Artist Spotlight: Michele Oka Doner
Whenever we’re in New York, we try to spend an afternoon with artist and writer Michele Oka Doner at her loft in SoHo. Oka Doner moved here in the early 80s, when the neighborhood was still industrially zoned, the streets empty, and the buildings, if not abandoned, housed a few struggling artists.
Things have, obviously, changed. But from Oka Doner’s loft, you can still barely hear the traffic below, as if the streets were deserted. Instead, as she pointed out, there is birdsong and seagulls. Both Oka Doner’s home and her studio, the loft is also an archive of sorts, a gallery, and a library with thousands of books. We followed her as she walked around pulling out drawings, holding up bits of rock and coral, pointing to new and old sculptures, each with a story or idea behind them. For Oka Doner, the natural world is a book and none of the answers are in the back.
Oka Doner is probably best known for “A Walk on the Beach,” the mile-and-a-quarter long floor installation at the Miami airport (her father was mayor of Miami Beach). But we have an affinity for her smaller, more intimate pieces, like the Burning Bush candelabras cast in bronze, throwing a spidery shadow along the walls; or her inscrutable books, like “Intuitive Alphabet,” which might be for children if adults weren’t the ones who need to read it most. We wondered how someone so attuned to nature could spend most of her life in the city, but Oka Doner reminded us that nature is always there, if we only look and see.
Studio AHEAD: So much of your work is rooted in reimagining the natural world so that we see it differently. When I’ve come to visit you, you’ve shown me little pieces—sticks, stone, coral—that you’ve contextualized into figures, bodies, faces. It’s one of the things that drew me to your work, because it’s what our designs do with Northern California’s landscape. Can you speak about this reimagining?
Michele Oka Doner: You describe a very old human impulse rooted in the neural networks of our ancient visual system. The recognition of familiar forms in natural objects goes as far back as the cave. Hominins discovered, likely felt, a flush of pleasure in connection, and took back to their shelters the stone that resembled a face, the branch that echoed their human body. This ability is unique to our species, and I'm a humble keeper of this golden thread tightly woven through the human tapestry.
SA: When you are working on a piece, are you adding to—accentuating—the natural form, or is your process more a taking away, a stripping back, to allow the form to come into its own? Are these insignificant distinctions?
MOD: I believe I am celebrating, or examining, or altering forms by any and all techniques that seem applicable to a desirable conclusion. There is no singular approach to making.
SA: Do you see nature as a kind of writing, a script?
MOD: Again, I reference the ancients. Hieroglyphics are just one example of how we began the experience of visual communication through the shape of objects culled from daily life. Images of snakes and birds, so exquisitely executed in stone and painted on walls in Egypt, speak a language that was/is universal in its ability to forge immediate recognition of information. A direct circuit before the internet.
SA: You moved here in the early 80s. Did the downtown art scene at the time influence you? Manhattan, and especially downtown at that time, seems very far from the natural world.
MOD: New York is part of the natural world. Everywhere I look there are trees and seeds, leaves under my feet, the moon gliding past my window at night, the sounds of gulls screaming down Mercer Street, all reminding me that the power of the living, of weeds and feral creatures is irrepressible. And then there is the seaweed that dropped off the box of the neighbor's sushi delivery, flattened already by a truck, evoking a Victorian pressed specimen. And Devonian crinoid fossils in the marble table at the restaurant down the street.
SA: What were the landscapes of your childhood like?
MOD: Miami Beach where I was born and raised was a new city, only 20 years old. The wildness of semi tropical life still pulsed. Vines overgrew their place of origin and landed on the doorstep. In those early years the Everglades still burned periodically, a reminder that beyond the boundaries of my neighborhood there were other forces operating.
The poetry of Wallace Stevens, one of our great American poets, speaks to this feral moment of heat and moisture and resulting dew and endless tides, and the mystery of it all.
SA: I remember your reciting his “Nomad Exquisite” to me once with the line about the green sides and gold sides of green sides. He was well attuned to color. Has he taught you anything about being an artist?
MOD: Wallace Stevens was not afraid of passion, a great observer of growth and form as well as the enigma of water. I particularly love his line describing the “green vine angering for life” as it clings to and ascends a palm. Every time I used to stop at a red light in Miami I would look sideways and remake “there’s a green vine angering for life.”
Photos: Ekaterina Izmestieva
