Katya Oicherman interviewed each of the Im/perfect Slumbers artists in the fall of 2022 as the artworks were being developed. The interviews, presented here in full, show each artist’s thoughtful process and examine the ways that sleep functions as both a mechanism for creation and a physical and spiritual challenge.
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Katya Oicherman (KO):
Please tell us about the work that you are preparing for the exhibition, the idea behind and what stage it is in currently. What’s happening in the studio?
Rachel Breen (RB):
When I started the theme of sleep, I immediately thought about pajamas, because many people sleep in pajamas. With my interest in used clothing, it just seemed a natural fit. Recently one of my first things I do when I start working is I go to the Goodwill Outlet to look for materials. This is where a lot of my ideas come from.
So at the Goodwill Outlet, the used pajamas that I have found so far are mostly polyester and really ugly. Surprisingly ugly. I think there’s something very ugly about polyester as a material in terms of how it’s made and how that process affects the earth. Polyester is made from oil. It’s a destructive process and it has a huge negative impact on our climate. So I have a lot of negative feelings about the material itself. Then this material doesn’t biodegrade when we put it in the landfill, which is where a lot of these pajamas will wind up very soon after they’ve been used once or used by one person and then discarded. They will stay there forever. For those reasons, this material just makes me feel horrible.
I immediately leapt to thinking about this situation as wishing that it were a bad dream that I could wake up from, and then knowing that I can’t. A nightmare. That’s also a metaphor for climate change and workers’ conditions. These pajamas have been made in factories where workers are not treated well. I think there’s an irony there, that people think about putting pajamas on to help them have a good sleep, to stay warm at night, just to be comfortable, while in fact, these pajamas should be making us very uncomfortable.
So my process emerges from the material and how I get the material. I got a lot of really ugly pajamas and I brought them to my studio. Some of this polyester material feels very soft, but there are ugly colors, ugly patterns. In India I saw so many incredibly beautiful textiles, hand block printed fabrics that have been dyed in natural dyes in these amazing earth colors and dyed with indigo. And then here I am with these pink and black, tiger striped pajamas that are in contrast just gross.
I’m thinking about why we are settling for these pajamas. I want us to wake up, to see that we are settling for ugly and horrible clothing and we should be demanding something different. We should be demanding that our clothes be made in better conditions, but also just that we have better clothes and pajamas to begin with.
So I bring all these ugly pajamas to my studio and I start putting them up on the wall and looking at them to find relationships in colors, patterns and shapes. Just arranging them. My vision is creating something that resembles a sleepwalking monster. Because of the particular space at the museum, I started to envision them hanging in a circle, but facing outward, hanging the sleeves in an outward way, with this idea of sleepwalking. It is a metaphor for me of how I think a lot of us approach clothing. We’re just sleepwalking, we don’t really think about it. We’re just ignorant or detached from the realities of how the fabric and the garments are made and what we are actually wearing and sleeping in.
When you get far away from it, the colors can actually look kind of beautiful, especially the color relationships between the different pajamas. That’s also a metaphor for when you’re far away, something can look nice, but as you get closer, you start to realize the garishness of the clothes, the fact that these are all synthetics, that the bright colors have a very negative impact on the planet and also probably on the people who are actually dying the fabric. And you start to see that the polyester, a lot of it is nubby, while it’s soft, it also feels fakey. It doesn’t have the feel of natural fibers.
Detail of Rachel Breen’s “I Wish This Was A Nightmare”
My ultimate dream would be that these pajamas would be worn by a group of people who then have to figure out how to move together in order not to rip them apart. Or maybe ripping them apart. I think that all my interest in textiles and the garment supply chain has made me think a lot about how, in capitalist society, when we think about change, a lot of it is focused on individual behavior change. And it’s so limiting and we need so much more than individual behavior change. People often ask me, when they learn about my work and they start thinking about how our clothes are made, “Well, what can I do? Or where should I shop?” As though if we just change where we shop, that’s going to solve the problem. I think that the solutions that are needed are much bigger and require collective action. Thus in my work I want to emphasize that idea, that changing how the garment industry affects us will require collective action.
KO:
It seems that there is a certain shift in what you’re doing – in developing this almost theatrical potential within the installation and in your recent work as a set designer. So can you speak about that?
RB:
Yeah. I’m interested in making large scale installations, in part because that speaks to the scale of the problem and it also captures people’s attention in a way that small works don’t.
KO:
Could you provide us with some context on your visit to India? It evidently informs so much of what you are doing now.
RB:
I had a Fulbright Fellowship to India. I decided to go to India because seven years ago I visited Bangladesh to research the Rana Plaza factory collapse. I interviewed survivors and union organizers. Since then I have been making work mainly with used clothing and fabric scraps that I collected in Bangladesh, addressing the garment industry, workers exploitation and negative impact on the planet. People would often ask me, “What should I do?” And I have some answers. “You should do this or that, buy less,” et cetera, et cetera.
But I became interested in learning about the sustainable solutions that are coming out of the Global South. It’s easy for us here in the Global North to say: “this is what we think you should do.” But what are people in India saying? What are people in Bangladesh saying? What are people in Cambodia saying about what to do? I went to India to look for that, to learn about what they think the solutions are. I did a lot of traveling, interviewing many, many people who are making small, sustainable brands, working with handweaving, natural dyes, block print, repurposed fabric–the whole spectrum of small-scale textile and clothing production.
I was looking at the intersection of textiles, craft, sustainability, and fair trade. I wasn’t looking at big brands, big garment factories. Although I did visit one organic cotton fair-trade factory that employed 2,000 people, which was very interesting. Mostly though, I was looking at very small-scale organizations where workers are treated well and the products are developed with a great attention to minimizing the impact on the environment. I found so much inspiration in these incredible efforts. So many interesting ways of working with craft and making it contemporary, both for India and for export. I had fascinating conversations about tradition and innovation in this space. I learned so much about how fabric and clothes can be made sustainably, imbued with intention and care both for the people and the planet.
It’s why I go to Goodwill Outlet, look at our pajamas and think: “Oh my God. We are settling for such ugly clothing.” Not just pajamas, other clothes that we wear are just ugly. In India I saw people dressed in beautiful clothes, amazing patterns and fine materials. I start to wonder: “What difference does that make in one’s life to be clothed and covered in garments that have been made with such care and so thoughtfully?”
I have yet to fully process my whole experience and understand how it’s going to affect my art making. It was very inspirational, and a privilege to be living in a culture that is so different from our own. India is a country that has suffered from colonization and also a country that deals with incredible poverty. To see how that complex history manifests was extraordinary.
KO:
Textile-wise, did you notice anything else that was different that has to do with the material culture of sleep?
RB:
Jaipur is located in a desert. Rajasthan is one of the largest living deserts in the world. It took me a while to realize that when they talked about winter, their winter was like our summer and their summer was like our summer on steroids. I had an opportunity to visit people’s homes overnight and would just be given a bed with a sheet. Blankets are not so common in Rajasthan, though they are common in other parts of the country.
In some ways, the bigger differences were more about clothing. For instance, I found the saris to be a fascinating garment, especially in the way that saris can fit anyone. They can fit any body shape. That was a huge realization to me of how, whether you gain 10 pounds or you lose 10 pounds, your sari still fits you. It is this incredibly sustainable garment. The sari can be passed down from a mother to her daughter. No matter their sizes, the sari fits. As long as it maintains, it doesn’t completely fall apart, it can be passed down and reused.
The act of reuse in India was fascinating. A tradition of reuse perhaps existed once in the United States, which we have mostly forgotten. But in India, if your sari falls apart, it is either turned into a shawl or a baby blanket or a baby mattress. That’s the connection between sari and sleep. Saris are always reused, they’re never thrown out. The idea of circular design is inherent in the culture of India. We think we’ve come up with this innovative concept of circular design. No, it’s been alive and well in India for generations. And probably here as well, before we were trained out of this habit of reuse and recycling, and became a consumer throwaway culture.
I met many people who showed me the blankets that their mothers had made from old saris and then embroidered. Sometimes, if the baby blanket falls apart and gets too old, it is turned into a doormat or a rug. Everything is remade from something else. It is inherent in the culture.
KO:
And it remains beautiful throughout the entire process…
RB:
Yes. These saris have embroidery, which then becomes a part of the baby blanket, and new embroidery is added. When saris are layered to make up a blanket or a mattress, they create layers of history that you’re sleeping on. What a contrast to these ugly polyester pajamas! You’re sleeping on layers of saris that were your mother’s or your grandmother’s. What an incredible kind of material to be connected to physically. Imagine if that’s what we were all sleeping on, in garments or on bedspreads that were made from our mother’s and our grandmother’s and maybe our great-grandmother’s clothing, how meaningful would that be?
KO:
Yeah, that’s very generous. Generous, humbling and accepting. How was it getting back? How is your sleep now?
RB:
It’s funny. I feel like right now, with the change of the weather from summer to fall, my sleep has been wonderful. There’s something about this temperature that has been very comfortable for me. In many ways I was ready to come home. There was something very exhausting about the pollution in India, the population density, the noise and the chaos. That was another thing that was both fascinating and challenging for me. Challenging in part because I recognized it all as a symptom of our relationship to India. Many of the difficult living conditions in India are caused by how we live in the global north. We send a lot of our garbage to landfills in India and we outsource so much. The production of so many garments…
Rachel Breen:
I’m really honored to be a part of this exhibition. I think sleep is a fascinating entry point into so many things. And I think the group of artists that you pulled together is an interesting group. It’s always great to see who else is there and how your work is animated by other’s work. It’s because of new relationships that might emerge, and so I’m curious to see that happen.
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Katya Oicherman (KO):
What is the work that you created for Im/perfect Slumbers? What is the idea behind it and maybe also a little bit about the process of creating it?
Sayge Carroll (SC):
The piece that I made is called Mourning Quilt, and it is ceramic tiles with decals of photographs of my ancestors. So it’s like a memorial for them. There’s so much that I don’t know about my history. I have been researching my dad’s side of the family, and I was able to keep and restore my grandmother’s archive of photographs, that goes back to the late 1800s, of my family, relatives and friends. And so within my studying and research, these are some of the poignant people in my history. That’s how I got here. I just wanted to honor them making my path possible. There are five of my ancestors in the work. Going from left to right, we have Skeet, Ozel, Allen. We have my Uncle Joe. We have Junior Miller, who’s like five in that picture. We have his mother, Ginny, or Ginner as I would call her, and Bobby, and then my Aunt Esther and then Lily.
I haven’t done this type of quilt with ceramics before. So it was really exciting to come up with the idea and see how to make it work. I think that’s the most fun thing about creating. You come up with your plan, and then once it comes into reality, it always morphs and changes and tells you what it needs to be. Working with clay, I find, it’s very much a collaboration with the material, developing an understanding of how clay works and then the desired effects that I want.
