came down here quite conscious that I didn’t want to think about that, that I wanted to be more involved in the processes.

One of the things I do is, I work in clay. I’ve worked in clay for quite some time. It’s gotten to a point where I’m bored with it. Being down here what I want to do is to get outside more. Digging clay. I want to experiment with firings. Barrel firings. Pit firings, and building my own kiln. And I kind of think I’m more interested in experiences than outcomes, and I think work will naturally arise out of that process.”

LW: “So you’re trying to give yourself two months to breathe and explore?”

KN: “Yeah, I want to breath and explore. I’m realizing that that it is actually more work. I’m getting up at 6 am to do firings and other stuff, but it is good. There are people here who can help. In New York, I feel very singular; it’s just me. It’s nice to have people around who say, ‘Can we help? What can we do? Do you need this?’ ‘Yeah, I need a half cord of firewood, please.’ ”

Kate Newby, Ah be with me always, 2015. Colored mortar, brick, porcelain, bronze. Courtesy of Michael Lett Gallery (exhibited at Laurel Gitlen, NY)

LW: “Yeah, that’s a great thing to be able to say. From what I know of your work, I do see that you work a lot with clay, but not traditional ceramic vessels and that you work with other material as well. Could briefly describe what you make?”

KN: “Sure. I think what I do is, I create situations. I think about things like atmosphere and weather, being outside. Things that I absorbed and paid attention to, and I want to reflect that back out in my work. So my work is never a singular object. In fact, it might be several hundred objects in the case of some of my studies of rocks, or it could be as simple as using a piece of rope, which is what I just did at the SculptureCenter. I used 600 feet of rope to go from a puddle I had made on the ground, out of concrete, to weave into a tree, to weave across the building, and to hang down the very front of the building. I like to call peoples’ attention to these discrete actions. They don’t give a lot away, but they try to belong to a site in a way that is not too foreign. The materials I use, concrete and clay and rope, are never totally removed from what I’m looking at when I am installing.”

LW: “How site-specific are these? Would you reinstall the work somewhere else using the exact components or is it unique to that site?”

KN: “It’s both. It’s totally specific and I’ll use the same components anywhere. But they would change and I would want them to change and I would want them to be responsive. I think about site-specificity versus site-responsiveness—No, I don’t think about any of it. I just think about, what am I looking at? And what do I respond to, and what do I think is curious? I try to trust my instincts more and more. Just see what is happening and make works that responds to that.”

Kate Newby, Crawl out your window, 2010. Concrete ramp, rocks, crystals, cotton fabric, wall, yellow paint. Courtesy of Michael Lett Gallery (exhibited at GAK Gesellschaft für Aktuelle Kunst, Bremen). Photo credit: Peter Podowik

LW: “Now that you’re in this new space in Texas, what does an ideal day in your studio look like?”

KN: “Hmmm, I know what an ideal of what that would be like… I don’t have a studio in New York; I have a small room in my apartment that kind of acts like an office and storage area. Now I have a huge studio that would be awesome to utilize, but I don’t quite know what to do with it.
I’m definitely a morning person, so I’m trying to get up at 6 am, which is actually a little too early for me, but ideally I would be up at 6, shower, eat, and be in the studio before anyone is around so I can get my head into it. My ideal day is to do everything. To have practical, hands-on work. It would be to finally do my taxes; it would be to do some deep reading and research. It would be to eat properly. But it’s never like that. I wake up, I have 30 good minutes, and then I’m just walking around with a bit of paper in my hand, just trying to fumble through the day.”

LW: “What about time for email, does that factor in?”

KN: “It’s funny because that’s something I do everything morning in New York, and here I don’t and I’m really behind on email. It’s chronic; it’s terrible. But I’m here now, and I just want to get out of the apartment. I just feel like I’m so excited to get to the studio and to get to work. And I’ve got all these time constraints because of firings and drying times. I’ve been very physical and doing all this other stuff, where in New York I do email all the time.”

