JESSICA STOCKHOLDER: Can we mix some abaca with this yellow?
Well, I was invited to make some paper here at Dieu Donne,
something I’ve never done before.
The experience of it is deceptively simple.
It doesn’t feel highly technological.
It’s also something that would be very hard to do
without the help of the people in the paper mill.
Paul has a lot of experience with paper
and with all the techniques and the history of paper-making.
The whole paper-making studio is filled with water.
So it’s a very clean and fresh feeling.
There’s a possibility nevertheless to make things
that are bright and sharp and crisp,
you know really plastic colored.
You know part of me would like to make stuff
that’s minimal and very well organized
and neat and clean and quite comprehensible.
I love the chaos, which is why I do it.
I don’t make minimal controlled things,
but I always feel kind of embattled
and it takes me a while to really know
which ones I like best after I’m finished.
Cause I think there are lots of different kinds of thinking.
Um, you know your hands learn to do things
that you could spend a whole day trying
to write about and articulate.
What’s intuition?
You know it’s a kind of thinking, it’s not stupidity.
Um, and uh, so, so I think there’s a discomfort associated with trying to um,
put all those different ways the brain works together.
You know so I kind of like to avail myself of that discomfort.
You know I, Like being in the studio alone.
I don’t like (LAUGHS),
I don’t, I don’t hire people to help me in the studio.
And you know when I do the installation
I have to work with people to get,
to get things done on time
and to do things that I couldn’t do by myself.
And in here I like to be alone.
I, I mean part of the parameters I work within are
that I can carry the stuff up here by myself
and do everything by myself.
And um, and, and it’s odd to be in the studio
and not know what your going to do.
You know it’s, I think being an artist and choosing
to put yourself in a circumstance where
you don’t know just how things are going to work out
and what you’re going to do is uh,
is very exciting and rich and also difficult.
These pieces are more like pieces of furniture.
You know they’re not furniture
but they’re of the scale of furniture in the room.
They address the architecture as furniture does.
And furniture is also built for the body.
And these are like that too,
though they don’t serve any particular function most of the time.
And I love plastic.
I also just love color and they’re a really great vehicle for color.
And they embody color.
They’re colorful all the way through.
Plastic is cheap and easy to buy.
And my work participates in that really quick and easy
and inexpensive material that’s part of our culture.
In that way my work engages the means of production that we live with.
At the outset, my work was about as nonverbal as you could get.
Because I had two very verbal parents,
I needed to find a place to kind of ascertain
the nature of my experience that wouldn’t be argued with.
To work with the physical world was a place to do that.
But now having grown up,
I find it interesting to put words parallel to this work.
When I make these pieces I don’t have a, a literary story in my mind.
I mean I’m thinking about what things are going to look like visually.
And then afterwards can put words to what I’m doing.
Drawings are a way of planning what I’m going to do,
a way of putting myself in the space
and thinking about being in the space
and mapping out what’s of interest in the space for myself.
Maybe they’re like recipes for action.
In the studio I don’t have a plan,
but for the installation work I need to
have enough things planned so that I can make use of the time I have.
And then I feel sort of prepared to go and do the installation.
But, but it’s always a kind of uncomfortable feeling
because I can’t do any more work until I get there to start work.
I mean this pile of light bulbs here,
I’ve done that before and have some sense of what that would be like.
It’s a nice color.
Lower, lower.
All the way down.
Right against here.
There we go.
Being responsive to what’s there.
Or what materials we actually were able to find.
The sizes of everything, what the colors look like.
I mean it’s like setting myself down
with a bunch of different color paints and starting work.
Many things could happen.
Went shopping last night to find something blue.
You know I didn’t want another cooler,
there’s a lot of colored plastic geometric shapes um, in coolers,
but I’m using all those coolers out there.
And I wanted something blue and plastic,
something that had this color, that wasn’t very specific.
You know that was like uh, you didn’t right away think, oh it’s a....
And this seemed kind of perfect.
So I was lucky.
Refrigerators and freezers, I’ve always enjoyed
because they are the place of food in a house.
And food and cooking has to do with loving and giving in a family.
But, but also freezers and refrigerators are cold and frozen
and that has to do if you have an emotional mirror,
that has to do with withholding and not loving.
So for me they kind of embody that duality
which is probably also in the gallery.
The gallery and our institutions of art are both
full of possibility and extraordinary feeling.
And they’re also, they also put art in a place of remove.
So it’s...it has less power in some ways than if it weren’t removed.
In my work I’m interested in systems.
And how things are geometric or systematically organized.
How a thinking process can meander in unpredictable ways,
in contrast to a system that’s been planned
and that’s shared amongst people.
I wrote a little text about this piece,
it’s some kind of poetic text.
Referred to the “Yellow Brick Road” and the Wizard of Oz.
I think all of those kinds of fantasy fictions have resonance with what I do.
My work is about posing this possibility for some other experience,
world than the one that, that we experience as mundane.
Even while this is made of mundane things.
My work’s really about pleasure.
It’s not always pleasurable to make it, sometimes it’s excruciating and it’s hard.
And I think that pleasure matters a great deal.
I mean I, I think what kids do that’s play is a kind of learning and thinking.
And uh, it’s, it’s a kind of learning and thinking that’s um,
doesn’t have a predetermined end.
So I think that I’m involved in that.
It’s an ancient technique.