Detail of Sayge Carrolls “mourning quilt”
KO:
Can you speak a little bit more about the quilt? Why quilt?
SC:
Why quilt? Together with the photographs I also received from my grandmother a quilt that she had made. The family history that I found out about was very exciting. My great-grandmother, Hetty McGee, had a restaurant that was open until 1938 when my father was born. And the only reason that it closed was because four months after my father was born, my great-grandfather passed away, and so grandmother was no longer able to keep the restaurant going by herself. When my dad, in one of my interviews with him, mentioned that, he just made it like it was no big deal. And I was like, “But you had never told me that there was a whole restaurant in Dothan, Alabama.” This was happening during segregation, when Black people couldn’t just go into regular restaurants. Learning this gave me a lot of pride that my family was able to pull something like that together.
That also explained why the family was able to get so many of these formal photographs taken. I know it wasn’t that expensive, but it was hard to get people for a regular formal sitting, I guess, to do the photographs. Madear, my grandmother on my dad’s side, had made a photo album and placed there all of my lineage, all of the people that came before, adding who were the people, who were the children from the family. The book just continues to go on, she didn’t get it finished. And I found it in a shed, in the backyard, Dothan, Alabama. It was being eaten away by mold. I feel very lucky to have found it and to be trusted to restore those stories.
This means so much to me because, in fact, I’m not that many generations away from slavery. In order for me to be where I am, my family had to continue on a path that was pretty bleak. To come from people that never thought things can change… Their existence was telling them that slavery was and would always be. It’s really powerful to internalize that they were still building with that knowledge, but hoping that we wouldn’t always have these circumstances. To continue forward with that is what really inspires me. That’s why I want to continue to honor my ancestors in the ways that I do and bring their likeness out for people to see. I do feel like this is a huge gift, to be able to put together this pottery studio business that I’m working on and to be able to live as an artist in Minneapolis. I’m really grateful to them for it.
KO:
Was it the same grandmother who put together the album and created the quilt?
SC:
Yes. The same grandmother put together the quilt and put together the album. She was a rockstar. She was amazing. She became a nurse, but she started out cleaning houses. My dad’s first job was picking cotton, and it was before child labor laws, it was all through summer, dawn till dusk. His foresight was that if he stayed in Dothan, he would have no chances of becoming what his dream was, which was a man who carried a briefcase and went to an office. He didn’t feel that he would have those opportunities in Dothan. The only way for him was to get out of there, but they didn’t have money, they didn’t have people they could send him to, so he went into the Navy. And he was there for four years and then he was based in Minneapolis. This is where he chose to have his family. And on top of that, he also married a white woman when that was still illegal. You think about this path, and it’s very impactful for me.
KO:
How did the quilt end up with you?
SC:
When Madear passed, we all gathered. I was documenting Black males across the United States, when we got called to Dothan, Alabama for her passing and funeral. While there, we were cleaning up and going through all of her effects. My dad had a sister, who was really his cousin but her mother had passed, and so she just grew up in the family with him. And he had a brother. And Madear was living with my aunt Netta, who’s his sister, and they had put all her personal effects in the shed in the back. They just told me, “Go see if there’s anything that you want.” Nobody wanted the photographs but me. I was a photographer, so of course I was predisposed.
My sister, I think, got the quilt. But once she started seeing the works and the research that I was doing, she gave me the quilt to archive and keep. Another thing that I guess I got from my family is caring for the community. Madear was very involved in church and in helping single mothers or all people that she could. There were a lot of things she could do on her own, making the quilts, having a garden and feeding the neighbors. All of this is incorporated into my practice. This “Mourning Quilt” is a way for me to say that without writing an essay, I guess. This is my essay form. As I make these things, I am meditating on and thinking of all of the obstacles that my ancestors had, and were still able to create these beautiful pieces that are lasting in the world longer than they would. With ceramics, that’s going to last for a long time.
KO:
Yeah, absolutely. Even in our very project, Rotem Tamir talks about her grandmother, Shanai Mateson talks about her grandmother, as well as Gwen Westerman, and Amoke Kubat , of course, always refers to this larger community of ancestors and is a grandmother herself. So it’s a very significant presence.
SC:
It is. I think mothers are usually the cultural bearers. They’re the ones that create the culture in the family and carry along and pass on a lot of their learning, experience, just all the knowledge that they hold. And mothers are often dismissed as caregivers. To dismiss their role as culture bearers you have to have a very strong ability to ignore the depth of what they’re doing. I am a mother, and I understand how important that is. It is my favorite thing that I’ve done. So mothers, grandmothers, they’re the knowledge holders. They’re the ones that are paying attention. They’re the ones that have to manipulate and get around all the different things that are happening and keep everybody safe in the way that society has set up our roles. The grandmothers on my dad’s side, they were paving the way for a lot of things that couldn’t have happened without them.
SC:
I just want to say that this has been a wonderful experience, and I appreciate that you’re focusing on Im/perfect Slumbers and getting our sleep. It feels very supportive of women’s work as well, which I feel is really needed. I felt very honored in the process. So I want to thank you.
KO:
Thank you. It was brilliant to have the opportunity to work with this great group of artists.
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Katya Oicherman (KO):
Hi, Amoke. It’s lovely that you are joining me for this little discussion. Let’s start from the very beginning. Can you tell me about the work that you are doing for the M, where it started, and where are you going with it?
Amoke Awele Kubat (AAK):
This project is called, so far, The Night Mothers, and it is in response to my experiences during the emergence of Covid in 2020. I had been asked by yourself and the Walker to do a written piece about daily living and resting, and where we were at that time. I spent an awful lot of time in my bedroom, a very, very small bedroom. I actually slept in a child’s single bed, which became my whole world of feeling safe, writing and creating. From that published piece we’d continue to talk about the uncertainties of it. The murder of George Floyd happened after that. Mothers were summoned. We were in the streets. We were watching. The insurrection that continued forever. The political unrest of not only Minneapolis but nationally and then globally was going on. And I was aging in the middle of all of this. So the work is just kind of an explanation of how I made do, managed all of this, in so much uncertainty.
Initially, I didn’t feel that angst that most people felt at that time. I didn’t feel like I was being punished or diminished in any way. I felt like this was the opportunity to be bigger. I started looking at the reality of it. We, my family, were kind of isolated. I lived with my oldest daughter and youngest grandchild. Having to support and take care of ourselves, and have the resources we needed, was pretty daunting.
Stick bundles in Amoke Awele Kubat’s “Night Mothering”
This series of artwork began by using Covid resources at hand. Weaving, using natural and found objects, and writing everyday, got me to my new normal (as if normal was ever an identity for me) and kept me centered. By 2022, uncertainty and strife were getting normalized. A friend reminded me of an African proverb, “Sticks in a Bundle Together are Unbreakable”. When you’re alone: you break, shatter, get crushed. I started doing little bundles of sticks I found on the ground with the leaves coming off, small branches and big branches I found at the rivers, just started joining those as bundles. We’re different people, different communities, sticking together. I started adding fabric and bells and all kinds of materials. The bundles became whimsical. These pieces will be part of my exhibition at the M.
KO:
Can you speak more about your relationship with textiles? There are many textile elements in the exhibit. There is the bed itself. And there are also your woven pieces.
AAK:
I think most of my life I liked fabric. I like softness, I like swaddling. Blankets, sheets, towels became caves and houses and sanctuaries. Weaving takes me to ancestral memories. I go with the flow of my consciousness. I don’t have any idea where these threads will take me—become a final project. I met Chiaki O’Brien, a master Saori weaver in the early 2000s. She’s from Japan. Saori sounds like “osa ori” (change of consciousness) to me in the Yoruba language. In Zen vocabulary, saori is the combination of the words sai, meaning everything has its own individual dignity, and ori, meaning weaving. I thought, how is she speaking Yoruba and what does this loom have to do with this? And I wanted to create things, big pieces of fabric. She allowed me to have the loom for six weeks. But in four days I’ve used up all the warp yarn. It was just where my mind and my feelings went, how I flowed through that time, and how I had something that was more tangible that you can share by touching and feeling it. It becomes something to wear on top of something else, or you can hang it and look at it. It’s functional art, but also more than that. Chiaki thought and said, “Oh, it’s going to take you six weeks to do this.” Well, it took me four days. I was weaving morning, noon and night. I couldn’t stop. It felt like it took me to other places and then I would just start yanking anything I could find. I had snake skin. I just wove it right into it. Bells, beads, shells, whatever I could pick and however I could weave into the cloth. I love these layers of textures. A shell from the ocean, a string, sheep wool or plant fiber.
I love that kind of juxtaposition in weaving, that it’s all related and it’s all enmeshed. The more I do that, the more it feels like I’m going into the depth of my human development, right into the cellular level, into the stringiness of muscles. And I’m aging, so it feels like I’m putting everything I can into these pieces so it has a longevity to it. I’m usually a writer. You write, people read it or they don’t. But weaving is a functional kind of art. At some point, it can function for a long time. It could be a legacy, it could be a family’s heirloom, it could be something that somebody buys. I’m just now getting to the point where people actually buy my art. I just make it.
KO:
Right. Can you tell me more about doll making?
AAK:
I made dolls as a kid. I was a child that was not popular. I used whatever was in my environment. I wasn’t given toys, so I made my own toys. Balloons became dolls. The chicken I cut up for dinner became a doll before it became a plate of food, because I would play with it as I’m cleaning it, washing, and plucking it. I would animate anything. It’s a matter of animating things, the sensuousness of touching things that used to be land, they used to be leaves, used to be grain. Fibers of all kinds from fruit or vegetation, or trees, or roots themselves.
I have premortal dolls, I have dolls made out of wood, I have dolls made out of sticks. They all started representing this feral, indigenous side of myself. I’m African American and we’re not immigrants, not pioneers, not refugees. We were enslaved people that were brought here against our will. We didn’t voluntarily come. It was no vacation. We had a relationship to land, we had a relationship to art in a way that has not been discovered. It’s an exploration of what would be my indigenous African side.
And I’m finding out that in my own ancestors there are African people that came from islands where they were bead workers and textile workers. I feel like this is familiar to me. I feel like I knew how to do this, I knew how to use a loom, how to make bead work, and I just feel this real gratification in doing it. It satisfies something that seems like a longing, a hunger. And literally I can do it from sunup to sun down. The sun comes up, and the sun comes down, and I’m still using my shuttle, I’m still tying things together, I’m still finding things to put in it. It’s very, very satisfying. And I’m all self taught. So I still have a lot to learn how to make things more than just one long strip.
KO:
Let’s circle back to this idea of rest and sleep, and how it links to your experience.
