This was perhaps one of the more stressful assessments I've done, the whole contacting a creative we admire perhaps left me feeling a little daunted. Which is why I kind of kept putting it off at first. It didn't help that the first person on my list was David Lynch. It was more of a thought experiment though, there was no chance that he'd actually reply but it would've been amazing if he did. (Better he didn't, I can't imagine what I would even ask... How's Annie?)
I also tried contacting the designer Peter Saville and the musician St. Vincent, both didn't have public email addresses, and I felt uncomfortable requesting an interview via Facebook/Twitter/Instagram. Not hearing back from their managers after a week I made the decision to jump down to the last person on my list, my mum's cousin Silvia.
She's an art teacher and visual artist, but she also curates a café with her husband that doubles as a small gallery space. Having these three different viewpoints on creativity and art I thought it would be really fascinating to interview her, I wanted to pose my questions around these three roles, how they intertwined and related to each other. While having someone famous could've been nice (I had the idea of presenting the interview as a CD case and lyric/questions booklet as the above two have connections to music) I felt that this was a great opportunity nevertheless.
I decided to conduct the interview over the phone, that way we could have a discussion around the questions, something that flowed naturally rather than just a straight question and answer format. Unfortunately my laptop's microphone kept dropping out, meaning every so often I lost a sentence or two from her responses. I was able to fill most of it in from memory (or at least approximate what she was trying to say). Other than that I chose not to edit her responses too heavily, keeping in most of the "You know"s and "I think"s as I wanted to keep it as natural as possible, to make it sound as if the reader was conversing with her themselves. Part of this assignment was the challenge of figuring out how to convey a sense of the subject in a visual medium, and for that reason I chose to present it as a zine (even though just about everyone else did the same). Seeing as Silvia often works in collage I also wanted to bring that across.
How instinctual do you find your creative process, or do you feel the need to rationalise certain aspects?
Where do you feel that art education exists today. What does it provide that other subjects can’t?
You work in a number of different mediums, how do you feel that affects your work? Do they inform certain qualities?
To what extent do you find it necessary to discuss your work in terms of identities, so being a mother, being a woman, your heritage etc? Is it something you find that consciously informs your work?
What drove you to establish a space to display and support other artists, at the café? How does that connect to you being an artist, educator, and mother?
I was able to go past her house and take some photos of her studio and working space. I wanted to provide some context to the text and I believed that the space carried a sense of who she was and how she worked. Being a mother the studio often bled into the rest of the house, such as the kitchen or lounge room, and it was this notion of the mother and artist, domestic and creative aspects merging together that I wanted to capture in my publication.
My initial attempts to lay out the booklet on InDesign didn't quite achieve the tone that I wanted, so I decided to 'unmake' my designs by printing out the text, some images, a grid layout and essentially 'collaging' the zine (similar to the idea of 'paste-ups': how designers created page layouts before desktop publishing). My shitty 20 year old black and white laser-jet printer often produces faded prints, and that helped add some warmth to my designs. I found working this way quite fun, and despite being limited by certain aspects I found I was able to create much more exciting layouts than what I was attempting on screen. (The only problem is you can't fix spelling errors you missed!) This way of working probably isn't for everyone, you've got to be happy with a lot of imperfections, but I would defiantly recommend it even just as an alternative to sketching.
Having completed the collage/layouts, I scanned them back into an InDesign document to arrange them as a booklet. I also added some more imagery, this time with a duotone red-orange filter and multiply blending mode, which almost resembled a screen-print. It was this sort of hand-made, lo-fi aesthetic that I wanted to pursue as it felt in keeping with her artworks and style. Speaking with Andy and Bronwyn I decided to try and print on newsprint paper, or at least something similar, so that the finished product would retain at least some of the softness I had tried to carry through. Unfortunately most printers are wary about printing onto such thin paper as it tends to stick to the rollers, fold over itself, or not take ink very well ( A+ quality paper it is ;P). However the thin recycled paper I had sourced worked well enough at Dinkums. I would have liked to try inkjet as it produces a less shiny image, however commercial inkjet inks are quite thick and this paper wouldn't absorb it quite well (It's also more expensive).
Despite my initial hesitations I found this to be a really fulfilling experience. I enjoyed the process of interviewing a creative and then attempting to interpret what they had said into a visual form. Also I was just in a book-making headspace (100 Qs book coming soon. Hopefully) so that was nice too.
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