Artist: Emily Jan of Oakland, California, USA
and Montreal, Quebec, Canada.
Interview 34: Emily exhibited in the 2012 World of Threads Festival exhibition De rerum natura (On The Nature of Things) at Joshua Creek Heritage Arts Centre in Oakville, Ontario.
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Interviews published by Gareth Bate & Dawne Rudman.
Biography
Emily Jan was born in Los Angeles in 1977. She grew up in San Francisco and currently divides her time between a tiny apartment in Montréal, Canada, and a craftsman in Oakland, California, which she shares with her partner, a housemate, a Deer Chihuahua, and more feral cats than you can shake a stick at.
Over the course of her life Emily has driven across North America twelve times, traveled to twenty-nine countries, and lived in four (South Africa, Mexico, the United States and Canada), so her life has largely been defined by movement and the constant reshaping of ideas of culture and home.
Originally trained as a scenographer, she has designed sets, costumes, and puppets in San Francisco, Berkeley, Providence, New York, Los Angeles, and Cape Town, South Africa. She has also worked in graphic design, illustration, and journalism. For the past three summers, Emily has taught in Oaxaca, Mexico as an assistant for Oax-i-fornia, a hybrid design/craft/art workshop offered by the California College of the Arts.
She holds a BA from Brown University, a BFA from the California College of the Arts, and is currently pursuing her MFA in Fibres at Concordia University, Montréal. Emily's Website
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Artist Emily Jan at the Redpath Museum, Photo: Ted Tucker, © 2011 |
Tell us about your work?
On the surface, my work concerns the natural world, especially the animal kingdom. I find that creatures are a good back-door way into talking about all kinds of human issues which are either ethereal and difficult to pin down, or alternately sticky and contentious.
Though much of my work has political undercurrents, it is the mythical quality that comes to the fore. I am most interested in that moment of encounter that a viewer has with a piece as a presence in the room and as a being with a narrative that must be teased out or invented.
A lot of things happen in that instant. In believing in the reality of what is in front of you, even if only for a moment, a transformation is possible. As Liz Magor once said, "the desire to believe it's real is stronger than the desire to believe it's not real." I play with that a lot in my work.
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Cape Buffalo, shown at Paxton Gate Gallery, San Francisco, as part of words once spoken (solo show), 2010, 50" x 28" x 36", materials: hog gut, reed, zip ties, resin. |
From where do you get your inspiration?
In the broadest sense, my inspiration comes from travel, stories, and the natural world, and particularly where the three intersect. I've spent a lot of time looking at how things grow and how they live.
I was one of those kids who was always getting into some sort of trouble outdoors when given the slightest opportunity. Nature was (and is) both my refuge and my own personal Indiana Jones movie, so my parents no doubt got quite tired of finding me sunk up to my waist in a marsh, beached on top of a boulder I climbed but couldn't climb down, standing in fields having staring contests with deer or wild horses, or fleeing nests of wasps that I'd disturbed.
It might also be hereditary – my late grandmother was an artist. She taught me to paint before I learned to write. My living grandmother was an adventurer, leading Taiwanese girl scouts out into the bush. And my parents and my brother are biologists of the highest caliber. You could say I grew up in a scientific household – deeply rational for sure, but also passionate about curiousity, creativity, independence, and the desire to know, understand, and ultimately play some small part in shaping the human condition.
I grew up spending a lot of time in museums. They interest me not only at face value for their educational quality, but also for the layers upon layers of narrative they contain: authority versus opinion, timelessness versus the historical. The history of the way we think about the world around us is fascinating.
I also read like a maniac, all sorts of things. I'm currently reading two books about the history of science, a global history of exploration, a book of travel narratives from the Age of Exploration through the Colonial period, and a travelogue about chasing forbidden food and drink around the world.
And of course, I would be a miserable liar if I didn't acknowledge that I get a great deal of inspiration from my peers and my professors. My community keeps me both motivated and (mostly) sane. Times of solitude are one thing, but I completely don't believe in that romantic "lone genius artist locked in a turret" myth. Doesn't sound like much fun to me.
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dikdik / ghost dikdik, 2010, dimentions variable, materials: hog gut, reed, zip ties, resin, wax, wool, branches, found glass, found metal, technique: casting, felting |
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Detail: dikdik / ghost dikdik, 2010, dimentions variable, materials: hog gut, reed, zip ties, resin, wax, wool, branches, found glass, found metal, technique: casting, felting |
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Detail: dikdik / ghost dikdik, 2010, dimentions variable, materials: hog gut, reed, zip ties, resin, wax, wool, branches, found glass, found metal, technique: casting, felting |
Why did you choose to go into fibre art?