AAK:
I think for me, my age, this time, I am really clear. I don’t have to prove anything to anybody. Everything I do is gravy and dessert. I feel like I’m really blessed that I can lay down and go to sleep anytime, anywhere, if that’s what I want to do. I do have a lot in my head that says I’m not supposed to do that. I’m constantly changing that narrative. I’m sleeping now, but pushing myself to stay up to 9:30 when I’m tired now. It doesn’t make any sense! I also learned about myself that I over eat trying to get energy. When I’m actually very tired and I need to lay down and go to sleep. But instead what I will do is go find something sugary, or coffee, or something to keep me awake, because I’m not productive. I’m not doing anything. I finally thought, you know what? Now, none of this is working. Lay down. I will ball up in a blanket or go to my bed in a heartbeat if that’s what I need to do, lay out on the couch, I will lay out in a heartbeat.
Rest is very important for us to rejuvenate on all levels. And we all are so bombarded, and we’re all sucking up such negativity and such craziness right now, we need to rest. And sitting down and giving yourself permission and accepting other people’s permission. Help somebody else: you look tired, let’s sit down, here’s a glass of water, or a nice cup of tea without the caffeine, or something medicinal. We need to care for ourselves. It’s a practice of caring. We say we want caring and being kind, but we have to be caring and kind to ourselves first. You can’t give if you haven’t got it to give. And I realize how many times I’ve depleted myself, going to school, going to work, taking care of kids, trying to do it all, sleeping four hours a day, not eating properly. It’s taken its toll. I have health challenges now and I can tell where those health challenges started. Resting is very, very important, and it helps you to be more creative. I have a very rich dream life. I come out of my dreams like, “Oh yeah, I was talking to Prince,” or “Oh wow, that’s when I need to do this.” I just tell people to rest. You have to figure out a way to have downtime.
Playing is also a rest for me. My granddaughter loves Monopoly and we will play Monopoly till we get tired, leave the board where it is, go do something else, take a nap, go eat, come back, and keep playing the same game. We’re learning how to rest in ways that are fun, and invite other people as well. A lot of my resting is watching comedy on TV. I make a point to laugh every day. I mean heart, stomach holding, clutching, farting, laughing. I just have to have that every day. I can feel the bubbles, I can feel my body feel. And I laughed till I was hurting and tired. I make sure I do that every day. I try to find ways to help myself without going to the doctor, and inviting other people to share in that space with the intent.
KO:
Does our not very encouraging reality infiltrate your dreams?
AAK:
No. I always dream of people, places, and things that I haven’t gone to. Like last night, there were a lot of people and I was trying to bring them into my house and play bingo. I was looking for prizes to give to people for bingo. Then I had a dream where we’re at a concert, and then I had one where Prince was talking to us about what he was doing now. So no, I don’t seem to bring the real world into my dream view. It’s other worlds that I go visit, or do things. When I come back to this world, I think that it wouldn’t be a bad idea to have bingo at my house.
KO:
Is there anything else you would like to say that we didn’t mention?
AAK:
I love this idea of looking at textiles, linen, and bedding, and sleeping because it’s this other part of our lives that’s almost secret. I think it should be lifted up more, like intimacy. To be able to talk about rest, to be able to talk about what your body needs on that cellular level, and that deeper level, and be vulnerable about it. I am just tired, why can’t we say that and we don’t feel like we’re going to be judged as inferior or broken or really traumatized or really messed up? We all get tired, but there seems to be this thing that’s pushing us. Who could be the tiredest and still be standing upright? Or who could do all the most impossible work with nothing? That seems to be a badge of honor or a really heavy stigma.
For mothers, this keeps our labor invisible and not valued.
So yeah, I think about all those things as I go. And the best way to go about it is not to preach it or beat somebody over the head with it, rather it is to model your life. When they start saying, “You’re looking pretty good for your age,” or “You’re walking pretty good today, you look like you’re feeling better.” “Yeah, I slept 10 hours.” I slept until 10:00 the other day and I was absolutely shocked. Because I didn’t think I had slept at all. But I woke up and it was like, “What? It’s 10:00?” And then open up the blinds and it’s all white outside. I was like, “Whoa, wait a minute. While you were sleeping, the world turned white.” I think my waking life and my dream world are not much different, to be quite honest. I love my bed. I have thanked the Creator and Ancestors for my bed—my place to renew, reset and dream.
KO:
That’s a really wonderful conclusion to have. Thank you so much.
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Katya Oicherman (KO):
Can you speak to the ideas, stories and processes that inform your work for the M?
Shanai Matteson (SM):
In the visual artwork I create, which combines printmaking and textiles, I always work in a really intuitive way. I do a lot of writing and sketching first, imagining the way a piece might look, what it might communicate, or how the fabric will hang. But oftentimes I’m learning as I go, especially lessons about how fabric behaves in hand. You don’t always know until you’re working with it.
Same with the ink, if I’m printing–just how the ink is going to adhere to a piece of fabric, how the colors will turn out. I use a lot of materials that are repurposed or found. Over the years, I’ve also been experimenting with different types of fabric dyes, most of them coming from natural sources like minerals or plants that I’ve gathered from specific places, including places that have been degraded or disturbed by industry.
For this project I’m going to use similar processes and materials, and I’ll be furthering a body of work I started five or six years ago, about mining.
I think of the textile pieces that I create as story maps. They tell a story about a place, and about the people who live there. In this case, I’m also thinking about how to respond to this space, a window with depth to it. Windows are something people walk by in the course of their day, not necessarily on purpose.
I like thinking through the different layers of surface, and what’s beneath. What is seen, or inferred. I’ve long been inspired by geology, which is a science that deals with physical structures, but also tells stories about time and the processes that shape what we understand about the deep history of place.
I’ve been looking at geological maps a lot lately. I’m excited to have some time to look at them in new ways, because the theme I’m working with is a personal response to resource extraction. Geology and mapping are such a critical part of that extractive process, and in ways that we don’t always understand when we are doing them.
KO:
Your work addresses extraction, and its impact on places and bodies and our imaginations, can you talk a little bit from your experience with this theme?
SM:
For the last two years I’ve been closely involved with the Line 3 oil pipeline struggle, a movement that begins with rights to clean water, Indigenous rights in the face of ongoing resource extraction.
Right now, in the community where I live, we just witnessed the completion of a really destructive pipeline project. There was a lot of fallout from that, both personal and collective. I’m still processing a lot of it.
And now there is a proposal by Rio Tinto, a multinational mining company, to build a nickel mine here. Just like the oil industry, the mining industry has a track record of destruction and disregard for human rights, and also using stories to manipulate people into supporting them. Rio Tinto has started to do that here–to develop plans for a new nickel-cobalt mine, in a wetland area close to the Mississippi River, and the town where I grew up.
So I’ve been spending a lot of time looking at maps, and trying to understand things like mineral rights, or how water moves, or the stories of land and how it was stolen, or what Indigenous communities mean when they say “water is life,” or “land back.”
KO:
How does this process, which is scientific, as well as very political, figure into your artistic process?
SM:
Over the past few years, my life as an artist, an activist, and a person who cares deeply for land and water, has gotten more complicated. I mean, I have complicated it, I suppose. My awareness has grown about what was taken from Indigenous people and communities, and how much harm has been done, on behalf of the people and communities and ways of life that are mine.
A lot of people seem to get stuck there, in shame, or wanting to distance themselves from culpability. But then many activists, and organizers–they run toward, rather than away from that dissonance. In many ways, we are finding a different path.
I’m not saying I know the answer, but as an artist, I feel this convergence is a place I can dig deeper. I can try to understand those processes of colonization and extraction, and especially what they have meant to me and to my existence. To my family’s story, and where it meets the stories and experiences of other people, especially Indigenous people who are still living here and resisting colonialism and genocide. What stories are we shaping into the future? It becomes a place to root into a purpose, for my art-making, and my activism.
I’m living here, in this time, and these colonial processes, the violence of dispossession and extraction, are still so active and visible. I have to do something beyond acknowledgement, and it has to come from a place of awareness and responsibility.
KO:
How do the ideas of layers and materials relate to those very complex and traumatic histories and how do they relate to the material you are working with?
SM:
In my previous textile projects I gathered overburden, which is a mining term for waste rock that’s been removed as part of the mining process. It’s dumped, essentially. It’s waste, piled into these giant mounds. Together with the mining pits, where the ore was dug out, this has changed the topography of the entire region. I used overburden because it still has high iron content, and so it creates a dye. It stains everything. I’ve used it to dye some of my fabric pieces.
Rock that’s been dug from beneath the earth also contains sulfates, which in the environment, when exposed to oxygen or water, can have really destructive impacts.
I also keep learning about the plants that grow in the community where I live, and about the different characters of those plants and the different stories that people tell about them, as I incorporate plant-based materials into my work.
Manoomin, or wild rice, is a really important plant relative to Anishinaabeg. It’s a sacred food, part of prophecies that brought people here. I’ve seen images of drawings–maps, or scrolls–that trace the migration route of Anishanaabe people to this region. There are depictions in those scrolls of rivers, lakes and other local landmarks, places I’ve known too, though in a very different way as a non-native person.
I am always careful, I don’t want to appropriate a cultural story that is not mine, but I mention this because it is part of what I am learning as I develop resistance to extraction, and as I organize with Anishinaabe friends and families in the community here.
Detail from Shanai Matteson’s “Severed Right”
In the pieces I’m creating, I’m incorporating some of my experience with those materials–minerals, plants–and also with colors and patterns that are part of the culture of extraction that is also present in this place. Things like the clothes people wear in my community when they’re doing things like hunting, or working on a pipeline.
I associate certain high visibility colors with this work, and with hunting. It makes me think about the visibility and invisibility of people, or ways of life–and it makes me wonder what is beneath our concept of safety? Who has a right to safety, clean water? And who is sacrificed?
I often add my creative writing to the pieces with printing.
As a cultural organizer, and an artist who works in public ways, people are also really important to my creative process, and I am grateful to work with so many visionary Indigenous women and other movement leaders, as well as other non-native activists who are part of my life in so many ways.
I try to immerse myself in all of this, and from there I know what makes sense for the piece, and how I want to bring it together.
KO:
Does bed time figure into this?
SM:
It does, in a sense that rest and having a physical and mental or spiritual place where you can lay your head down is very important. Maybe it will sound like a cliche, but I am a person who has dreams that literally guide me in different directions. Before the Line 3 pipeline was built, I had several dreams, in the summer of 2017, when Enbridge was working on its permits. I was going to hearings in St. Paul, but my heart was very much at home, in the place where I grew up, where I knew they would try to cross the Mississippi with an oil pipeline. At night I was puzzling: What can I do? What is my responsibility? How do I organize? Who do I talk to and what do I say?
I had a dream that I ended up writing a poem about. I was in a camp, inside a trailer house that consisted of several trailers… A familiar structure in the place I grew up. To make a bigger space people take two or more trailer houses and connect them at their doorways, so it all looks like a train crash, but it’s home. I lived in a place like that, in a trailer house. We didn’t have a home and bounced around for a while, and ended up in a trailer out in the woods.
