Phone Tag: Interview with JD Reforma

Posted on February 19, 2018 by Linnea

Installation view, Coconut Republic, 2017, Firstdraft, Sydney. Photo: Zan Wimberley. Courtesy JD Reforma

I speak with the Sydney-based artist JD Reforma about Kardashians, car parts, the American landscape, and, of course, art in this Phone Tag interview. Former Phone Tag participant Giselle Stanborough knows JD through art school and connected us for this interview. JD earned an MFA from the University of New South Wales. He often considers contemporary culture in his work, from celebrities and pop to geopolitics and imperialism, as well as his own background as an Australian born to first-generation Filipino immigrants in the suburbs of Sydney. In addition to an interdisciplinary artistic practice, JD is a writer and curator, and he currently works for the Sydney Biennale.

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/or inspiring, who I then interview with the same five questions.

*****

LW: “If you had to briefly describe your practice, what would you say you make?”

JR: “I make a bit of everything…It is usually informed by whatever kind of idea I’m exploring. Ideally sculpture and installation. Lately a lot of video—just because the economy of it is so much more accessible to me now. I particularly like video, because I can communicate a range of interests aesthetically—subject, narrative—more so than you necessarily could in sculpture and installation. There’s an economy in it: it’s easy to produce, easy to scale, and I quite like playing with the different textures of video, like the cinematic or pastiche and collage or text. It’s a really plastic medium. But, definitely through art school and some time after, I was playing with sculpture and installation and had a very material practice.”

“The work I make is informed by a lot of ideas, but it inhabits a space of pop cultural critique, and embrace as well. I lived for a great deal of time in the western suburbs of Sydney. It’s an interesting community because it inhabits the space of the ‘Aussie battler’—of an aspirational middle class. That fed really well into my practice. I lived in a gated community. I was really interested in aspirational aesthetics, but have kind of moved away from that now.”

LW: “Looking online at work on your website I can see that, but I also see a kind of global geopolitics writ large. Is that fair?”

JR: “Yeah…. The political through the domestic.”

Nothing comes between (foreground), 2017, reconfigured Calvin Klein underwear, marble; and oK ok OK (background), 2017, site-specific computer-cut vinyl, altered Calvin Klein logos, installation view, Coconut Republic, Firstdraft, Sydney. Photo: Zan Wimberley. Courtesy JD Reforma

LW: “What are you working on now?”

JR: “Right now I’m trying to think of a work on television. So I work—and, the way that Sydney is structured, a lot of practices are centered—around opportunities. I don’t have a studio-based practice. I work full-time, which makes it hard to have that. So you get an opportunity, you make a work. I have a show toward the end of the year…and you know when you have a show and you have an idea for a work, and you’re just trying to get them to meet in the middle somewhere? The show is around television, and the curator is great. I don’t even own a television. It’s a bit anachronistic to think of an idea for television. But I’ve really wanted to make this work for ages and ages and ages and ages about Kylie Jenner.”

“I’m taking a break mostly. I recently had an exhibition in a gallery in the western suburbs of Sydney. It’s a particularly interesting space because it’s located in this post-industrial context. There is a highway called the Princes Highway that skirts Sydney down the south coast and goes all the way through the southwestern suburbs. It’s called that because the Prince of Wales visited Australia in the 1920s. This roadway already existed and because of his visit they renamed the existing highway the Princes Highway. I never knew that backstory. Everyone knows the Princes Highway. It’s very post-industrial, geared towards car sales, car repairs, rims, supercenters—there’s an Ikea there. It’s very dreary, very neglected. There’s this one place along the Princes Highway—Tempe Tyres. It has this incredible façade where it’s just two or three stories of glass frontage built with a grid of chrome wheels.”

LW: “Oh my god.”

JR: “It’s amazing. It’s beautiful actually. It’s a perfect grid. Years and years ago it used to move. All the wheels used to move at different speeds. It’s kind of a perfect analogy of the highway itself. All these little wheels moving at different speeds and then, over time, it has completely fallen apart. They stopped getting the wheels to move because they started breaking down, they started falling out. So they haven’t replaced the wheels.”