Kate Newby, The January February March, 2015. Porcelain stoneware, earthenware. Courtesy of Michael Lett Gallery (installation view: Margaretville, The Catskills, NY)

LW: “That’s great. That sounds like freedom. When did you first think of yourself as an artist?”

KN: “It developed incrementally. I had this moment when I was 15 and I thought— ‘Oh, this is a way I can look at things and make sense of the world,’ and for the first time I intentionally became involved with art. It became my full focus when I was in high school and then I went to art school and then I went and traveled for several years. I wasn’t exhibiting—I wasn’t traveling as an artist. I was traveling just as a person. I was ironing sheets; I was waitress-ing; I was whatever. When I came back to New Zealand, I thought about it, and that’s probably the moment I became an artist, because that’s the moment I basically looked at art and thought, ‘What’s here, and what do I want out of it, and what do I want to do with this, if this is what I am going to do.’ Before then, art had been something that I carried around like a backpack. In my mid-twenties, it became something bigger and harder, and not so convenient. This is the minute that things became quite alive for me.”

Kate Newby, Try it with less pennies and direct light, 2017. Glass, Jute. Fabricated by Jake Zollie Harper. Originally commissioned and produced by Artpace San Antonio. Photo credit: Adam Schreiber

LW: “Is it more important for an artist to be in a big city with a strong cultural scene, opportunities to show their work, lots of people, etc. or to be in a place maybe more like San Antonio or even quieter where you’re just focused on making?”

KN: “I think it’s both. I’m from New Zealand and I grew up at a beach and in a valley with a lot of trees. I grew up with a lot of solitude and I really need that. Strangely I get a lot of solitude in New York still. But what I do really need is the landscape. I need my work to be involved with the landscape. When I think about my work, I don’t think about it in terms of galleries; I think about it in terms of how can I take it back outside to where it came from, and how can I work these elements that are so crucial to my thinking back into the work.

So, that’s not answering your question, but I’ve done some really remote residencies, like Fogo Island, which is off the coast of Newfoundland in Canada. You can get more remote than that, but it’s very remote. Once I was in a town called Worpswede in rural Germany, which is this tiny little village. I was there for 5 months alone while I worked on an exhibition in Bremen. It’s weirdly exhausting, because you just have so much to do with yourself. But I think it’s both. I love going back to New York. I wouldn’t change that and I love leaving just as much.”

LW: “I’m interested in this idea of landscape that you mentioned, especially if you’re going to such different landscapes and then going to a place like New York. Are you think of an abstract, generalized idea of landscape or does New York City as a landscape feed into your imagination?”

KN: “It’s just whatever experience I’m having. In New York, it’s a huge influence on me in terms of how I work, because I’m pretty obsessed with sidewalks and the residue from people and the residue from wear and tear of us just being alive. I’m not looking at nature too much in New York City, but what I am looking at is this experience that we have every day. Even the tilt of the sidewalk or something, I find these kinds of things interesting. I don’t know why, I just do. These tiny, tiny things. The first time I made them I put them in this community garden in Brooklyn because it was kind of protected and they could be outside. They lasted for several months and they didn’t break and they made a sort of gentle sound. I like this idea that my work is a collaboration with weather and with elements and with these things that come in to complete the work. I’m only half making the work and then I’m putting it in a situation where these other things might come in and infiltrate it and work with it. So, when I say landscape, sometime it is a big general thing, like being on a ranch in Texas, but it doesn’t have to be.”

Kate Newby, Let me be the wind that pulls your hair, 2017. Assorted clay and glaze, bronze, cotton, wire. Originally commissioned and produced by Artpace San Antonio. Photo credit: Adam Schreiber

LW: “Who has influenced your practice?”

KN: “That’s a tricky questions. I don’t know. But I will say that less than a year ago I went on a trip from Los Angeles through Nevada up to Utah and I saw a lot of these land art pieces. I was blown away by this Nancy Holt piece called Sun Tunnels, which was phenomenal but also really challenging. She worked on it for four years and she was out there in the desert working on this thing. It’s a totally deep meditation. I come to a site and I could bang a work out in a day, that’s the way I work. It was interesting to think about what if you just made one thing but made it really, really well while keeping it simple. That was the thing, it was just really simple. She’s come to me at a really good moment—it’s making me question things a lot more. Especially in New York, where I feel like I’m exclusively making work that could fit in my backpack.