So in the dream I was trying to get out, but because the doorways were connected there was no exit. I could look through the window and see people sitting around a fire. It was a camp.
Back then, in 2017, I didn’t really know what it meant. But I felt that something was coming, and I was trying to explain, to warn the people and to tell them to take shelter, but I was stuck inside this trailer house, not even a good shelter by itself. I had my daughter with me and I was trying to hop over the threshold of these smashed-together doors, and I was scared that I might drop her into the narrow space between.
The dream was very vivid. Several years later, I’m living in a resistance camp, and that feeling is very present. It’s what it feels like to be an artist and organizer. I never sat down and said: “I’m going to the frontline to live in a resistance camp with activists, and I’ll bring my kids with me. I’m going to stand up against the state. I’m going to speak my mind, and I’m going to end up in court.” These things unfold gradually, one step at a time.
When we sleep we do take rest, but our minds are still very active. We’re still puzzling things out and telling ourselves stories. That’s the origins of those visions. I felt called, or compelled to go home. The dream was a preparation for that. I am not a very religious person, I don’t have a tradition which I studied, but I am a spiritual person. I believe that our relationships really matter and that there are forces that we do not completely understand. We know when we feel moved, but in the dominant capitalist culture, we deaden this feeling in ourselves. We have to, otherwise how would you step over bodies going forward, if you didn’t kill this feeling inside yourself that tells you something is wrong? I think those dreams and visions are part of waking up.
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Katya (KO):
Hi, Molly, and thank you so much for joining me for this little chat. Can you tell us a little bit about the works that are going to be displayed at the M? Some of those works were created in the past, and you also added a new piece.
Molly Parker Stuart (MPS):
The latest piece is Yawn. I worked with all of my tools and techniques, adding another technique that I used in an older piece. I call it Live Pixel, where the animation is created out of each pixel. I assume that it is a living being and it has goals of its own, and it moves around the canvas in order to try to achieve them. In Yawn each pixel has insomnia. As the animation moves on, a select group of these pixels wake up and have to wander around, and roll around, and find a new place to settle down before they can fall back to sleep. Those insomniac pixels come from videos of people yawning. So we have this surreal, trippy image of these pixels running around the screen and forming images of people yawning. I think it’s really interesting.
KO:
What really was striking for me when I encountered your work was that there is a juxtaposition of tools that are almost esoteric, especially for a person who understands nothing about programming, with a very deep content that is not readily available to access, as the imagery is purely abstract. Just like with An Act of Pure and Unrelenting Beauty, “the content” is completely hidden while being transformed into this lyrical and seductive quality of the imagery itself. It is an act of healing. And now you’re telling me that 101 is basically a technical exercise that just initiated this whole process. But it is still a lyrical and beautiful visual situation that you cannot ignore as a viewer. You find yourself not knowing what you’re looking at, but there is clearly something “coded”—literally—in those foldings and unfoldings. So I thought: “Oh, that’s how people dream.”
MPS:
I love that. A lot of that comes from my history as a painter. If you look at my old paintings, you’ll see a similar composition of many layers of different things. It’s interesting to have compositions where you can’t quite tell what elements are in the foreground, and what are in the background, which one is moving, which one isn’t. It gives that dreamlike, surreal kind of vibe that helps to shut down the rational side of your mind, so that rather than dictating a narrative to what you’re seeing, putting a story to it, you just allow the emotion of it, the feeling of it, the deep understanding to come through that which doesn’t necessarily work with words.
I do a lot of that in my videos. Even in the smallest details, you’ll see individual pixels moving in directions different from those of the larger motion objects. Everything is working against itself, but together. I think it really serves to calm down the rational voice that wants to describe what’s happening as a story.
KO:
That’s an interesting way of thinking about this, a surrealist technique developed within the digital context. I need to think about this. Returning to Yawn… I have this sleep cycle on my iPhone that tells me when to go to sleep and when to wake up, one of those tools injected into everyday routine that becomes digitally hooked. You wake up to the sound of music that you didn’t choose. Apple decided that’s the music that is supposed to wake you up as part of a health app. And then you hit the button to stop it. Obviously you hit the snooze, because you can never remember which one is which. So I’m in the shower and it starts again. It has a life of its own, and it creeps into your dreams, into your sleep. Yawn has that feeling of technology creeping into…
MPS:
Yeah, it is weird. I have a similar thing, a little wearable. It’s a step counter watch, but it also tracks my heartbeat. And it supposedly tracks my sleep, though it’s not very good at it. It’s weird how technology creeps into our most intimate moments, like sleeping. How many people would we allow to sit there and watch us sleep? But we let Apple do it.
KO:
How is your sleep lately?
MPS:
I have bipolar disorder, which at its core is a sleep disorder. Every once in a while for reasons that are complex and different for everybody who has it, you just stop sleeping and eventually just go nuts because you’re not sleeping. So my sleep is troubled. It has to be regular, and it has to be good or I get into trouble and become… well, somebody else. I have this contentious relationship with sleep where I’m always trying to get it, and I’m so frightened of not getting it. When you have bipolar disorder you end up with this obsession with sleep that I’m not sure other people have. So lately my sleep is not terrible, not bad, but not great either. I have medications that will definitely make me sleep if I need to.
KO:
Do you think that the work that you’ve been doing is a way to deal with this troubled sleeping?
MPS:
I don’t know if it is. I did do one piece specifically about having bipolar disorder. I was having a conversation with a friend who had recently had her first psychotic episode, and we were talking about what it’s like to be in the hospital, and what it’s like to try to wrap your brain around this idea that your mind, the things that you believe aren’t always true, and just how strange and surreal it is. I then did a piece that was specifically about that. There are certain levels to how the disease presents itself. Hypomanic is one of them, which is not completely manic, you haven’t completely left the planet. But you’re not sleeping great and you have a very high drive to get things done. When I’m in a state like that, then I do really intense work, and sometimes it’s really good, and sometimes it’s not, but it plays into that intensive process of constantly collecting data, finding all these things. Then you start going through this cycle of writing the software, change it a little bit, and again change it, and change it, and see how it works. You end up in this cycle where you’re doing that over, and over, and over. I think that cycle feeds off of hypomanic energy.
KO:
So you see the connection between this method that you developed and being in this state?
MPS:
There is definitely a relationship between my bipolar disorder and my work. It’s just very complicated and strange. Every time I have a significant episode, I come back a little bit different. It does something to your brain, it is a traumatic event, it’s basically a head injury. So you come back a little bit different. The art is a little bit different and the things that you want are a little bit different, the things that drive you are a little bit different.
KO:
Thank you so much for sharing this. So do dreams play any role in your life? Do you notice what you dream?
MPS:
I have a hard time remembering what I dream, and it’s always really strange. I’m not somebody who has narrative, easy-to-follow stories in my dreams. A lot of it is disconnected and surreal, I guess it is influenced by my art, and also influences it. I know that I talk in my sleep a lot. But it never comes out as words, it’s just gibberish. People describe it as language-like, but not real language. Something about that reminds me of what I’m trying to do in my work, when I’m trying to shut down the rational description based on words. I think it’s all related.
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Katya Oicherman (KO):
Hi, Anat, and thank you for joining me. Let’s start from the very beginning. Could you please introduce the main ideas of the work that you are doing for the M?
Anat Spiegel (AS):
Yes. I’m creating a three part sound installation, which will be presented in three different locations around the museum premises. The installation is based on text fragments from The Minnesota Pioneer, all from 1849, dealing with different aspects of sleep and rest. Each location will have its own composition and its own treatment of these themes. There are a few actors and musicians from around town and abroad who are engaged with this work, some of them worked independently and others were able to share time in the recording studio with me. Using all these different voices, I am hoping to create a kind of sonic frame around the exhibition, a red thread connecting the past and the future with The Minnesota Pioneer original building and contemporary reflections on sleep and rest. We create a kind of a hug around the building with those sounds, like a blanket, inviting the dreams to appear.
KO:
Can you tell me about each specific piece?
AS:
I feel that now we are in the editing phase where a lot of the sonic ideas are becoming more concentrated and specific. Outside the main entrance Arise Ye! will be playing. It will be triggered either randomly or by the presence of passers by. This side of the museum’s building gets lots of traffic and is pretty noisy so I was looking to create something that will penetrate through that noise clearly and fully.
I reached out to Matt Rahaim who specializes in Hindustani music. He created two short compositions based on fragments of a secular sermon published in The Minnesota Pioneer. The sermon calls the readers to go to bed early and names all the reasons why. Matt is also singing the calls in his bright and engulfing voice, which is a real treat. So people will be passing by on that busy street on their way to and from work and all of a sudden this beautiful voice will tell them to go to sleep. It’s like we are setting up a doorway, an entrance to another dimension.
Inside the museum space, you will be able to hear the second piece featuring Liz Draper on double bass and myself. This piece is based on an advertisement for a pharmacy. It’s a collection of names of many different substances and drugs one can consume in order to put themselves to sleep, to wake up, or do many other things. It turns out that at that time in history, if you had a pharmacy, you would sell tar as well as sleeping pills, whatever works. So when you read the advertisement you just have this very long list of substances that goes on and on. We picked out the herbs and medicines that can affect one’s sleep in one way or another, and created what we call a “sleep spell,” with the idea of getting the listener to tune into a space that’s outside of the here and now. It’s not designed as a lullaby per se, but it makes you sleepy a little bit, it’s slightly witchy.
The third piece is going to take place within the building’s vestibule, inside a little square alcove. That piece is based on A Letter to the Editor. It’s a question whether this letter was really written by a Pioneer’s reader, or maybe it was a fictional creation written by the editor himself. Either way, the letter describes a strange man walking about town during the night, making commotion and disturbing the sleep of the writer’s neighbor, Mrs. Smellets. The writer is then asking the newspaper for advice or some form of investigation to figure out who the man is and why he is behaving this way.
The editor writes back suggesting a kind of a moral framework in which to perceive this situation. Maybe this very blessed neighbor, Mrs. Smellets, who has a house and a kitchen, even a stove, could consider that not everyone else in this new country, in this new place, enjoys the same privileges. Those newcomers, who have no homes and beds, might just have to fall asleep wherever sleep overtakes them, wherever the ground allows them some room.
This piece is a vocal collage created with the voices of Theo Langason, Kevin Walton and myself. We all executed the same assignments separately, reading and interpreting the text on our own following the same set of instructions. Then I used these materials to create a collage, making the different readings into one thing.
KO:
Can you speak a little bit more about the process, and your relationship with the different people that you’ve engaged in the project?