I'd say that fibres found me. My background is pretty eclectic (spanning set, costume, and puppet design for the theatre, graphic design and illustration, as well as the fine arts) but I have always had an affinity for the material and the handmade, for things that require skill and dexterity. I enjoy the challenge.
There is something about the tactility of the structures that you can create from the raw matter that grows outside the bounds of human machinery, like straw into gold...it's a kind of magic or alchemy. From the hair on a sheep's back you can create a strand like a spider's web or a sheet as dense as Siberian tiger fur. Dyeing is like painting across space, time, and chemistry. This alchemical nature lends itself well to the themes I work with.
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Detail: Dürer's Rhinoceros, 2011, 84" x 32" x 60", materials: resin, silicone, recycled textiles, flax., technique: casting, textile deconstruction, machine and hand sewing |
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Dürer's Rhinoceros, 2011, 84" x 32" x 60", materials: resin, silicone, recycled textiles, flax., technique: casting, textile deconstruction, machine and hand sewing |
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Detail: Dürer's Rhinoceros, 2011, 84" x 32" x 60", materials: resin, silicone, recycled textiles, flax., technique: casting, textile deconstruction, machine and hand sewing |
Which is your favourite fibre medium?
Wow, now that is an unanswerable question. I am constantly learning new materials and techniques – possibly a hangover from the years I spent working in the theatre, when you absolutely had to be ready and willing to learn on the fly – so I've never devoted myself to a single medium exclusively. I use what I deem appropriate for each project.
In the last few years, I have worked a lot with reed and hog gut. More recently I have returned to working with fabrics, embellishment, knitting and crochet, and felting. I love screen-printing but I have yet to figure a way to bring it into my central practice. I'd have to say that the act of learning itself, the balance between the new and the quest for mastery, is ultimately the most interesting discipline for me.
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What other mediums do you work in, and how does this inform your fibre work?
The backbone of my non-fibre studio practice is casting. Occasionally I cast an existing object or plant, but most often I sculpt from scratch in clay or plasticene, create molds in silicone and plaster, and cast positives in resin, silicone, hydrocal, and sometimes wax. I find the way hydrocal mimics bone, silicone mimics flesh, and resin mimics scale, tooth, shell, and horn, to be compelling.
If there is commonality between these rigid materials and the soft structures, it is in the inescapable materiality of them. They all must be worked, their essence grappled with and understood.
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nagual (by night I am the giant hare), 2010, 30" x 60" x 18", materials: hog gut, reed, resin, silicone, flax, wax, burlap, wood, buttons, techniques: casting |
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Detail: nagual (by night I am the giant hare), 2010, 30" x 60" x 18", materials: hog gut, reed, resin, silicone, flax, wax, burlap, wood, buttons, techniques: casting |
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Detail: nagual (by night I am the giant hare), 2010, 30" x 60" x 18", materials: hog gut, reed, resin, silicone, flax, wax, burlap, wood, buttons, techniques: casting |
What specific historic artists have influenced your work?
When I was small, my family made a trip to Europe, and we went to the Prado. My father bought a replica of The Garden of Earthly Delights, that hallucinatory triptych by Hieronymus Bosch, and for my entire childhood it sat on the mantle place. I remember staring at it for hours, fascinated by all the hybrids and monsters, the implied narrative and passage of time, the idea of the creation of a complete world in a work of art. I wanted to enter the painting and see the strange beasts for myself.
No one in the art world, then or now, would probably consider Carl Akeley an artist. He was the man who, together with his wife Delia, revolutionized the field of taxidermy in the early half of the 20th century. Many of the most famous life groups in the American Museum of Natural History in New York and the Field Museum of Chicago were collected and stuffed by them. But he thought of himself foremost as a sculptor, shooting game and then bringing it back to life for the halls of the museum, for posterity. Though there are all sorts of problematics with this idea of killing something in order to save it, I ultimately relate to his passions and motivations. I'm not a hunter. But I don't have to be - I can get wool to look strikingly like fur, and resin like tooth and nail....
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The Tigress of Jowlagiri, 2011, 96" x 40" x 24", materials: wool, recycled textiles, silicone, pulleys, rope, techniques: wet felting, needle felting, sewing, casting |
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The Tigress of Jowlagiri, 2011, 96" x 40" x 24", materials: wool, recycled textiles, silicone, pulleys, rope, techniques: wet felting, needle felting, sewing, casting |
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Detail: The Tigress of Jowlagiri, 2011, 96" x 40" x 24", materials: wool, recycled textiles, silicone, pulleys, rope, techniques: wet felting, needle felting, sewing, casting |
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Detail: The Tigress of Jowlagiri, 2011, 96" x 40" x 24", materials: wool, recycled textiles, silicone, pulleys, rope, techniques: wet felting, needle felting, sewing, casting |
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The Tigress of Jowlagiri, as shown at the Casa de la Cultura, Holguin, Cuba, as part of TRA(MA)PA, a Concordia show at the Romerías de Mayo Youth Arts Festival, 2011, 96" x 40" x 24", materials: wool, recycled textiles, silicone, pulleys, rope, techniques: wet felting, needle felting, sewing, casting |
What specific contemporary artists have influenced your work?
