CLK: Claire L. Kovacs
SBG: Susannah Biondo-Gemmell
SBG: Susannah Biondo-Gemmell
JR: Jennifer Rogers
CLK: To begin, I thought that you both could talk in general about the conception of Momento, and then we could move into the questions.
JR: Susannah and I were asked to work together, collaboratively, for the Iowa Clay Conference. We didn’t know each other and we met one late fall afternoon and talked about where our ideas overlapped and where we felt like we had commonalities.
SBG: We started about a year ago in my studio making lists, words, thinking about similarities in our own concepts, materials, our individual works and our lives currently. We developed idea a little more conceptually at first, and then began to visualize how that concept might manifest itself.
JR: I remember ideas such as ‘we’re both in Iowa’ and ‘we are both new [to the area]’ – I was born in Iowa, but I had recently returned to the area.
SBG: But that is a good point, because the piece itself is very much about cycles, and we were both at a point where we were returning to a place. [I was] returning to the Midwest, after having lived elsewhere for a long time. There was that similarity, and that is where the idea started.
JR: And we met several times just talking through the ideas, and the work started to develop really organically; it was an easy process to work through. One thing that sticks out in my mind is how there is a relationship between the studio and the domestic space, and that for me drove what the piece started to look like. That it had to look like both; and represent both spaces.
SBG: We wanted to use the ceramic process because both of us are tied to [it in our own work] – but not use it in a literal way, but more metaphorically. The space needed to be able to contain the process, and be something else too – larger, more universal, to people who are not necessarily artists. I see the piece as metaphor [for] these cycles, depending on what a viewer’s position in his or her life; what he or she is experiencing; [in the end] how [he or she] interprets what these cycles are, really varies.
JR: I remember, in talking about these ideas of cycles, Susannah saying ‘something needs to happen – a change has to occur to complete the cycle,’ and I really wasn’t so convinced early on. [But] that became an important component of the work –it became a completed cycle, that there was a change that took place within the space.
SBG: But also that it was meant to be continuous. So there is this sculpture, this installation, that I feel is incomplete without the performative element, it’s meant to be a continuous cycle – we don’t know when it begins or when it ends.
JR: The space morphs through the process. The table becomes redder. The trough becomes more covered in clay. Things change that signify to the viewer that somebody’s been in the space, even when no one is present.
CLK: We have spoken a bit about the performance, but there is something I want to emphasize a bit more: I was wondering about what it is like when you are placed into the role of the viewer, watching the performance. What are your experiences, as the makers?
JR: I usually have a lot of ownership over my work, but because this was a collaborative piece, and it wasn’t just a collaborative piece with Susannah, but it was also a collaborative piece with our performer, Lynnette Volden, that I didn’t feel quite the same ownership, which allowed me to step back and hopefully experience it like the other viewers were experiencing the piece. That being said, when I had the opportunity to just sit, and watch the piece, and really focus and be drawn into [it]; it became quite an emotional experience, where I was actually brought to tears because of the beauty of the piece.
Because this was a collaborative [work], and because once Lynnette stepped into that space, I felt like it was her space, and no longer my space, [nor] anyone else’s space, it allowed me enough distance to see it in a different way. I don’t think that could happen with my own personal work.
SBG: I agree with you. I felt that whenever we would go into the space, once we put the fabric up, it felt really foreign, even though we created the physical installation. When I first started in the arts it was in theater, so for me I’ve always been interested in performative, time-based work. Once I started working in clay, I’ve been trying to figure out how to create some sort of hybrid of the two. For me, it was very much like watching theater in a way that I don’t achieve in my own work. One thing is that I did feel very strongly about how people experienced it, and I didn’t really realize it until I saw people come [to the opening]. I wanted to make sure they experienced it as a sculptural object, versus just sitting and watching, like you might something on stage. It was meant to be something different, something you were to view in the round.
JR: You wanted them to engage with it as a sculpture, as an object, and Lynnette just happened to be inside of it.
SBG: One of my favorite viewpoints is through the shelves, through the birds, and you have to go to the back to have that experience.
JR: One thing that surprised me is that people would sit down on the gallery floor and watch the piece, which was amazing.
CLK: How has the act of collaboration shaped the process of creation?
JR: It was a very ambitious project. It was demanding of our time and our efforts, and it came together because there were two of us working on it together, thinking about it together, and solving problems together.
JR: And we talked through everything. Sometimes ad nauseum to make really simple decisions, but in the end it paid off.