AS:
I was thinking of 1849, which is a time prior to when Minnesota became a state, and I was trying to connect it with notions of the present, as the text itself does. The text and its themes are very contemporary. So the question was how to do it, how to make the connection between the past and the present, where are the parallels. My own life and experiences as a newcomer to this town, to this country, how are they similar to those newcomers who were here in 1849? I think that’s where the title for the work came from: The Colonizers’ Dream Press Revisited. You can see how 2022 is a time which is marked by rebuilding and redefining, just like 1849.
I’ve reached out to Matt because I was looking for voices, sounds, and ways of musical thinking that are other, not from here. With Liz it was different, because she is very much from here. Her belonging to this culture and her double bass playing provided a kind of grounding, connection to the place. My own voice is also an outsider’s one, a different ghost of some other past.
With Letter to the Editor I wanted to continue my work with Kevin Walton, with whom I collaborated many times in the past. He’s originally from the UK, and now lives in Amsterdam. He’s a wonderful vocal performer and I really wanted to feature him.
I wanted the voice of Theo Langason, who is a black actor, not only because it is so soothing and beautiful, but also because it brings another cultural perspective to the text. Theo has a very different kind of timbre than Kevin and myself, a different feel and tempo. I wanted to create a triangle of interpretations that arrive at the scene from various places and through different portals.
For me, the voice is the key. I wanted to feature very specific elements of the voice, to pull the listener into a dream state, to break or cast a spell on them. The artists in Letter to the Editor received a specific set of instructions on how to read, but there was a lot of room for interpretation, so I could create a little bit of a game. We were playing with slowing down and speeding up, and with how high or low the voice can go. So all the voices were operating on a wide spectrum, moving between natural speech to very absurd and artificial vocals. Composing like this is very freeing.
Recently I’ve been working in very constructed environments, with many predetermined rules. But here I am thinking of dream and rest, and how in the space of dream and rest things just show up and sprout uncontrollably. I wanted to work with that energy, to receive the sonic material as it comes, and to figure it out intuitively, the same way I would in a dream.
Now I’m in this phase of editing where I am moving from this intuitive place into a more formulated environment, and I need to consider the listener’s encounter with that environment, how will they experience it? For me this is an uncommon situation, because I’m a musician who works on stage, and I’m used to a predetermined format of performance and presentation. Here people will come into the space maybe halfway through, stay for thirty seconds, for a minute, or maybe they want to hear the whole thing? Maybe they’ll stay until it repeats again? Who knows?
So, I’m thinking about the element of time again. We construct those sound spaces to be inviting for people to stay in them, and to be able to reflect on their position in the building, and how the relate to one another and to the other works, to this person’s life, but still take into account that the listener might just have a snippet of it, just a glimpse. I would like that within that snippet there will be the essence of the text, of the project, of the otherworldliness of a dream, and the connection to our world, now, too.
These are the current challenges in forming the pieces. But there’s been this sense of lightness to the work, and there’s a lot of humor in the texts, which is very helpful for me. Usually, my works are very serious, and I enjoy having a chance to work with a text that is so suggestive and so fun. It pulls my thinking and methodology into other territories. I love that. I’m sitting in my room and I bring all these voices in so I feel I’m in the room with all these people. I get to spend time with them and literally play with them. I enjoy that a lot.
KO:
How have you been sleeping lately?
AS:
It’s interesting. Normally I have no recollection of dreams. I think the only time it changed for me was when my kids were really young. I usually just sleep. I find it to be pure grace and mercy that I get to just sleep when I sleep. Most recently, I got sick so I ended up waking up in the middle of the night coughing, then noticing the automated wheel of thoughts kicking in, and the difficulty to go back to sleep once that happens. Of course, in the dead of night, in the silence of the night, the darkest of thoughts show up. I’m looking forward to this sickness being over so I can get my true, sweet sleep back.
I was living for a while in an intentional community where two of the members had a very hard time sleeping. We would meet in the morning in the kitchen for breakfast and I would hear all these tales about their night, what happened, who rolled here, who did that. I was dumbfounded that people can live their lives through all these nightly events, dreams, happenings. For me, sleep is pure and blissful. I’m very grateful for that.
KO:
Is there anything you would like to add?
AS:
The whole connection between the past and the present, and the projection into the future that takes place when we think about dreams and about dream interpretation. Looking at these old texts, of which only a small part made it into the composition, you sense a texture of life at that time and it offers anchors that can be translated into the current reality. I find that to be a special space to work in.
I like working with archival material, it’s so specific, so concrete. As a text source it has a peculiar style of expression, and working on it I noticed I take issue with it. It’s excessive—too lengthy, too ornamental, too expressive. But I’m also often suspected of being too expressive. I see the newspaper sermon and say, “Oh, that’s way too expressive. Can’t we say it more simply?” I’m confronted with notions of myself.
It’s almost like unfolding an old piece of textile, airing it out, and putting it on the bed. Just the sensation of its porousness, how you can still see the other fabric underneath it, the old and the new air mixing together in the room. Some particles of a contemporary body travel back in time through this room, and what happens? Are you spellbound, trapped between the future, the past, and the now? All of those compositions are, in a way, some form of a spell. Through the agency of music and sound, which is so different from the agency of text, I hope the spell will have a palatable effect in the spaces it occupies.
KO:
Thank you so much for sharing those thoughts.
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Katya Oicherman (KO):
Let’s start from the beginning. Please tell me about the project you are working on for the M. Where did it start and how does it relate to sleep?
Rotem Tamir (RT):
It’s difficult to establish when the beginning was. I presume it began with a conversation I had with my mother. My parents came from Israel to visit us here in Minneapolis and we had one of those late night conversations in the living room. We talked about my last project, when I created the mattress and it was about my dad’s family. My mother protested that I don’t explore the family on her side. I could just argue with her, but instead I surprisingly did the grownup thing and began asking her questions.
I’ve never heard her speak about that subject and apparently she didn’t know much about them. An interesting thing that happened during this conversation was that we began talking about the women in her family–herself, her mother and her grandmother. According to her, these were three generations that gave up on their lives, on the things they wanted to do because of prevailing social conventions. Her grandmother came to Israel from Iraq with her family, who were traditional Jews. It was a time when the birth of a girl didn’t even merit a blessing. A son was the desired offspring, and wretched was a woman who gave birth to a girl. That was one of the reasons to marry girls off at a very young age, obviously they had to have a dowry et cetera… So my grandmother has been complaining that she didn’t get to marry the person whom she loved all the years I’ve known her, until her death, and she was miserable. And they all were strong women, learned women. My mother did a PhD in engineering when it wasn’t a straightforward thing to do for a woman of her background. At the same time all of them still felt that they had to give up on something very essential in their lives.
But then there was Rima. Four generations back, mid-19th century in Iraq, there was a woman about whom not much is known, but she is described as the woman of the world. All women of her generation were envious of her, because she traveled around the world when it was utterly uncommon for a woman at least. The women in the family waited for her to die, because she amassed some amazing fabrics from her travels and they all wanted those. So this story made me want to get to know this Rima and also I began to reflect on my life as well, as a mother, as a woman devoted to a career in the arts, on this situation when you give up on something essential of who you are for the sake of those responsibilities.
Maybe it’s reaching the middle age, I’m 41 now, and my friends also express similar feelings, that we sacrifice some aspects of ourselves. So a fairy tale image began to emerge in my mind. I grew up on tales about a princess who lives in a tower, waiting for something to happen. I imagined this woman who sleeps, and as long as she sleeps then all the people who are important to her, her family, kids, husband, her job, they are ok, her life runs smoothly. But the day she wakes up, it all will collapse. So she needs to live through this paradox. This is where the current work comes from.
It’s a column built of hand-made, square, flat cushions piled one on top of the other. Their stuffing is local, hand-sorted wool, the outside is organic cotton manually dyed in red with madder root. The sewing is hand sewing–I work with a traditional technique that was used in my family to produce mattresses. Between the folds of the cushions, hiding in especially created pockets are fragile tear-shaped spheres. They are blown from pine resin which resembles thin yellow glass. Blowing is very important. I literally blow air, breath, into the material to create these extremely delicate and fragile objects that hide between the folds. Those spheres are unstable, they change their shape depending on the air temperature. Once blown and set I have very little control over them.
KO:
Thank you. So let’s talk more in depth about your working process. What do those stories reveal about how you work?
RT:
Madder root that brings the red color concerns me a lot now. There are a lot of layers to that. Historically it’s a very ancient dye stuff. Very early textiles show that color. Madder grows in different parts of the world, including here. Different cultures developed this dye simultaneously because red was an important color. How those cultures of color interrelate is of great interest to me and how the color migrated from place to place. So it’s a migration of peoples and crafts from place to place. Color is a connecting thread. Red itself is symbolic, it stands for blood and the internal part of the body.
Red can come from the factory, but there is a great difference between chemical dyeing and a madder bath. You immerse a white fabric into this boiling pan, crazy bubbling red. When the fabric is out it’s red in the way you’ve never seen before, it is so deep. You cannot undo this, it’s a kind of primordial red. I do this over and over again, I need so much fabric. I cook and cook, and that’s another thing, I’m working in my home kitchen. Here I reconnected again to these women, where did they work, where their creation was happening. It’s in the kitchen, in this boiling pan. Your hands get dyed red too and the smell is so strong. When you partake in those ancient processes you realize how everything there is linked. There is a physical totality to this experience. I think in this experiential totality we are connected to all those generations who did this before us.
For me it’s very significant, because we can hardly do anything else to connect to them. You can read, but then often the things that interest me were not put down in writing. No one has written about these women. Rima for example–she had several sons, and they all became great Torah scholars. In Israel, they all became famous rabbis. Their stories are known, but no one really knows a thing about their mother. So what I’m searching for has not been written, instead I’m looking to connect through creative physical acts.
KO:
It seems to me that your practice is characterized by a kind of courage. When you see that you need to obtain a certain skill you just go ahead and do it. You find people who know, you learn from them and then you continue on your own. It takes courage, especially that you’re not concerned with disciplinary divisions and conventions, you don’t think what you did or did not study in the art academy. Your approach is open minded, you obtain the skill and with it you take on the responsibility and history that the skill brings with it. So let’s talk more about sewing and blowing. They seem like two very different things. Sewing of mattresses is an existing craft that you’ve learned from a craftsman, while blowing pine resin spheres is a process that you’ve invented.
RT:
Yes, that’s right. I do think a lot about learning, that learning, especially learning a craft, is such an important facet of my practice. We do not normally consider learning as an artistic act, but this is what I am beginning to do, to approach learning as an artistic act. I still cannot explain it fully, though I do think about Joseph Beuys, on how he created his university. It was mostly discussions, while I do go to people to learn manual skills, crafts. Manual labor is of essence. Beuys wanted everyone to be artists, in a sense that everyone should be working in the world as artists do.