Roni Horn is really interesting. She also has a type of this deep awareness of what’s going on. I want to be careful about that, because the last few years for me have been very busy and I’ve had to perform for these deadlines. I just want to be aware, keeping an eye on my work in a way that the thoughtfulness, the considered rigor of both of their practices is something that I absorb and keep in mind.”

LW: “Is it a coincidence that they are both women, or is that something you think about as well?”

KN: “It’s something I think I need; I really want that. I listen to a lot of music, and more and more I want female voices around me. It’s because they make phenomenal work and it’s because I need more female voices around me.”

Kate Newby, Let me be the wind that pulls your hair, 2017. Assorted clay and glaze, bronze, cotton, wire. Originally commissioned and produced by Artpace San Antonio. Photo credit: Adam Schreiber

LW: “What’s next—you have two months in Texas and then you’ll be back in New York—what does your upcoming future look like?”

KN: “Someone mentioned to me years ago, ‘Kate, how are you going to keep working like this? Turn up somewhere, make a show, and move on. How are you going to keep doing that?’ My next year is already feeling a bit like this. But I’m doing things I really want to do. I’ll go to Stockholm for an exhibition at Index, which is great, which is phenomenal, and the project is the second extension of a project I did two years ago at the Arnolfini in Bristol, by the same curator Axel Wieder. He’s doing the second chapter of an exhibition called The Promise, and it’s all in the public space—that’s a dream come true—when you can gain permission to work in public space and have support to do this. You’re not making necessarily public sculpture, but you’re able to work outside with the support of an institution. How do you utilize that? I’ve just got a lot of questions. How do I keep doing things with integrity? That’s the stage I’m at. How do I maintain this, and how do I keep it honest? Funnily enough I have a second residency this year in Texas at the Chianti Foundation in Marfa. I think this will be an interesting opportunity to re-visit a lot of the ideas that I may open up while working here in San Antonio.”

LW: “But that’s a great place to be, because it’s a sign that what you’re doing is working, right?”

KN: “Yeah. I think so. I’m just aware that the work has to lead. I don’t know what’s going to happen, but this time here is good.”

LW: “Well, thank you. This has been great.”

KN: “Thank you for talking to me.”

Phone Tag: Interview with Walter Scott

Posted on December 3, 2016 by Linnea

Walter Scott, Excerpt from Wendy

The former Phone Tag participant, Tiziana Le Melia, put me in touch with Walter K. Scott, a Canadian artist perhaps best known for his Wendy comics. Walter speaks with me about creating Wendy, a fictional character trying to navigate the art world; his sculptural practice; and his recent move to Guelph, Ontario to pursue an MFA in this Phone Tag interview.

***

LW: “If you had to briefly say what your practice was, what kind of work do you make?”

WS: “I started making comics again in 2011. I have this comic series called Wendy. It’s a fictional narrative of a person named Wendy who strives for art stardom but her life keeps getting in the way. She tries to access the art world and continually try to define herself as a successful artist without really knowing what that means. So it’s the story of someone’s personal life but it’s set in the art world.”

LW: “Does this relate to what you are seeing in other people when you were out at openings, or is this more a personal feeling as well?”

WS: “Wendy is based on me. Wendy started as a story of a girl who wants to be an artist but she lives in this punk community like I did in Montreal. As Wendy’s adventures have continued, they are inspired by the things that have been happening in my life, to me. They go from the punk loft to galleries, openings, parties, conferences, all the art milieu places.”

Walking Across Campus With a Form to Fill Out, Acrylic and Watercolor Pencil, 14x17", 2016

Walking Across Campus With a Form to Fill Out, Acrylic and Watercolor Pencil, 14×17″, 2016

LW: “In terms of who has influenced your practice, are you looking at other comic books? At life?”