“Everyone in Sydney knows Tempe Tyres. Particularly anyone who is from the west knows Tempe Tyres. So I took a 16:9 shot of Tempe Tyres with the road reflected in it. That was nice for me. I don’t actually do my video work; I work with collaborators in that sense. I asked a good friend of mine, Kate Blackmore, who’s also an artist, to film with me at Tempe Tyres and we sat there, trying to take video. And the guys were coming out asking us what we were doing. We were like, ‘Oh it’s an art project. Do you mind if we take a few photos and videos?’ and they were so happy for us to do it. To me, chrome is an analogy for suburban masculinity and, particularly around that area, there’s a lot of marginalized communities for whom signaling status and wealth happens through objects and hotted out cars. I was interested in making that a tribute to them in a sense.”

“Like I said at the beginning, I have a very plastic practice. I try to mold it to the context. [This work] was so specific for that particular gallery. In a way I kind of wanted it to feel as if it had always been there.”

Installation shot, Princes Highway, 2017, 55 Sydenham Road, Sydney. Photo: Stelios Papadaki

LW: “The work you showed in the space was as video?”

JR: “It was a video. Not quite 1:1 scale of the actual Tempe Tyres, but almost. I try to match ideas to contexts.”

LW: “Just judging from a few recent projects on your website, it’s not like you install a set of objects in a room; it’s really a whole room all working together as an environment.”

JR: “Yeah, an immersive environment is something I am interested in.”

LW: “So when you’re thinking about the show you have coming up, you have this idea and you know you have this physical space—you even know what it looks like. I wonder how that affects the process, and I wonder how that affects the process with the curator, because they aren’t just coming in and picking out objects and putting them in a room.”

JR: “No, no, I wish they could. It would be so much easier. [Laughs] It’s a very interesting gallery [for this next show]. It has a kind of a pentagonal shape. It houses this huge archive of Australian television and radio. I’m not so interested in making a work about Australian television and broadcast, more about the texture of television. They way that television is consumed today, which for me, largely, is through my phone, through the internet, and how sort of I grew up watching television as a part of my schedule, like when I came home from school. It’s part of your routine. Which it still is, but now, rather than it taking up a section of my day, television and the televisual run parallel, with that you consume it in 15-second grabs, or 1-minute-long grabs, rather than episodically.”

“I know it is broad to say I want to make a work about Kylie Jenner, but I quite like the Kardashians. I like them as the characters of the show but also the way in which they inhabit this kind of televisual space. They are characters but they are also family members. They have multiple shows running concurrent to each other; they have these apps which are running on another, entirely different time scale to their television shows. They also have the media landscape, which they’re feeding into, so it becomes this feedback loop. And they are broadcasting themselves through their own television space, through their social media. So it is this huge, huge, incredibly complex feedback loop which is so tightly controlled by them. It’s not so much about the Kardashians as a media empire, but more of them as these time lords in a way.”

“Now with their makeup lines, particularly Kylie Jenner’s which started and now Kim Kardashian’s, I’m thinking of them as artists, because they are working with these palettes and working with color. Anytime I’m exploring an idea, I’m also trying to think, why does this need to be considered through art? And you know the lip kits are kind of what started it. Anyone can enjoy the Kardashians or any of these reality television shows independent of contemporary art. But now that they are exploring this makeup, it kind of enters this realm of body politics and the relationship between the consumer and the body, and women and the body and color and the screen, with branding and politics.”

A Novel Merchant (performance documentation), 2015, performed as part of 48 HR Incident, 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art. Photo: Zan Wimberley. Courtesy JD Reforma

LW: “So, Kardashians, other artists… this question is meant to be very open—who has influenced your practice?”

JR: “I’m probably more influenced by film directors, or maybe just a whole range. Film directors and photographers, Bruce Webber, Herb Writ. Ralph Lauren, Calvin Klein. Paul Thomas Anderson, I love his films. Stephen Spielberg. Roni Horn, I love her work. Felix Gonzalez Torres. I love his work.”