So in a similar vain I’m thinking how do you learn something in the world as an artist. There is a difference. As an artist learning craft I learn to be an amateur, I admit and embrace this. I do not aspire to become a professional in the craft I learn. My purpose in this learning is not a clear or straightforward one either, it’s abstract, and the journey there is not linear. I do not know in advance what will come out. So how do you approach people from whom you want to learn? I went to India recently to study Ajrak block printing. People there asked me why? I just said that my family is from Iraq and I cannot visit there, so I came here. It was a reason enough for them. Our activities have some kind of unclear influence on life generally, encountering people, encountering art. If we’re lucky, an encounter with an artwork moves us somewhere else—or not. There is this influence, a minor one, but still. So when I go learning, I encounter people, materials, places, I try to maximize the chances of this influence to increase and I think about this as an artwork.
KO:
So what about sewing and blowing specifically?
RT:
Let’s start with blowing. It’s a funny one. I always depart from researching and experimenting with materials. This time it started with my partner’s bread baking books. They are serious books with lots of descriptions of chemical processes. One of those books had a whole chapter on blowing sugar. I was completely fascinated, especially that this also reminded me about a glassblower I knew who worked on small-scale colorful pieces. I watched him blow the glass and it was mesmerizing. So I began cooking and blowing sugar and I thought that molten sugar is similar to resins. Why not try blowing tree resin? I started working with pine resin as I did with sugar. It blows well, but it’s really tricky. You need to double-boil it for a few hours reaching a very specific temperature for it to melt. Then you work under a heating lamp, pouring the dreadfully hot resin onto a surface. You work with 2 pairs of gloves, turning the resin into a plasticine-like substance by repeatedly stretching and folding it, just like you do with sugar. You need to watch not to dry it, it has to remain elastic.
Detail of Rotem Tamir’s “Puah”
While you’re doing this, it changes the color from transparent to glowing golden. It’s magical. Then before it solidifies, you have to form a little pocket, insert a straw and start blowing and forming it repeatedly until you get the size you wanted. It is still a bit soft and pliable, so to fixate the shape you immerse it in water. It floats and it’s beautiful. So this is the process.
You are entering into a very close relationship with the material, you need to feel it, to be aware of everything around you and in you that can contribute or destroy, because it matters while you’re with the material, the room temperature or the heat of your hands for instance, they matter. You need to listen to the material, because no one will be able to tell you when exactly is the time to blow. If I have a bad day, it won’t work, because the attention is absent. You can be at it for 12 hours and it just doesn’t work. So I’m fascinated by this relationship of human/material. That’s one thing.
Another fascination is with spherical containers that hold air. It’s a long term interest, I worked with balloons, with flutes or other objects that generate sound by breathing air into them. This “empty” space keeps me occupied. You imbue the object with your breath and it remains there for a while. Maybe you wish it to remain there forever. Breath is such a fundamental and vital thing for us and also completely intangible. One cannot get a hold of breath. We don’t think about breathing, but when it’s over, we’re done with. It is something so personal and intimate, like your smell in your breath. Who feels your breath? Your partner whom you share the bed with at night. So when I blow into the material, I create the object by means of my breath, I put my breath in it. It’s the most intimate relationship you can get into with the material. It’s like the grand finale to this continuous saga of the pine resin forming. There is also frustration because once I attain the shape that I am pleased with I have no control over how long it will actually hold itself as this shape. Just one unlucky touch and it cracks. The weather gets warmer—it loses air and flattens. So when I deposit them into the pillow, it’s for safekeeping. The pillows protect the delicate spheres. They are like egg shells, with the difference that my shells can not only crack, but also melt. When they melt, they change from being something beautiful into something vulgar, visceral, like an withered internal organ exposed, lost its breath. Obviously I am often struggling with that ability of the objects to change, because I want the work to be at its best, presentable, poetic stance. So there is a struggle between what the work wants for itself and how you want it to be preserved.
KO:
Let’s dwell more on this point. We could have suggested that there is a material and a craft that would make your vision permanent and unchanging – glass. There is a reason why humans have been perfecting this craft for thousands of years – we can create beautiful, spherical objects by blowing into the material and they stay as we intended. But still you’re not rushing to do that…
RT:
Yes, not for the lack of intention though, I might do this in the future and learn glass blowing. But now I’m not rushing there because of the resin. Some things you cannot fake, you cannot pretend. My approach to sculpture is rooted in that, I’m not working to produce an object for a beautiful photograph, but for a person who will share the immediate space with the sculpture. There is a specific relationship between the material of the sculpture and the person experiencing it though their bodies. Glass will be one thing, while resin will be something else, it’s more like amber, the fossilized resin. Its particular texture, smell, color—they all matter. Glass will be different, maybe very good, but different.
KO:
Blowing into the resin brings up associations with the Biblical divine act of Adam’s creation. “Then the Lord God took dust from the ground and formed man from it. The Lord breathed the breath of life into the man’s nose.” In Hebrew words “breath” and “soul” come from the same root, just like “spirit” and “wind” are the same word.
RT:
Yes. The letters of the divine name are called the letters of breath. God’s name is written with breath. Breath is sacred.
KO:
But you are less engaged in storytelling, much more you are engaged in doing. Like you said: there is no way to tell when to blow, you can just feel it and it doesn’t always work. The first Biblical story of creation relates to language. Creation happens when there is someone who can say the words, first the word came and then the world appeared. You are pointing to another situation altogether when words are useless, because no word can help understanding when to blow. You can only feel and this feeling is inexpressible through language.
It’s a fairly subversive position in relation to stories of creation that take language as their foundational element. What really was breathed into the dust? Was it the story or the letters or was it the smell of the creator’s mouth? Does this mean that he had a body, lungs, stomach?… We are not born because someone said a word, we are born through and as a result of very physical processes, which more often than not do not include language as a constituent.
RT:
Yes, true. In the context of making, when I’m thinking about stories, these are first of all orally transmitted, rather than written ones. In its origins an orally transmitted story is related to a space and a place where it is told, to people who were telling and listening, so it naturally has smell and taste, visuality and tactility. When someone narrated about a mountain, it was not somewhere else, it was here. People sat together around a fire, the narrator told about a mountain that they all saw in front of them, so the story was embodied and grounded.
In making I discovered a powerful thing: when you make something jointly with another person using your hands, stories start flowing. When you go learning a craft, when you start with a person it is at first a cold and detached experience, just an exchange of technical information. But the moment you begin working with your hands, sweating, things get going, you become familiar with people and then stories, often unexpected ones, begin. Reality becomes this unexpected place. Are there some specific activities and crafts that are especially conducive to bringing people closer and unleashing the storytelling? Maybe some are less so? I am interested in those questions.
KO:
Thank you. So let us circle back then to our initial subject, sleep. How is your sleep lately?
RT:
I sleep superbly. Just like my mother. We work on full power all day and we get very tired and then the bed is just like a pool we jump into. I love sleeping and I sleep really well. I have a bed that I like and high quality bed linens that I love, actually made of linen. When I sleep – I sleep. I do remember dreams and I think about them, but ultimately sleep for me is a real disappearance. It’s my place, no one is allowed in. Just like my mother.
KO:
Do the recent upheavals in the world influence your sleep?
RO:
I just want to disappear even more. My dad had a difficult life and he is one of the most resilient people I know. He often says to me and demonstrates: “Rotem, it comes in from here and goes out from there.” So, no. Nothing disturbs my sleep. Sleep is a real escape. The world disturbs me when I get up. The world drives you to melancholia, so in this situation I’d just like to sleep more.
KO:
Thank you so much.
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Katya Oicherman (KO):
How have the ideas that you are working on for the project developed? Can you tell us about the process?
Yuko Taniguchi (YT):
The first step was thinking how sleep is really different for everyone. That concept inspired me to write the poem, The Weight of Sleep, for the window. In the poem, a family is living in the same house. They all go to bed at night. How each person connects to sleep is different, but it seems that the family isn’t aware of the differences. The mother specifically tells the sister to “find” sleep as if this task is easy, because finding sleep isn’t difficult for the mother. The poem captures how we see others’ health and sleep through our own perceptions without realizing that individually, we experience our health/sleep very differently.
Within the poem, different images emerge. What is each family member’s sleep like? What is it like for that person? Does the sleep move? Does it have color? Does it feel heavy? These images gave me the visual concept for the exhibition, how to show various types of sleep.
My initial idea was to capture the whole story as a sculpture. While exploring this idea, I had numerous conversations with different people. For instance, my next door neighbor, John, is interested in rocks and stones, and I learned about different types of stones and their history. This conversation inspired me to incorporate stones as a material to demonstrate weight. Conversations with Peng Wu, who is working on the graphics for the window, have also been very insightful.
Conversations introduce and foster playfulness. What does it mean for the sky to come down and become this heavy blanket? That’s a part of the poem. My natural instinct is to use a really detailed, fine blue thread. But the window glass is dark. So then I’m thinking of ropes and so on. Thinking of different materials. Would stone be a good choice to express weight, while feathers are naturally connected to a comforter? So having different conversations, getting different materials, having conversations with materials. Such a playful process is new for me. I collaborate with many different artists, so I have been learning about that sort of a making process. I have allowed myself to play with different materials and actually make something and then see if that feels right.
KO:
Can you speak about the poem itself? It seems like it is a portrait of a very specific family. Is it your family or is it someone else’s? How did the poem come about?
YT:
The family in the poem is fictional, inspired by my own family. The poem reflects on how sleep is understood and experienced differently within a family, yet we aren’t aware of this reality. For instance, the mother says to the sister, “go to sleep!” as if falling asleep should be accomplished easily. My mother finds her sleep as her head hits her pillow, and she perceives everybody should be able to do so as well. My father is a bit more sensitive; his thoughts wake him up. He must be more careful not to move his thoughts inside. Two people may share the same space, blankets, and sheets to sleep, but what’s inside them, their own sleep-world, is different.
The sister’s character represents the adolescents whom I have met at psychiatric settings. How they relate to their own sleep is complicated; they really want to sleep but cannot, or they’re afraid to go to sleep. They need sleep the most, yet they can’t. They also have this life structure, such as the school schedule, they must comply with. If school could begin at noon for teens, that would be ideal, but society doesn’t move based on the needs of teenagers.
And then there is the speaker with a more philosophical voice that imaginatively explores how sleep is like the sky coming down to the earth. I was thinking that animals and humans all need to sleep in order to stay alive. We need a grounded feeling and safety to fall asleep. We need to be able to trust our environment. Assuring the sleep of each individual is a communal responsibility.
KO:
Can you talk a little bit more about your work with young people? What is it you’re actually doing and how do you address sleeping?
YT:
I facilitate creativity based workshops for adolescents who are struggling with mental health challenges. My work is based on the idea that everyone is creative. The answers for healing and recovery remain within the person, and creative activities can often facilitate the process of becoming aware of their own strengths, talents, insights, and answers.