WS: “My first influence was Kathy Acker. The first Kathy Acker book I read was Don Quixote. I like how the main character speaks but then the dog will speak, and the prose was inspiring to me. I wanted to channel that punk spirit. But at the same time it was influenced by Legally Blonde and the idea that a person on the surface can be conventionally attractive and well-dressed but in fact is a mess. That’s where Wendy came from. Formally, because I picked up drawing comics where I left off, when I was 16 years old, the same formal inspiration is there. Like Matt Groening’s Life in Hell or Ren and Stimpy.

Then from comics, I started to make sculptures. But I wasn’t totally sure where the sculptures were coming from. They felt a little bit forced and too autobiographical. But then I had a really good studio visit, where this curator said, since I already made this fictional universe with Wendy, that it was actually totally OK for me to jump from fiction into sculptural practice, and that it didn’t have to be a sculptural practice that was a direct one-to-one translation of my life. In that way, it’s more interesting because it gives a third space for both me and the viewer to draw from and more opportunity for complexity in the reading of the artwork.”

LW: “Yeah. I could imagine—or you could tell me—that you chose a comic format because you wanted to use narrative. But then, narrative doesn’t always work the same way in sculpture. Do you think about narrative with the sculpture?”

WS: “I do. Although, because Wendy is about a person, Wendy has an emotional dimension to it. Each of the characters in Wendy are a different representation of me—different facets of my identity—so I think there’s a kind of shape shifting or drag performance going on in a way, some process of embodiment or transformation. With my sculptures, I use the opportunity in working with physical materials to draw out that relationship more: between the artwork and between the body and transformation. For instance, I had a sculpture that I made in 2013 that was called Wendy’s MFA Application or I think it was called MFA Application 2016. It had this weave hair attachment all around the outside of an envelope. It pointed to this idea of the physical embodiment of fiction, or how I use fictional characters as a costume or a cosplay of myself. I’m trying to play with ideas like that in my sculpture. Lately I’m realizing while I’m doing my MFA that I’m more interested in the embodiment of fiction and visual metaphors and allegories for embodying fiction, where intestines can also be a line coming out of a pencil, and things like that.”

Excerpt from Wendy

LW: “When did you first think of yourself as an artist?”

WS: “Maybe when I won a drawing award or something? When I was like 3 or 4.”

LW: “That’s super young. So you were always drawing as a kid?”

WS: “Yeah, I was the one in school that could draw. That was my thing.”

LW: “And you were making comics when you were 16, and then you stopped for a while?”

WS: “I was drawing since I was very, very young and then maybe around 14 I started to make my own zines. Later on I would start selling them at school. I had these comic series I would make, editions of comics, and I would Xerox them on my lunch break in high school on the Xerox machine at the corner store down the road. So, yeah, that was my thing. I think I really needed it at that time to define myself.”

LW: “Did you go on to get an undergraduate degree in painting, drawing..?”

WS: “I got an undergraduate degree in studio art at Concordia University in Montreal. I graduated in 2009. I specialized in printmaking. I was interested in the screenprinting process. During undergrad I was also interested the punk DIY music scene. I was making posters for events. I wasn’t screenprinting them, so they were either photocopied or colored digital images, but they used the screenprinting process in the way that they images were layered.”

LW: “That’s a solid gap between undergrad and grad.”

WS: “2009 to 2016…oh my god, yeah, it’s been seven years.”

In Walter Scott’s studio

LW: “Do you have a new studio at the school? What’s an ideal day like in the studio?”

WS: “I have a pretty big studio. We all have pretty nice studios here. I’m slowly breaking it in. I’m kind of welcoming the mess. A perfect day in the studio is not very long. I don’t like to work very long. Maybe I’m lazy, but if I get four hours in the studio, I’m OK.

In the four hours, there’s room for sitting and staring and walking away and then toward the objects and textures and stuff that I’m working with. I like to collage or edit. A lot of my sculptural practice, the first parts of it are me drawing textures or using watercolors or acrylics on paper and then putting them on the wall alongside fabric or material. Then walking away from it, moving around, and walking around my studio moving pieces and seeing the relationship. Just trying to feel out the spatial relationships between the objects, the textures, the fabrics and then how they exist in the space also—whether something is better lying on the ground or hanging off of the wall or somewhere in the middle. Because these things that I’m making will eventually determine their own space in the gallery in the way that only they could.”

