FRAGMENTS AND DISSONANCE
Excerpts from Clay Seminar No. 2. June 10, 2022
FRAGMENTS AND DISSONANCE
Speakers: Rose B. Simpson > Artist (USA); Ramekon O’Arwisters > Artist (USA); Kahlil Irving > Artist (USA).
Fragments are what can only be uttered in part. They disrupt notions of wholeness; they are not ideal. A shard is a glitch in the system. It signifies breakage and fracture, the loss of function, or a process gone awry. Understanding or experiencing the world through fragments is characteristic of the diasporic experience. Dissonance is productive friction. Active in each of our speakers’ processes is the method of destabilising an existing artwork through reimagining and restructuring parts. In collaborative work like this conversation today, the counterpoint to fragmentation and dissonance is collective intention (Introductory text: Linda Sormin, 2022).
RBS: I always like to start talking about my work in context, because we’re always building in relationship – we don’t exist in a void. I have had the privilege of coming from a very long history of ceramic artists who lived in an aesthetic relationship with life and spirituality, in the Santa Clara Pueblo of northern New Mexico, and so I live here in my ancestral homelands. The image on the left is my mother’s work, and on the right is the work of Margaret Tafoya, who is one of the most iconic traditional potters of my tribe, who has since passed. This is what I’m inheriting. This is the story. This is the visual language that I’m coming from – and a lot of it has been around ‘place’. I think seriously about a really deep and thoughtful and conscious relationship with place. My mother was given clay and started her own contemporary process of figurative ceramics and eventually bronze. Thinking about our place in context and in my own voice, and considering very deeply our relationship to all things, are also very important specific perspectives; we’re all facets of this reality. And in that facet … and in that perspective of being … that very singular facet of a whole, we are doing vital work, and our perspectives are incredibly important.
KI: I think about the layers of history that are social, physical and emotive within spaces that are occupied and the constant transformation of an architectural environment, which us as humans are occupying, or oscillating between the spaces of the structures built around us. It is complicated … it’s a complicated facility that you have to then read and negotiate constantly with your senses, and the other myriad information that you’re being bombarded with daily. The issue is the problematic of understanding the things that we inherit, versus the things that we’re immediately interacting with or trying to decipher daily, and the things that we’re trying to wrestle with emotively within our sensorial engagement – and trying to wrap all these into a sculpture. I’m thinking about clay as something that can occupy space, as being of itself – looking like clay, or clay being formed into a vessel, and clay being formed into something that is recognisable from life … it’s those three parts of itself, those three … in some ways you could say fragments … but also it’s making them exist simultaneously as a kind of … understanding of what clay can be and what clay can do … It is the possibilities of invention that can exist within a material that has such a long history of being formed, but also being used as a means for industrial production. And, for me, it’s just been a place to put so many things together.
RO’A: I was trying to use these two elements – fabric and clay – as a metaphor for the black queer experience and the African diasporic experience, or any experience of ‘other’ or ‘otherness’. That’s how we’re characterised by the dominant culture … it’s to be perceived as other. So then, the symbolic associations that I have with shards, is a symbol of brokenness. Throughout one’s life, one has to accept brokenness – from the minute we’re born to the minute we die, because we’re always degrading. We’re always being fragmented. We’re always losing something just to live because our bodies are constantly ageing, and you have to experience and understand and accept what that means and the acknowledgement of self. So, accepting fragmentation is, for me, a very powerful way of navigating a very hostile environment and world. These are all the things that I bring to the work that I create. I’m sure a lot of people – when they see these images or they see my work – they unconsciously reference brokenness … and I want to reach people on that level of the unconscious, because that’s what we all are acting on … How do I create a universal experience so other people can experience and acknowledge their own pain, their own unhappiness or whatever feelings they have about brokenness? And my whole thing is I don’t throw these away. They’re shards and broken, but I don’t throw them away. So, I keep them, and I create something beautiful out of it.
RBS: That learning … you realise that you’re putting that out there in the world … something that never existed before and, in that creation and those fragments, you’re watching them and seeing them spin together and create this whole that is so beautiful because it’s so dynamic. I just think about innovation and how that’s so linked to courage and intuition and the courage to look deeply at our own intuition.
RO’A: My studio, it’s like a sanctuary. It is where I don’t have to be anything else. There are no eyes … all the eyes are outside … they’re not on the inside, so you can totally let go of having to decode, or having to smile, or having to – you know – step and fetch or having to pretend. So, my studio is a sanctuary.
KI: What does it mean to build a studio from the bottom up? And what are the infrastructural things that you need to be able to survive? What can you make do without and does that change the physicality or the point of departure that you can engage in from a place with a certain set of resources or possibilities? And does that fracture away from a certain way of knowing? or also allow you a certain openness to operate in a completely different way? For me, a lot is born out of being in my own space – even though when I was in teaching with Linda at Alfred University, our doors were always open for the most part, and so people would see us even in our most vulnerable state; but in a lot of ways, it was always also about sharing. And I think in a way, like dealing with the things that we’ve inherited, or the positions in which we’re in, with or without the diverse possibilities of privilege, can be seen as a place of hurt, or a place of loss or lack … We’re also still very giving. We’re still very excited. We’re still very open to the possibility of positive change and growth and, I think, in dealing with the things that I’ve inherited and learned from my family or society, and still wanting and desiring to have my own space to work on my own, outside of an institutional setting, it’s still very much a desire to share and give to the community. The context changes the fragments of what I’m working with, or the parts of what I’m working with are shifting – but the issues and the problematics that push it forward are still quite similar.