I am intentional about including well-being related topics like sleep. We often learn about developing healthy eating habits, sleeping routines, and the importance of exercise. These concepts are often introduced as coping skills through therapy, and they are critical information. I think creative work could be an important addition to the work of recovery. Through an Introspective approach, we explore, “Well, what is sleep like for you? Why is it like that? How do you get to the place where you can fall asleep? What kind of imagination might be helpful for you to have a calm state before falling asleep?” The process of theme building through reflection can be valuable for both making art and recovery.
As a facilitator, I am always looking for key expressions that feel authentic. If I notice certain expressions that only that person could express, I need to let them know. It’s hard to see our own authenticity. My job is to provide the feedback they need to welcome their own creativity.
KO:
Within that practice, what is the role of objects?
YT:
Objects speak, especially objects in nature. They hold history. For instance, the moment you hold a stone, there is a story. Where did it come from? What did it take to become a stone? The resilience of a stone makes me feel humble. I can spend quite a bit of time observing, appreciating, and holding the stone. Then I begin to feel something, as if I am now connected to this stone, as if we have become friends. This sort of connection and emotional response are the starting point of my creative process.
Detail from Yuko Taniguchi’s “The Weight of Sleep”
For The Weight of Sleep, Peng Wu and I developed a simple performance of creating a row of various-sized stones and inviting workshop participants to select a stone that feels like their sleep. Hold a stone. Feel its texture and weight. Does it feel similar to the way you visualize your sleep? Hold and feel the weight of various stones until you find the one that feels right to you. Through this work, I have witnessed again and again how others also make connections with the objects. I have conducted this workshop for the general public, undergraduate students, and adolescents. Every time, someone finds the stone that represents their sleep and becomes reluctant to return the stone they selected.
“Can I keep it?” A teen asked me at the most recent workshop.
“Why do you want to keep it?” I asked.
“It’s my sleep. I’m kinda attached to it now.”
When I told them that they could keep it, they were so excited, as if they had received something they had always wanted. In this sense, the role of an object is that it can contain our perceptions and stories. Interacting with objects can evolve the emotions that were already inside us. Feeling our emotions is a lot of work but also necessary for creating something
KO:
There are so many things happening in the world now, and not particularly promising things, so how is your sleep lately?
YT:
I have to practice to rest and be intentional about going to sleep. On a practical level, it means that I go to sleep when I am tired. I am intentional about making sure that I get sun exposure during the day so that I will become tired and sleepy at night. (I learned about sleep and the circadian rhythms!) I make a point to sit in my garden and look out. I could work more on staying away from my computer. The boundary of not working all the time has been difficult. But I am aware of when I am not following important habits.
This kind of response used to be impossible for me when I was a student. Fighting through sleepiness to produce and accomplish more was considered noble, and is deeply ingrained in my system. Sleeping=laziness. It was hard to become free from this outdated message. Today, I sleep when I become sleepy. I am fortunate to feel sleepy most nights. But some of my thoughts wake me up. My thoughts may contain things I didn’t get done, or creative ideas I want to try for my projects. Because most of my projects are responses to challenging mental health issues, some thoughts feel urgent. But I do practice breathing when I feel that my brain is filled with thoughts. I sort of imagine that as I breathe out, my thoughts get smaller, creating space for my sleep to reemerge.
KO:
Do dreams play any part in your life or your creative work?
YT:
I have recurrent dreams. They are often related to my youth. Maybe because I work with teenagers, I keep returning to the time when I felt lost as a teenager. I came to the United States at the age of fifteen, and I didn’t understand this new space, language, people, and culture. It felt disorienting. This sensation often returns to me in my dream.
Another recurrent dream I have is that I am still married to my first husband. In my 20s, I was married to my first husband for ten years. This marriage could be described as the state of sleep. The marriage was peaceful because we had separate lives with very little interaction. There was a strong expectation not to fight or talk about uncomfortable topics. Breaking out of a lengthy marriage that was peaceful, in an eerie way was extremely difficult, painful, and almost impossible for me, the agreeable and obedient person I used to be. In my recurrent dream, I am still married to my first husband. I think very hard about how to tell him that I have to leave. When I wake up from my dream, I have to remind myself that it was a dream. A part of me is shocked that I left that marriage. It may be possible for some women, but me? It feels like a miracle. This recurrent dream is leading me to write my current work of fiction and it also became a personal essay, Running Through.
KO:
I’ll be waiting for it. Thank you for sharing those beautiful thoughts.
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Katya Oicherman (KO):
Hi, Gwen. It’s lovely to have this opportunity to talk to you. The first thing would be just a general question about the project that you’re planning to produce at the M. What is it about? How did it start?
Gwen Westerman (GW):
This project started as an essay, a creative essay, and it incorporated memories of my grandmother, who was a quilter, and who raised me when I was an infant until I was about three or four years old, so I spent a lot of time with her.
She made quilts out of old clothing, didn’t matter what kind, shirts, dresses, pants, and those are some of my earliest memories of sitting in her backyard on a quilt and she was either teaching me to memorize Bible verses or she was teaching me songs, and we always had a quilt wherever we went as kids. Even as an adult, there would be a quilt in the trunk of the car or behind the back seat. If we stopped at a park, we’d get it out and put it on the grass and have a picnic.
In the summertime, we would often sleep outside because we didn’t have air conditioning. I wanted to capture those memories and those feelings and how disconnected we are now from sleep. We have sleep sounds to go to sleep, we have alarms to wake up. We’re constantly tethered to technology. It doesn’t seem like there is any space for us to disconnect from all of that and sleep in a natural way.
One part of that essay was, at least, from the way I was raised… You can get answers to questions that are running through your mind. The questions that are bothering you, you can get answers to those questions from dreams. But if we have no place to sleep, no place to dream, how will we ever find any answers at all? That’s where that began. Then I took parts of that essay and made it into the poem that’s part of this project.
KO:
How did you come up with the specific installation that is now in progress?
GW:
Thinking about the installation and how to convey this kind of restfulness that you can get when you are closer to nature is the biggest motivation for me. I don’t think people take their shoes off and walk in the grass. They don’t spend much time outside, for no reason, other than to be outside.
Gwen Westerman’s “A Place for Dreams”
I wanted to recreate that experience I had as a child of sleeping outside on a pallet or a quilt laid on the grass, and in the hot summertime, the breeze next to the ground would be cool and it was a really restful kind of sleep. I miss that. I wanted to find a way to share that with other people.
KO:
Can you speak a little bit to the link between quilting and writing?
GW:
I’m always thinking about projects, whether they’re poetry or essay, or fiction, or quilts, or shirts, or clothing that I make. There really is no division between creating things that are utilitarian and creating objects that are art. To me, it’s the same process.
For quilting and poetry, especially, you start with pieces of fabric, text, drafts of text, previous texts that I’ve written, and then you choose pieces and fit them together to make a pattern that has meaning. Quilting and poetry are the same process for me. They just come out in a different form.
KO:
Would you say that there is some kind of tactile aspect to writing?
GW:
I write on paper with a pencil. Just the feel of that pencil lead moving across a paper page, that has a little bit of texture to it, is very tactile for me and I can’t explain why. I can’t explain how it works, but there’s something about having that pencil in my hand and that sheet of paper on a desk or a table and writing across it, that repetitive motion and the feel of that pencil lead on that paper, like I’m actually connected to that page through that pencil. It is a very tactile experience for me. I’m always choosing calendars, because I keep a paper calendar, and journals based on how the paper feels.
KO:
Interesting. It’s not very far from sewing, in some way.
GW:
In a lot of ways, it’s not very far from sewing.
KO:
Is there anything in how you experience the time of rest or time of sleep that has to do with your Indigenous heritage?
GW:
I can’t say that there’s something specific about sleep and dreams that is part of coming from traditional people, but there is that… The way we were raised, we were always really close to the land. Like I said, we would sleep outside, we would take quilts outside and lay in the grass and look at the stars. There was always a direct connection between skin and grass or the bottoms of your feet and dirt, that deep-rooted connection to the land, and I think that’s part of that upbringing and part of that teaching that if there are things that you can’t find answers for, it’s because you’re too busy. That’s what my grandma would tell me. You just need to go outside and be still and be quiet, and you’ll find the answer.
It was never in a way of, “Oh, this is our tradition” or, “This is our Native American tradition.” Those are not the words rumbling around in my head. It was just part of who we are. That’s why I preface that with I can’t really say it’s specifically tied to some tradition, because that’s not the way we were taught. This is the way we do things. Sometimes I would ask my mom or my grandparents, “Well, my friend Vicky, she does this. Why don’t we do that?” They would say, “Well, that’s just not the way we do things. This is how we do things.”
A lot of that had to do with being outside, paying attention to the seasons, to the weather, understanding how animals respond when a storm is coming, and hearing my grandmother and her sisters at the kitchen table, talking and laughing in the language and that’s just the way things were. We didn’t ask, we didn’t think to ask really, unless we had something to compare it to, like my little friend who lived down the street. It is definitely part of who I am and how I’ve come to understand my place in this world.
KO:
You’ve mentioned that some sort of answers come sometimes through dreams. I’ve been talking to different people about how they actually relate to dreams. I get this range of replies from people who just don’t think about their dreams or don’t even remember them to people who remember specific situations and specific dreams which they consider an answer or a direction given, that somehow changed the way they acted or lived. In your experience, were there situations where you felt that you were directed or given an answer?
GW:
Absolutely there were. There have been relatives who came in my dreams and would say something or show me something that would help me make tough decisions in my life. When my grandma’s younger sister passed away, I was at home and I saw Aunt Katie standing in the hallway. My mom was in the kitchen. I said, “Mom, Aunt Katie is here. Why didn’t you tell me?” She came around the corner and she said, “What are you talking about?” I said, “Aunt Katie is here. She’s in the bedroom.” My mom said, “No, she’s not.” I got up and I looked down the hallway and in both rooms and she was not there. Later that evening about nine or ten o’clock, my grandma called to tell us that she had gotten the call from her other sister that Katie had passed away.
I didn’t tell anybody about that story for a long time, until another of my grandma’s sisters passed away when I was in college, and I woke up and she was standing at the end of the bed. She just smiled and nodded her head and she was gone. I called my grandma the next day, I said, “I saw Aunt Liza” and she said, “Well, she passed away yesterday.” I said, “Why have I seen them?” She said, “They must have been thinking about you when their time was coming to an end.”
My grandma had no answer about what they might have been thinking or if they were there to tell me something, but it’s things like that that people will hear and go, “That’s ridiculous. You must have had something bad to eat or you must have been sick and feverish or something”. And I wasn’t.
I think that’s that connection that we have, on a cellular level, that when we have time to rest and shut out all of the busyness and artificialness of the world that we’ve created, that we can reconnect with.
KO:
Given the situation with the world, which is dreadful and that doesn’t leave much space for peaceful rest, the pandemic and all possible catastrophes that have been accumulating, does that affect how you sleep? How is your sleep lately?