SBG: Collaboration is really hard and it can be a failure fairly easily, if it’s not the right people working together, or if they don’t have an end point. Part of the Clay Conference was that we had to show slides of our work, and [prior to that moment] we hadn’t really seen [each other’s work] – we perused each other’s websites, and we talked about our work, but not really in depth, and after knowing my work and seeing Jen’s slide presentation, I was amazed at how balanced the piece was. It wasn’t a piece that was completely outside of the way either one of us work individually, it was very much a nice mesh of our two ways of working.
CLK: You’ve talked about how this is bringing you back to issues that you have been interested in for a while, so I wanted to open [the conversation] up a little wider, how do the two of you see Momento fitting into the current trends in ceramic art in general, the big picture?
SBG: I think that ceramics has been widening its scope in terms of allowing in a more liberal way of working. For so long it was about the object, the vessel, the figurative sculpture –and now there are ceramic artists who are working in installation, time-based [media], and performance. Furthermore ceramics is increasingly embraced by the larger art world. An artist who historically had gone into sculpture can now pursuing ceramic arts.
JR: I think that as much as this piece does sit on the edge of what’s being done in ceramics, it is still very much linked to process and to clay, and to clay-ness – all of those things that ceramic artists love about the material. I can’t help but to think of Jim Melchert’s Changes – Performance with Drying Slip (1972). [He] and a group of others dipped their heads in slip, and then it sat on their skin and dried and cracked. I do think that it is important because it was doing something different, on the edge of what clay could do, at a really early time, and it was still so much about clay and material.
CLK: How does the performative element complete the installation, or do you see them as functioning as two separate experiences?
SBG: For me, I don’t feel that the piece is complete without the performative element. It is hard for me to just have it in the gallery, but [at the same time] it is very much about the object. We talked a lot about what makes it different from theater, and it is because it is very much about the object. The narrative is about the materials and the object.
JR: It is important that the space had a presence in the gallery. That it had a dramatic presence. That it had an impact when you walked into the gallery and saw the piece, even without the performer. I do think that it does stand on its own. In a sense it is an object, and I think it’s successful in that way, but I do think that the performer completes it.
CLK: What about the title Momento? What components were you trying to get across with it?
JR: The idea that the piece could be about the object, about the time, and what happens to the object during the performance became the focus of our title.
SBG: Yes. But we also changed the spelling, intentionally, it was meant to be a hybrid term. It’s a memento, the object, something that we could potentially take with us, which goes back to the metaphor of the piece. In some ways it’s about experiences and memories. These mementos, these memories that we take with us that she’s processing throughout the piece. That’s the object of it. It’s also about the moment; the mo- part of the word. Moment, very much speaks of the time element.
CLK: Could you speak to what sort of direction you gave the performer?
JR: Lynette has exceptional skill in movement. We were not interested in speaking, as it wasn’t a speaking part. I remember at one point we had a vocabulary lesson from her because we were having trouble communicating. She was interpreting directions through theater and we were interpreting them through visual arts. We would say things like ‘move with intention,’ and she would respond with, ‘what does that mean? Do you want me to move fast or slow?’ I thought that was very interesting.
SBG: I tried to relate it the theater. I told her to think about Stanislofsky’s idea of ‘living truthfully under imaginary circumstances.’ It’s his definition of acting. We wanted her to be very natural in the space, but have intention and purpose.
CLK: I want to give both of you a moment to bring up anything that occurred to you in the course of this conversation that you felt that we haven’t touched upon.
JR: Perhaps we should talk about the technical aspects. We talked about why the birds changed, but we didn’t talk about how the birds changed. Susannah and I press molded the birds, and during the process of press molding, we put red iron oxide in the interior space, so that when they went unfired into the water and started to fall apart, that the iron would come out. And then when the performer scooped up the clay birds to make a new bird, it was a darker red color. That transformation that takes place during the performance. Furthermore, the table that she works on is a cast plaster tabletop, so that while working with the wet clay, the moisture is absorbed into the plaster. The performer is able to quickly make a new bird.
SBG: Again this is the hybridization of the studio space and the domestic space. These found objects were manipulated in order to work with the ceramic process. We also designed the trough to specifications. We wanted the birds to to peer over the top, to see over it.
JR: Plus a lot of troughs are concrete; and being in Iowa, in the Midwest, it was one of our thoughts early on that we could potentially pull from the rural farming and agricultural lifestyle. And concrete trough made sense in that way.
SBG: Also, we chose to encapsulate the space: it’s meant to be of another world, a dream, a memory, seen through a bit of a fog. That space is slightly separate from our space.
CLK: And I think it helps the viewer, from my point of view, work harder to see; so it made me more actively engaged in the whole process.
JR: And it is an intimate, private space. There is a conversation between the public and the private; it’s the performer’s space. But I feel the same way with the floor – it was important that it was elevated. That she wasn’t touching the earth. That she was on a platform. And I think Momento was successful in creating another world.