The Pants of Law and Order, Acrylic and Watercolor Pencil, 14x17", 2016

The Pants of Law and Order, Acrylic and Watercolor Pencil, 14×17″, 2016

LW: “Do you feel it’s more important as an artist to be in a city, where its expensive or tough or whatever, but there’s a strong cultural scene where you can see art and you can show art; or, like you are now, to be a small town, a quieter place, where you can really focus on making?”

WS: “I think it’s OK to have both if you can manage to do both at different times. Because I see people in cities struggling constantly and I see more isolated rural people struggling in a different way. My solution has been to try to do a little of both; it’s almost like seasons in a year where I will try to spend some time in cities and some time more isolated. It’s not easy to do because people have different responsibilities.

But I work best when I know that I can enter and exit. I’ve been a nomad and home has been a difficult thing to define. So I decided that every place I’ve been in, is just another room in my house. When I go back home, to my hometown, I say, this is one room, like the guestroom or bedroom. And a big city like Toronto or L.A. is like the living room, and maybe Vancouver is the bathroom…I don’t know. Because every city also has its own spatial, empathetic, psychic character. You know how, when you walk into a church, there’s a certain protocol? It’s just like in a city, there’s a certain protocol in the way that you behave with others. Somewhere like New York it’s crazy and you just could do whatever…that’s kind of like being in a nightclub. Yeah, every city is kind of like being in a different room. I’m not really settled anywhere, nowhere is home right now, just yet. The way I try to feel at home now is to imagine that every city is just a room in the home of myself.

So after the last 3 years of being in these huge random cities, I really really welcome these two years in this small town. I think that I’m going to draw a lot from these experiences I had being in Chicago or L.A. or Tokyo, and really put it to good use while I’m hunkering down in Guelph, Ontario.”

LW: “These past few years of moving around—presumably a lot of it was residency driven—this is a strange model for a lifestyle. I know other artists who cobble together different residencies and they do it for a few years. Its sound really amazing but really draining.”

WS: “Oh, it’s difficult to get any work done! I expect to not. Sometimes I see a few months coming up for an arts related residency but I don’t expect to get any work done there and then I’m going to be in this other city, and I’m definitely not going to get any work done there. You sort of have to decide that some cities are more for experiencing than they are for actual production. It’s a matter of balancing out when during the year you have time and space to be productive, if you can, and when you’re going to say OK, these next few months are for experiencing life only and logging that and later maybe turning that into an artwork.

It’s kind of why I started to make comics again—the beginnings of this nomadic life. I stopped having a studio and I stopped having space to create larger psychical objects. I would literally just plop down in whatever bedroom I was staying in at the time. It didn’t take that much space to take out a notebook and a pen and an eraser and make artwork in a very transportable modality.”

Phone Tag: Interview with Tiziana La Melia

Posted on October 2, 2016 by Linnea

smile even when its bad, chalk pastel on paper, 2016

Following an introduction from Rachelle Sawatsky, I Skyped with Vancouver-based artist Tiziana La Melia for the latest iteration of Phone Tag. Tiziana is active in both the literary and artistic communities in Vancouver, and her visual artwork often playfully blends narrative and imagery. In this interview, Tiziana describes current projects, how a space or location can affect what she makes, and attempting to balance an ideal working style with the demands of reality.

***

Innocent Oyster, water colour and flashe with collage on water-jet cut aluminum, led strip, 27″ x 29″

LW: “What are you working on now? You mentioned that you have a studio visit later today. What will you show?”

TL: “I will be uncrating these free-standing paravent paintings that I started making last fall when I was at a residency at Parc Saint Léger, in a town called Pougues-les-Eaux. I recently got them back after exhibiting them at The Rooms in St. Johns, Newfoundland, but they don’t feel finished, so I need to look at them again now that I have more space to walk around them and look. I didn’t have room for that before. These works are called Purple Poses and there are three narrative threads, three sisters who are the three fates tickling the moon, a pond covered in algae blooms, and bodies made out of wine spills.