“Who has influenced me though? I think a lot of American creatives and producers. I think it comes through in my work, that American film sense—in particular the two last works that I made, thinking about how Philippines is still so connected and filtered through an American lens. They even learn American English, and how that, alongside the way Australian culture is learned through and influenced by American culture. Even the language of comedy that I know is American comedy. So, I think that’s why a lot of my influences are American, probably mostly American vogue though.”

LW: “I though in Australia there would be a strong British influence—British humor, British whatever…”

JR: “There is quite a lot, but I never engaged too much with Ab Fab or—what’s that other one that everyone always references, it’s got John Cleese in it…”

LW: “Monty Python?”

JR: “Yeah, Monty Python, or Little Britain. I don’t watch much of that or engage in it. I don’t know why. They’re not the cultural references that were for me growing up. My dad loved Elvis and John Wayne, and my mom was obsessed with beauty pageants.”

Confidently Beautiful, with a heart, 2017, video installation, with site-specific wall-painting and computer cut adhesive vinyl, video duration 8 minutes, installation view, Halò, Mosman Art Gallery, Sydney. Photo: Zan Wimberley. Courtesy JD Reforma

LW: “Sometimes I feel like we just stay our whole lives the way that we were when we were five. We keep so many of those same characteristics.”

JR: “I totally agree. I don’t know how many times I’ve been at an event or party and people are making these British references, and in my mind, I’m thinking ‘I really need to watch Monty Python.’ Yeah, very American, I don’t know why. Maybe because of the cultural influences my parents consumed. Also, I think I was interested in nationalism and this idea of American pride. It feels so much more acceptable than Australian pride. Australian pride is connected so much more to British colonial rule, and also thus to our kind of colonial history, this colonial legacy. You would never see in the pages of an Australian magazine Kylie Minogue draped in an Aussie flag. That’s just an image you would never see. I think there’s more of a shame celebrating something like that for us.”

LW: “There certainly is a good deal of patriotism here. Have you ever been to the U.S.?”

JR: “Yeah. Last time I was there was ages ago, in 2012.”

LW: “Did it live up to these ideas of America?”

JR: “I saw so many more U.S. flags out on balconies. Definitely I did. The size of it. America’s bigness impresses itself strongly on any visitor. And also, it looks like a film set. I remember when my cousin and I went to Las Vegas, we went to the Grand Canyon, and it is just enormous. It looks like—because it’s so big—it looks exactly how it is drawn in Road Runner. That’s the far away wall that’s been painted, and this is the middle ground, and this is the foreground where you are. Space in America feels very much constructed from a foreground, middleground, and background in that sense. It has that kind of dimensionality. I don’t know if you feel that.”

LW: “I don’t know; I’ll have to think about it. When did you first think of yourself as an artist?”

JR: “Probably when I was in high school. I think a lot of people start thinking of themselves an anything when they are forced to, which is when you go to university. I thought of myself as an artist then because it was the thing that I excelled at in school. At that age you’re so conditioned to do what you think you’re good at, because it will provide you the greatest advantage, so probably when I started art school is when I started thinking of myself as an artist. But I wish I had started thinking about this a bit later, because maybe I got into the wrong thing.”

“I don’t know if I still think of myself as an artist. No, I don’t. I know that when people ask me what I do, I say: ‘I work at the biennale in Sydney.’ And then I’ll say that I’m an artist. It’s hard to rationalize the latter.”

LW: “Yeah, you mentioned working for the Sydney biennale and also it coming to an end. When it ends, do you become an artist again?”

JR: “I think so. Whenever the shoe fits, I’ll wear it.”

LW: “I think it’s great to have a more flexible identity.”

JR: “Absolutely. And yet there is this cultural impetus to choose one thing or another. More and more, I’ve become less attached to that. I think of myself as someone surviving. [Laughs] And if art helps me survive on this day, then I’m an artist, and if working at the Sydney biennale helps my survival the next day, then I’ll work at the Sydney biennale. It has to be flexible.”