I just saw Berlinde de Bruyckere's work here in Montréal at the DHC/ART gallery, http://www.dhc-art.org/. The way she uses casting to simultaneously suggest death and life is disturbing, grotesque, and sublime at the same time. Though I find her work to be really hauntingly beautiful, I sure wouldn't want to be locked in a room with it at night. That means it has real power.
Earlier this summer I had the great good fortune to participate in a workshop at Concordia University with Theo Jansen of Strandbeest fame. He was generous and humble, and he had a distinct theory about creativity – that we should get rid of it! Well of course that got our attention. Once he had our attention, he described a philosophy of making. This involved choosing a single material (the way he chose pvc conduit for his strandbeests) and getting to know it so well, letting its abilities and constraints dictate form, that working in the studio becomes almost like starting a little universe where you are choosing different building blocks for life and thus setting new parameters for creation and growth. It was a fascinating way to think about making things and I find myself coming back to it when I am feeling stuck with my work.
I have always appreciated South African artist William Kentridge for his great honesty and his courage in making work that mixes the societal and the personal. I lived in South Africa for two years, and his drawings and animations conjure the South African landscape, from the Highveld around Johannesburg to the beach huts in Muizenberg, with intense emotional clarity. Quite often they make me cry in the gallery, which is a very rare occurrence for me. Personal though his narrative may be, it is also deeply universal. That's a quality I strive for.
I have also long appreciated the work of another South African, Jane Alexander. The way she creates her hybrid creatures and stages them sometimes in tableaux, either physically in site-specific installations or digitally in photography, has influenced the way I think about presenting work. Speaking of presenting work, another artist who I think of when I think of really startling, arresting images, is Mexican photographer Graciela Iturbide. She somehow manages to blend the ethnographic with the fantastical in a way that feels like truth and not fiction.
I was introduced to the work of Shary Boyle earlier this year, and her mix of extreme craft (those porcelain figurines with all their minute detail require a huge amount of technical ability to create), mythology, and pure imagination. I have a poster from her show at the Art Gallery of Ontario and I eat my breakfast every morning staring at the detail and the surface of her work, thinking: "damn; how did she do that?"
While I do my best to keep abreast of what happens in the art world around me, I have to say quite often when looking for inspiration or a new way of conceiving of the world I turn to writers. Haruki Murakami is one of my favourites. The way he blends the mundane world seamlessly into the fantastical and dreamlike in order to more closely approach truth, has at this point greatly shaped my own perception of history and existence.
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from the flotsam / jetsam series, #0066, 2011, digital print, St Paul Joli, Quebec |
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from the flotsam / jetsam series, #0095, 2011, digital print, Bay of Fundy National Park, New Brunswick |
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from the forest of the unreal series, #0031, 2011, digital print, Bay of Fundy National Park, New Brunswick |
What other fibre artists are you interested in?
In another lifetime, I would have loved to have Yinka Shonibare's practice. His was one of those ideas that are so ripe for its time that once he had given it form, it was like, "Of course!" Building the garments of the colonizers with the cloth of the colonized, and that cloth itself the product of earlier colonial encounters and cultural hybridity – so simple, yet brilliant. The photographs of him, a British-Nigerian inserted into some powdered-wig historical European scene, are also fantastic.
The Musée des Beaux Arts, Montreal, is currently hosting the Jean-Paul Gaultier show. I've noticed that within the last five or six years fashion designers are appearing in the halls of art museums more and more often – and I think it's a good thing. Getting to see those garments up close, to linger over them, one can then appreciate couture as the art that it is. Talk about handwork! The Urban Jungle section of Gaultier's show particularly grabbed me – the illusions he achieves through painstakingly handcrafted means, carry weight. Of course we can digitally print anything now. For that leopard dress, he could have pressed a button and printed out a leopard; but instead he had his craftspeople spend over 1000 hours beading an entire "pelt". It was mind-blowing!
For a long time, I have been inspired by the work of director Michel Gondry. The videos he has done for Björk are "otherworldly" in the best kind of way – the way that opens up new possibilities in the mind of the viewer. And who can forget the scene in The Science of Sleep, where the lovers go riding off on the real horse wearing a knitted horse costume?