I’ve also been collaborating on the voice over for a film by Courtney Stephens. She’s a filmmaker who runs this screening series called Veggie Cloud in Los Angeles. The film-essay is based on letters from female travelers focused on illness and virtual and real time. I’m planning on going to L.A. in a week or two so we can be together to finish the script. It’s at a point where it is challenging to collaborate from a distance. It is also an excuse to see some art and connect with friends.

The third thing that I’m been preoccupied by is a manuscript for a long poem. I’m not sure what the title is going to be. Either The Eyelash and the Monochrome, or maybe Staring at the Ceiling Seeing D.O.G. It’s a text that I started in 2014 as part of an exhibition at Mercer Union in Toronto also called The Eyelash and The Monochrome. A version of the text is printed on dye sublimation bed spreads, but when I was invited to submit a manuscript to Talon Books this March it felt like the occasion to return to some of the ideas in this work, and to think about scale in writing and the time-based-ness of it, which are really obvious things… But thinking of books more as a form or space and its material though this space began to consume me. It’s not so unlike the script with Courtney, which has me thinking about similar things in terms of the formal and material conditions of working with language and time, and in this instance I am responding to images already shot for the film, and linking it to our research, but also again struck by the sensation of time. Which, with painting I think about sometimes, but in a very different way. More as a still document of time.”

Staring at the ceiling, performance documentation, Contemporary Art Gallery Vancouver, 2016

LW: “Since you just moved studios, you can unpack this work in a new space now. Was this super-disruptive, or does having a studio matter less because a lot of your practice is writing?”

TL: “It’s been really disruptive. Before this move, I had just reorganized and expanded the space at Model, which also functioned as a gallery and event space. My studio tends to be messy, with layers of activity, storage, gestures…the incidental collision of different modes of working really influences how I think through my work.

Moving to the current space was unplanned. I wasn’t even looking for a new studio. I was going to try working from my garden, because, as you said, with a writing practice I can be more flexible. So I thought: Maybe I’ll work completely outdoors. I’m really lucky to live in a house with a big back yard and a landlord who I’ve become friends with who encourages us to use the space how we like. I was also fantasizing about setting up in the old fruit stand in my parent’s orchard in the Okanagan Valley; it’s about 4 hours from Vancouver. I was recently out there to work for an artist who has a ranch across the lake from where I was raised. Being there this time made me really feel like there was something unique to not being in the city… to experience things like boredom, but also being in tune to hear your own thoughts without the constant interruptions of the city. The ideal way I would want to work is a place that is quiet so I can tune into how I am actually feeling and to what’s happening in the world. Here, I end up absorbing the stress of the city; it is numbing. The last time I was in New York I felt that so dramatically. If you have the choice it seems crucial to try to be in a space conducive to the work you want to do, even thought I’m not sure I know what that is yet.”

burning herb on the four corners, 22″ x 33″, gesso, aluminum, mugwort, gaouche, on canvas, 2016

LW: “Right, this is a question that I like to ask people: Is it more important as an artist to be in a city like Vancouver or L.A. or New York, where it is expensive, big, busy, distracting, or to be in a quieter place and you can focus, but its like–really quiet…?”

TL: “I grew up in a really tiny town, so the city always held this fascination and mystery for me, and also this possibility of reinventing yourself—of forming an identity outside the sort of conservatism of smaller places. For me, that felt like what I wanted to do. It felt more free…. I think I’ve been thinking about it for a long time. Just being in a ranch, where there were other artists and encountering other sorts of livelihoods and animals and plants and flowers and, like, silence… It’s just a total different thing. But also I just had more time; one day felt like four days.”

LW: “It sounds like being outside of a city is your ideal.”

TL: “I mean, I love cities—the access to libraries and museums and public institutions and friends. I used to embrace the constant distraction, as a kind of resource. But I don’t feel like it’s necessarily a good life. I don’t want to submit to that kind of resourcefulness.”