The Source, 2013, 1L spring water bottles, LED lights, custom MDF plinths, installation view, The Source, Mosman Art Gallery, Sydney. Photography: Zan Wimberley. Courtesy JD Reforma

LW: “So, my next question is, what is an ideal day in the studio? But if that doesn’t fit, what is an ideal day making?”

JR: “My studio is on my phone. I keep folders of references. The thing I do with making—it sounds so tacky—but I guess what I do is create mood boards in a way.”

LW: “But you do it all on your phone?”

JR: “Lately I do, the past few years. Not because I wanted to but because I don’t have a studio. I haven’t had a studio since 2015. I’ve become really good at organizing ideas into lists, folders of images, bookmarks of links to articles or texts that I’m reading. I don’t want to say that an ideal day is on my phone, but it is on my phone, kind of across the bunch of things I’m reading. I haven’t read a book in so long. I read mainly on my phone. That’s not true; I read a real book last year, How to Train Your Virgin, one of those Badlands books. But that was because it was like 100 pages long and I read it in like 3 hours by the pool. I like the phone as a studio because it’s much more like a rhizomatic studio, to go from here to here and there to there.”

“And once that process is done, I’m up on my feet a lot. Going to the hardware store and looking at materials; going to that store and looking at materials. Going to a fabric store, looking at materials; going to a department store to buy Ralph Lauren bed sheets for material. I try to structure my studio around my day. I take a lot of photos. I think it would change if I had a studio. There would be things on the walls, and I’d collect a lot more material. Collect a lot more paper material. For now, this works.”

The Source, 2013, 1L spring water bottles, LED lights, custom MDF plinths, installation view, The Source, Mosman Art Gallery, Sydney. Photography: Zan Wimberley. Courtesy JD Reforma

LW: “My last question is whether it is more important for an artist to be in a big city, like a Sydney, and you know it’s expensive and there’s a lot going on and institutions. Or, on the other hand, to be in a more remote, smaller place where you can focus on making.”

JR: “I actually think I was much more productive when I didn’t live in the city. When I was living at home, it was about a two-hour commute. I think I was productive in order to fill that time in which I didn’t feel productive, which is when I was commuting. There’s definitely benefits to both. The seclusion, that feeling of alienation, can be really rich and nourishing as an artist. I feel like a nut saying that.”

“In the city, obviously, you have access to institutions; to go see, interact; you have community. I think definitely if we’re talking about practicality as an artist, it is probably easier to live in a big city because there’s just so much with networks and feedback that we have understood to be critical to an artist’s practice. But I don’t think that you can’t be an artist in the regions or in the suburbs. In Australia, there’s actually a lot of support for artists outside the center. In a sense there’s a lot of institutional and government support, but in a way it still feels like supporting marginalized artists is a way of feeding the center. When I lived in Ingleburn, which is where my parents are living, I got a lot of support from institutions giving me shows and whatever, but there wasn’t necessarily an attempt to create that kind of a community out there. But having said that, there has been much more of an effort to create centers in Western Sydney that stay in Western Sydney, which is nice. But I guess, the answer would be both.”

LW: “Totally. Thank you.”

JR: “You’re welcome.”

Phone Tag: Interview with Giselle Stanborough

Posted on September 23, 2017 by Linnea

Giselle Stanborough, Giselle Dates, 2016, performance documentation, photo by Zan Wimberley

This August, I Skyped with Giselle Stanborough, an intermedia artist who lives and works in Sydney, Australia, having received her MFA in 2015 from the University Of New South Wales. Prior Phone Tag participant Marian Tubbs met Giselle through mutual friends in Sydney. Coincidentally Giselle recently moved into Marian’s former living space, a live-work space intended by the local government to foster artists through subsidized rent for a year. Giselle and Marian also share an interest in the permutations of identity on the internet. Currently Giselle is developing a series that relates online dating and the gallery experience, drawing parallels between the expectations people can bring to both.

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.

*****

LW: “What are you working now? Where are you focusing your energies?”

