Kohl Children’s Museum Artist-in-Residence: A Conversation with Rachel Davis
by Tim Abel, Museum Education Specialist
I am glad to share the Museum’s Art Studio with artists! It is such a fantastic opportunity to share a new perspective and art making style with the visitors. As an added benefit, I get to ask them about their art making, ideas about working with children and collaboration.
This past February, I was able to work with Rachel Davis while she shared her practice of monoprinting with our art studio visitors.
Tim Abel: You brought a lot of great natural materials from a nest to shells to shed antlers for the visitors to explore during the residency. It was great to see a child interact with these items and draw their own conclusions about them or to see how surprised they were when they figured something out, like how to put the lobster claw back together. There was care in the selection of objects you brought to share, so I guess I have two questions.
First, do you have a favorite item of your own that you have found from the natural world?
Rachel Davis: A favorite item from the curiosity box:
I collect objects from nature all the time, whether I am on vacation and am beach combing or just on a stroll in the neighborhood. I like to pick up things that catch my eye. I choose things based on their texture, color and shape. I am drawn to the lumpy, organic shapes of dried seed pods, oyster shells, snail shells and the texture of snake skin.
I have some stones at home that are special for their markings: gray with white stripes. One stone I shared at the residency, I found in Montana. It has beautiful lichens covering one side.
And second, a larger question: how does the natural world inspire your own artmaking?
These materials are important "supplies" in my work in the same way that paint and paper are supplies. I look, draw and study these items when I begin creating a new work of art.
I grew up in a rural area in upstate New York and played in the woods and in creek beds and loved building forts. I think of this open ended playtime as similar to my art making process. When I make compositions in a print or painting it is a process similar to play and often begins with objects I have found in nature.
Rachel Davis’ artwork, clockwise from top left: shellcave, horn, fishnet and hillside. All are Ink and paint on wood, 4 x 6” and made in 2014.
I have asked the past teaching artists that have visited the art studio about collaboration, so I wanted to get your take on it too. How do you prepare for a collaboration?
I think of collaboration, whether between myself and another artist or a larger scale project like Kohl artist-in-residence, as a conversation. There are pauses left for the other to speak and contribute. There should be spaces where we can contradict or disagree with each other. When this happens through the formal process of art making the result is more dynamic and engaging. It becomes a problem to solve. Instead of a linear process I like to embrace a process where the outcome is not predetermined. This insures spontaneity and playfulness in the process.
For my residency at Kohl I knew I wanted to capture the experience the children had making marks painting on the plexiglass. I have been working on these four inch round blotter papers and thought the material lent itself to capture a partial print that kids had created. This way the process was completely open ended and we were not confined to making a thing. Just collecting favorite marks, colors, and brush strokes. My prep for the residency at Kohl was to create a few formal constraints (for example creating interesting colors of paint not just red, blue yellow, but teals, pinks, grays, metallics) and the four-inch round paper stock. The process was very much open within those constraints.
The monoprinting workshops during the residency were so process-driven, in that they invited the visitors to explore: mark making with the monoprinting tools, color mixing or just to have fun squishing the ink across the plexiglass. These playful investigations are what the printed image became, like a snapshot of the action and experimentation. Do you have any advice to anyone who is new to art making with children or is trying something at home that would help embrace this style of art making?
I think it's important to let children use real tools and not toy tools. For example during the residency we used brayers, and decorative painting tools and real textile relief blocks from India. I think this authenticity is important. Though kids are playing, their play is their work and it is real.
I also like to use common household objects like a toothbrush, comb, Q-tip, cotton balls, paper bags, whisk, or spatula for art making.
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To see photos from the full residency, follow this link to our Flickr Album!
And spread the word: We are looking for our next artist for our upcoming Summer Residency period (to take place at some point July to August 2016)! If you are interested or know of a Chicago-area artist who loves to collaborate, work with the community or just has great ideas that should be shared, check out the link to our application for more details.
Also, check out the beautiful monoprints that we have been able to produce in conjunction with our Art Across Oceans: South Africa project! This video shows some of the South African participants’ creative work!
If you have any questions about this project or the residency, don’t hesitate to contact me!