LW: “Do you think you would have had the same opportunities, the same people asking you to submit writings to things, those kinds of connections, if you were in the middle of nowhere?”

TL: “Not if I hadn’t come to the city. They would have been different opportunities and a different life. I wouldn’t have the gained access to certain opportunities or had the same jobs and encounters that lead to things. I was talking to the writer Steffanie Ling yesterday, who had brought up the luxury of staying home if you don’t want to go out. The social aspect of art is a significant aspect to participating as an artist in the city. But it’s not the only way to be.

When I’m working on a project, I like to work in a continuous way. I don’t like to like socialize much when I’m working on creative projects, so that’s when I was thinking I could go to the Okanagan for stints of time where I have a deadline, and then I could live in the city when I’m doing research or working on things that don’t rely on a studio space. The reality in the city is that it’s hard to be fluid. A day in the studio has so many interruptions. I do contract work, and otherwise have my own schedule, which can be in conflict with the 9 to 5 of the world.”

Who is the boss of my dreams?, Dye sublimation on silk, powder coated medical screen, 2016

LW: “Would an ideal day in the studio be working for 8 hours at a time? Do you need that long of a period?”

TL: “Totally, I love having a full 10 hours to lead up to like an hour of something—extraordinarily inefficient. But this doesn’t necessarily mean always working on the thing. When I used to have a studio in my apartment, I’d be tending to things around the house. I like just to be around the materials that I’m working with, but doing other things like reading and writing, making a meal…gardening. Ideally it would be all those things and kind of moving in between them. Ideally the art part is just one of the many things to care for in a day.

I don’t work in the mornings, so that’s why when I’m working on a project I become anti-social. Most people work a 9 to 5, and I tend to start at 5 pm and work until whenever. I start when I do and then I like to keep working as long as I can. I don’t get to do that very often, but that’s how I would like to work.”

LW: “When did you first think of yourself as an artist? And is that a different timeline than when you first thought of yourself as a writer?”

TL: “I don’t remember exactly when I thought of myself as an artist. But I do remember being interested in art at a young age. I must have been 4 or 5 when I became really fascinated by the mimetic aspect of art. I loved… just the sensation of seeing something reproduced. I used to draw a lot when I was a kid, but I never drew particularly well. People would be like “you’re a great drawer” but it was more like because I was drawing all the time. So I was always making things, making videos. I didn’t think of myself as an artist at this time. Because I was so shy, I really had trouble speaking, being ESL might have been part of it, but I remember being this way in Italy too. Making art was a survival strategy, and in school, for example, it was a way to avoid doing a typical report. I would make a video instead. I waited until after high school to pursue it seriously.

When I went Capilano College for studio art, I had the option to take creative writing as my English elective. The course was stimulating but also confused me—in the sense that it made me wonder if I wanted to pursue writing instead. Cap had a strong connection to Simon Fraser University, which is the school I transferred to a few years later. I ended up taking a class with a Canadian poet and critic whose books I had read. He encouraged me to write and this eventually connected me to the Kootenay School of Writing, to writers and publishing.”

Who is the boss of my dreams? (detail), Dye sublimation on silk, powder coated medical screen, 2016

LW: “So this is related to my next question, which is, who has influenced your practice? Presumably writers as well as artists are influences.”

TL: “Ada Smailbegovic is a writer who has influenced my practice. She’s a friend and has a biology and literature background. Conversations with her have probably been the most influential. We met at a coffee shop that I used to work at. Her way of thinking has influenced me.”

LW: “When you say her way of thinking, is there something in particular?”

TL: “Her commitment to constantly trying to describe what you’re feeling. The experience of proprioception and the links between things, of autopoiesis. Her sensitivity to animals and plants was and still is beautiful. She studied moths and fungus and counted seals. Always thinking about how constellations of encounters are forming and transforming you, at a molecular level. And by extension, thinking about how forms produce thoughts and how thoughts produce form.”

LW: “Great. Thank you so much for participating.”

TL: “Thank you.”

No. 5 Orange, oil on linen, 77″ x 55″, 2016