GS: “I have this ongoing project that uses internet dating services, like Tinder and OK Cupid as well as a site that I made, that organizes to go on dates in galleries and particular exhibitions. It will be having another iteration in a year in Melbourne. We rejig the content for whatever particular exhibition it will be a part of, whatever particular city. I just started looking at how to change the work for that context, which involves a lot of sitting at the computer. I’ll be doing a lot of that this week.”

LW: “To back up, could you describe this project? It’s connected to your website GiselleDates.com, right?”

GS: “That’s right. I guess the project is a way to look at those high lofty ideals about art—connecting consciousness, overcoming existential loneliness, creating deeper connections with another kind of experience of life in the world—and to look at how that exists outside of the gallery and in people’s daily life. So it is trying to create a kind of cohesion between the goals of art and dilemmas of isolation, of consciousness that is not in the silo of contemporary art but just part of life, like people trying to connect on social media and apps and stuff. It’s also to try and have conversations about art with people who don’t have a vested interest in art. Which I always find really interesting and refreshing.”

LW: “Absolutely. I think the most challenging thing is when somebody who’s not into art asks, ‘What is this? Why is this art?’”

GS: “That’s the best question. That’s the most important one. And you can forget to ask that.”

Giselle Stanborough, Giselle Dates, 2016, Installation documentation, photo by Zan Wimberley

LW: “So for this project, you are going on dates with people. Do they know it is an art project?”

GS: “Yeah. Just because it is an art project doesn’t mean I’m not dating them. I’ve had relationships that have come out this project.”

LW: “There we go! That’s an outcome you don’t always see.”

GS: “Art can be a conduit to connection or a conversation piece for a day, rather than—I don’t know if you’ve been on many dates with people that you met online: they tend to be quite rehearsed and really boring and really career-oriented. At least the appeal of going to an art gallery is that it gives us something else to talk about…that’s not a monologue. You can have conversations that you don’t anticipate.”

LW: “Do you think of it as performative?”

GS: “Yeah. But, I think of most things as performative.”

LW: “Well, maybe dating is already performative…”

GS: “Exactly. Yes, it’s performative, but what isn’t?”

LW: “Is there an exhibition display when you show this project?”

GS: “There has been, but I’m not sure if there will be for this upcoming show in Melbourne. I’m going to make a series of ads. I know that in America you have the Bachelor [TV show]…”

LW: “Yes.”

GS: “…and I’m interested in that performance of heterosexuality. I’m interested in the idea of bourgeois heterosexuality as performance. So, to make a series of ads that sort of position me as a bachelorette-style person, which internet dating profiles do anyway. Those will be on screens in the galleries, but I often use screen spaces that aren’t technically for exhibition—screens that are out by the front desk or near the elevators. Or they might have user feedback screens. I use those screens because they have a kind of anti-viewer, art/not art way of being experienced by people who walk into the gallery.”

Giselle Stanborough, The Lonely Tail, 2012, 4 channel digital video (still), 3 mins

LW: “One of the things that I think is interesting is how you’re inserting yourself—not a character, not some idea—but yourself into these digital spaces. Is it important that it be you?”

GS: “Yeah, it is. Questions of selfhood are really, really complicated.

I think in a time of user-generated mediums and pop culture, we’re used to having an abstracted sense of our own self. Like: ‘Yeah, it’s me but it’s not the whole of me. It’s a part of me.’ It is a way that we are accustomed to accepting our positionality in the world. We are too big to be in any one spot at once, on a Facebook profile or a Tinder profile or a performance art work or with our mom, but we can accept that part as very authentic. Does that make sense?”

LW: “It does. At the same time, I think people often have an idea of the internet as this space where you can create the perfect self.”

GS: “The interesting thing is, yes, you can create your perfect self, but you can also be your most loathsome, despicable self. People say our generation is narcissistic, and there is an awful horrible element as well. It isn’t an experience of yourself from behind your own eyebrows—you’re already abstracted from yourself. And it’s not just self-love online; there’s a lot of self-loathing as well.”