GW:
I stopped watching the news. I will check online for news for maybe 10 minutes, 15 minutes a day. I have to shut it out, to shut all that turmoil out in order to find a place where I can sleep or just even think or create without all of that turmoil pressing in on me. It’s hard, because there’s so many terrible things going on right now, but those aren’t the stories I want to tell. The stories I want to tell through my quilting and through my writing are stories that create a space, however small it may be, for something regenerative and positive. Sometimes it may be historical, it may be a traumatic part of our history, but if we look at it and see where we are today, how many strong people there were who came before us, I think that’s also regenerative. It’s hard.
KO:
It was interesting to hear that you aligned sleep, creativity and work, all of them need this space that is away from the news. Do you write in bed?
GW:
No, I read in bed and sometimes I make notes on what I’ve been reading either in the book itself or I do have a little notepad in the night stand drawer. Sometimes if I have a really vivid dream, I’ll write it down in the middle of the night. Then often I can’t read what I wrote the next day or it makes no sense.
I can write everywhere else. I write in the car when I’m riding along and someone else is driving and I’m paying attention to the highway signs, the billboards, the animals in the field, the plants along the road, the color of the sky, and just am constantly scribbling as I ride in the car. Or I’m drawing as well.
I write on everything. I have a journal, I have a calendar, I have little notepads, I have those little field notes notebooks, which I love. Sometimes I’ll be caught somewhere without paper and I will find whatever is close by and write whatever this inspirational, amazing idea is and then when I’m at that point where I need to start creating again, I’ll pull all of these pieces together. Sometimes they manifest in written form and sometimes they manifest in visual form.
KO:
Is there anything you would like to add?
GW:
My hope for this installation is that the people walking past the window will stop for just a minute and shut out everything that’s going on around and think about what it’s like to rest just for a minute.
KO:
Amen to that. Thank you so much.
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Katya Oicherman (KO):
Hi Peng, thank you so much for joining me for this little chat. Let’s start in the beginning. Can you tell me about your work for this project, where it begins?
Peng Wu (PW):
Thank you for having me in this project. I loved the entire process. When I look at the works we created, it feels really fulfilling. I can see them being used in the future in other places to raise awareness about many things in our society that damage people’s sleep. I feel meaningful about the work we created.
Beginning though means going way back, onset of 2019. The reason why I became interested in sleep was because my sleep started to fall apart. That does not happen overnight. It’s a long process. I think it was getting worse over the period of maybe 10 years. I developed this kind of overreaction to things. I have an overly sensitive nerve, I smell really subtle things and hear even very tiny noises and all these began to affect my sleep. If I baked a cake in the evening and I forgot to close my bedroom door upstairs, I wouldn’t be able to sleep that night because I smell the baking. If my roommate goes to the bathroom after I have gone to bed, it will drive me crazy. Even the worry that they may visit the bathroom after I go to bed, because I saw their bedroom lights are still on. Just the anticipation of noise that has not happened yet would keep me up in the night. The whole thing started from the pressure and expectation of productivity. I wanted to do more work, I had ideas in bed and I would turn the light on and I would go back to my notebook to write them down and that would break my sleep track often. Being an immigrant in the US contributed as well, not having a stable status. All of that made sleeping difficult.
In 2019 I had this amazing opportunity and funding to do a project about sleep in the Weisman Museum. It made a huge difference to have a space, have some level of expectation, have funding to actually invest time to research on the subject, to talk to different people about it. That’s how I started to accumulate knowledge, reading books and learning from the researchers at the University of Minnesota. I discovered that sleep disorder is not only my own personal problem. It’s also a huge social problem, it’s cross-cultural. People in different countries experience it, for both similar and different reasons. It was amazing to learn how different cultures resist this deprivation of sleep caused by capitalism in their own way. Valuing sleep through their own tales and stories heard from elderly people. Researching all this was super inspiring. That’s how the bigger context of the sleep project emerged for me.
Collaborating with you opened a new dimension. The newspaper archive of the Minnesota Historical Society showed me the history and the culture of sleep in this place. How that affects everybody who lives on those grounds, on this land. You cannot fight against something you are not aware of, so being aware about what’s in the history of this place which is so toxic to people’s sleep was groundbreaking knowledge for me. So inspired by your discoveries from The Minnesota Pioneer newspaper, we got to work together to identify a few design opportunities to create visual representations of this local knowledge about sleep and insomnia.
Katya Oicherman and Peng Wu’s “Lethal Lullabies”
One of those opportunities, a critical piece of knowledge we discovered, was about opioid abuse. Two of the windows drawings I created are informed by that. Basically it’s about people, parents and carers, who use opioids to make kids sleep. That can be a script for a horror movie. This reminded me of my early experience before working on my sleep project in 2019. When I had a bad night’s sleep, I drove to my go-to place for help: the fancy Wedge co-op. They have a shelf of all kinds of over the counter drugs that claim to give you sweet sleep the whole night. After trying a few expensive bottles of drugs and food supplements, I came to the conclusion–I can’t simply buy my good night’s sleep back. Another theme that came through was home and homelessness. To sleep well you need a comfortable safe space. We take it for granted so much, but a lot of people don’t have access to that and that’s a continuous problem from many years back. Nowadays, there are still people camped outside who don’t have a home to sleep. So sleep has become a really acute social problem.
KO:
So let’s try to break it down into those different sources that we’ve discovered. We had two main sources. One of them was the texts from The Minnesota Pioneer from 1849 and they include the pharmacy commercial with a list of medicines and substances that they sell. There we discovered that opium was a substance that was easily available. We decided to look more into the use of opium as a means of putting children to sleep. This is where the horror stories actually started to come up. Another theme from the newspaper was stories about people who were coming into St. Paul, a city under construction, and some of those newcomers who do not have a place to sleep.
These were the textural resources and when we were looking for visual stuff, we discovered the quilts in the Minnesota Historical Society collection. Quilts are of course related to bed and sleep, they are covers and comforters, and they are local. We unanimously loved the Garden of Eden quilt from the 1820s–1850s that was made in Massachusetts and brought to Minnesota. It is a storytelling quilt, presenting a little world, a magic garden in shades of red and green on white background, populated by human figures, Adam and Eve (always dressed) at the different stages of their misadventure, and the serpent and peacocks, with moon, stars and sun at the center. It is a tiny universe and it’s the story: the fruit of knowledge, temptation, punishment. The figures and motifs are clear cut, because of the applique technique used there. That was the visual language that we decided to develop. With that language we tried to create the illustrations for the stories that we thought were meaningful.
Now let’s speak a little bit about your process as a visual artist, as a designer, and how you addressed those sources and how you came up with the actual designs for the windows.
PW:
Yeah, we found a lot of really interesting quilt patterns with unique styles that felt so new and foreign to me. That’s what excited me a lot. It felt like those objects and patterns and styles were people, as if my work is to revitalize them, bring them back to life and have them tell the stories we found in the newspaper archive. I think that was the most appropriate and impactful way to tell those stories.
I researched the quilts, and came up with this limited color palette inspired by our favorite piece. It was also the graphic style of that quilt that shaped the general visual direction. So the graphics I created were narratively based on the newspaper text, while the visual style was derived from the quilt. The story we tell is completely different from the story the quilt tells. As if we bring back that person to tell a new story. But then there were also those flying, winged heads of angels, this really creepy visual element that you found on a pillowcase. It was a pillowcase, right?
KO:
Yes, a hand embroidered pillow sham from 1880, also from the Historical Society collections.
PW:
In the original pillow sham, the graphics were created by stitching, embroidery. The typography style in the opioid abuse window is inspired by the embroidered text. It says: “Angels sing thee to thy rest”. So we brought multiple historical pieces together to create the graphics that are going to be featured on the M’s windows.
KO:
It was an interesting and rewarding process. We bounced ideas back and forth. For me, one of the most touching outcomes is how all those sources gathered together to tell the stories of local sleep. You realize that the forbidden fruit of knowledge was an opium poppy capsule. Or why the “creepy” pillow sham with angels’ heads and the text “angels sing thee to thy rest,” a child’s pillow sham lovingly embroidered by their mother, that was supposed to be a nice and soothing “time to go to bed” item, is frightening and uncanny. This line comes from Shakespeare’s Hamlet, but it is a variation on the Requiem Mass, sung when the body of a deceased person is taken out from the church. The link of sleep and death is a common one, but it hits you when you connect it to the history of opium abuse in children. Weaving those threads together and then seeing how in your work they are made into visual stories that deliver these insights–that was really rewarding.
PW:
It was a really cool situation to think about the site of where the graphics will be applied. The windows face the street. We thought about using larger scale graphics to attract people to look closer, to spend more time looking at the images or how to add a subtle twist in the small details of the images. So when people come closer they discover new things they cannot see from far away. We designed the graphics to be very site-specific and considered the so-to-speak “user experience,” how to attract people’s attention and make them stay longer.
When you were talking about the pillow sham and angels, I suddenly thought that this pillow sham is also a super relevant image today, because it speaks about misinformation. Those mothers using opioid drops to calm their children and make them sleep, mostly they would not intentionally hurt their kids. So I’m curious what they were told about those drugs, that guaranteed they’re safe to use. Nowadays, you can be misinformed in order to be persuaded to buy a drug. Information is twisted to bring more profit for the pharmaceutical companies.
KO:
Yeah, absolutely. Probably back then people had less knowledge, but not that much less. You remember, we did encounter the story from 1859 of Mary Cullough, a baby farmer working for an almshouse who intentionally starved orphans and drugged them with laudanum so that they would not bother her. Several children died and eventually she was apprehended. Medics in Europe and the US were alerting the public to the dangers of giving opiates to children, pointing to the very high risk of mortality. A 1854 English study suggested that three-quarters of all deaths from opium were in children under five years old, that’s insane. So there was awareness. At the same time opium was widely available, for a very long time there were no restrictions or regulations on selling it, and it was not the only dangerous substance available in pharmacies. When you read this it’s like a deja vu, the same but not quite the same.
PW:
Like a ghost, history keeps coming back.
KO:
Yeah. The recent opioid crisis is ongoing and people are still suing the companies. And again, the ease in which Oxycontine became available and its aggressive advertisement. Today there is no way to say that companies “weren’t aware.” There is no innocence at all. I think “ghosts” is the right way to describe it. That’s why those images, angels and bottles and rest of the imagery that you created, have this uncanny presence. That can also be said on the actual collection of vintage medicine bottles that we decided to include in the window with the pharmacy commercial. They are empty colorful shells of the “magical” remedies that were supposed to ease your life, make things right.
PW:
It feels like we talk about visual art as a way to make the invisible visible, right? That’s true. This is exactly what the project is about: identifying those period ghosts and giving them a form, making them be seen.
KO:
A good way of putting it.
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