LW: “You describe a lot of screen time in your practice. How does that figure into an ideal day in the studio, and what does an ideal day in the studio look like for you?”

GS: “An ideal day… I also do installation elements or physical or performative component, so I would like to do screen stuff, do some animating, and then I would like to do stuff with my hands. Today, for example, I put on all these stupid little rhinestones with this glue stick for a work. It came in this stupid little rose box but the rose was crushed from being sent from China and I had to set the iron on the lowest temperature and iron out the little fake leaves. It was nice, doing stuff with my hands. I don’t know if it was an ideal day, but it was pretty good.”

Giselle Stanborough, Lozein True Love, 2016, digital composite

LW: “Who has influenced your practice?”

GS: “In terms of other artists—it’s not a very unique answer—but Mark Leckey has really had a profound impact on the way that I see art and objects intercepting, and an interest in the precedents of cyber space. Instead of saying ‘Oh, this is so new. There was nothing like it before,’ Leckey looks at other parallels, even heaven or the way that the internet carries a narrative about where to draw the line between what’s human and what’s not. Or what’s animal, what’s mechanical, what’s divine. Those sorts of things that have been going on for a long time, and that cyber space is the most recent type of.”

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

GS: “It fades in and out…I don’t really think of it as something that I am, but as something that I do. Every now and again, when I’m going overseas and I write my occupation down on the immigration paper, then I’m like, ‘Oh yeah, that’s right. I’m an artist.’ I try and stay away from those identity things about being an artist. Because then I’m scared about the kinds of things that come along with it, like art being middle class or male. I just don’t even: I take little baby steps, so maybe I don’t think of myself that way even yet.

As well, I know a lot of people that work in the arts and are artists, all my neighbors here. When things are normalized, they sort of become invisible. It is just a part of our lives and we don’t think about what that means in relation to other careers. You don’t really know what other people do. What do stockbrokers do? Actually do? They feel that way about us. What do I actually do all day? ‘Oh, I iron out shitty little rose leaves from the internet.’”

LW: “You’re in Sydney. Do you like it?”

GS: “I think about this. Some people have a strong sense of place. For me, it is not that significant. Maybe because the internet has so much to do with my practice. Sydney is all right, so are other places.

[Laughs]

No, Sydney is awesome. Thank you, city of Sydney, for subsidizing my rent.”

Giselle Stanborough, Lozein Pride, 2016, digital composite

LW: “Do you think it is more important for an artist to be in a big city, a Sydney or a New York, with all that entails: expensive rent, opportunities to show work, to be in a cultural scene, or to be in a small place where you can focus on making and maybe not have all of the pressures of rent or making it?”

GS: “That’s an interesting question. In 2015, I moved back home for a while, which was really quite isolating but also kind of a cleansing experience, where you find your own values. When you’re in the big city, it is easy to get swept up. Things and cultural economy have their own kind of impacts. After that period at home, I didn’t give a shit. There’s all sort of weird things that are part of the industry, rather than art itself with a capital A. I find after that period it’s easier for me to be like, ‘Oh, this is about the manifestation of art and capitalism in Sydney’ or ‘Oh, that’s like capital A art.’ Leaving Sydney for a while for a quiet place was really good for me, but I don’t think it is sustainable. There’s not as much employment opportunity.

Also, Sydney is not a big city like New York. It’s a small city. New York is a big city. I think a lot of Australians have a reverence for centers of America and Europe, and I think now we are looking other spaces. Post-colonial narratives allow us to look to our closer neighbors for other ways that art impacts society.”

LW: “Are you thinking of anything in particular when you say that, a certain place?”

GS: “I’ve been interested in a post-colonial kind of queer identity politics, and looking particularly at a Southeast Asian context for that. A lot of that does come through Sydney because they are our neighbors and because of the diaspora. It’s something that I’ve really enjoyed watching come to the art scene here.”

LW: “Well, those are my questions. Thank you for participating in Phone Tag.”

GS: “Thanks so much!”

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.”