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Emily Jan working in her studio at Concordia University's Fine Art MFA program. |
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Emily Jan working in her studio at Concordia University's Fine Art MFA program. |
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Emily Jan installingThe Tigress of Jowlagiri. |
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Emily Jan's studio at Concordia University's Fine Art MFA program. |
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Emily Jan's studio at Concordia University's Fine Art MFA program. |
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Emily Jan's studio at Concordia University's Fine Art MFA program. |
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Emily Jan's studio at Concordia University's Fine Art MFA program. |
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Emily Jan's studio at Concordia University's Fine Art MFA program. |
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Emily Jan's sketch book. |
Tell us about your studio and how you work:
My studio at present is on the campus of Concordia University in Montréal, though that is of course temporary. My primary work table faces the northwest windows so most days I end up watching late afternoon and dusk fall over Mont Royal and downtown Montréal while I work, watching the lights come on, and go back off again. In the winter snowstorms, it often feels like being inside a giant snow-globe. (For whatever reason updrafts tend to carry the snow upwards past the fourth floor, instead of falling down). It's funny because most of my work deals with ideas about "nature", but I've always felt most productive in the city. Maybe it's like Hemingway writing The Old Man and the Sea in the middle of the American desert. (Not that I'm like Hemingway.)
At present I have several projects running concurrently. So one table is covered with casting materials. Another table is covered with wool and embellishment materials and my sewing machine. My desk at the studio is where I read and sketch ideas out or ruminate into my sketchbook. There's a silver salver in the corner full of notes and letters from friends, zines my studio-mates made, postcards from shows I liked. And drawings, samples, tests, and raw materials tacked up on the walls.
I would love to be able to say I have a nice orderly work routine, but I would be lying. I'm one of these people who feel slightly anxious if I'm not constantly doing "something useful," so I work feverishly most of the time. It's not uncommon for me to pull 12 – 15 hour days in the studio. I'm also not much of a morning person. I start work usually around noon or later, and work into the night, often into the wee hours.
In terms of process, most of the time ideas come nearly fully formed into my head, so once they do it is usually just a matter of getting down to work. As I said, I work mostly with animal (and occasionally plant or fungal) forms, so the process of building any one piece is like playing at being some obscure god – I have to think about the how the thing will be constructed from the level of the bones to the level of the skin. It's interesting.
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Birds of Paradise in the Garden of the Collector, 2010, 70" x 82" x 12", materials: wool, cotton, silk, glass, branch, technique: crochet, wet felting, needle felting, embellishment. |
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Detail: Birds of Paradise in the Garden of the Collector, 2010, 70" x 82" x 12", materials: wool, cotton, silk, glass, branch, technique: crochet, wet felting, needle felting, embellishment. |
What role do you think fibre art plays in contemporary art?
To me, the word "fibre" alludes to a certain kind of materiality. While I love working with the traditional natural fibres – silk, wool, fur, flax – I think the heart of why fibres is so vital these days, lies in the quality that fibres and textiles are quintessentially worked by hand.
As a society, I think the West has gotten quite out of touch with material reality. Between our increasing hours spent in the virtual world of computers and other screens, our distance from where our necessaries like food and garments come from, and the general un-viability of our economic structures, most of us live in varying states of disconnect.
I'm not saying that all progress or technology is bad, or implying we should dump the computer – I myself spend plenty of hours in front of a computer. But there is a kind of intelligence, a certain kind of knowing the world, which can only be gained through the hands. There is something harder to quantify which we have lost touch with, and which the handmade and the act of hand-making itself puts us in touch with. These are things which are unquantifiable but which nevertheless are what make us distinctly human, and which are subject to a lot of slippage in a society which deals increasingly in only things which are quantifiable in a very narrow way.
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the peryton, shown at the Bruce Galleries, CCA San Francisco, from the exhibition far from god (solo show), (side view), 2009, installation dimensions variable, materials: hog gut, reed, hand-screenprinted textiles, clay, soil, resin, polymer clay, techniques: casting, screenprinting. |
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the peryton, shown at the Bruce Galleries, CCA San Francisco, from the exhibition far from god (solo show), (rear view), 2009, installation dimensions variable, materials: hog gut, reed, hand-screenprinted textiles, clay, soil, resin, polymer clay, techniques: casting, screenprinting. |
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Detail: the peryton, shown at the Bruce Galleries, CCA San Francisco, from the exhibition far from god (solo show), 2009, installation dimensions variable, materials: hog gut, reed, hand-screenprinted textiles, clay, soil, resin, polymer clay, techniques: casting, screenprinting. |
Where do you imagine your work in five years?
Wherever I go and whatever I do, I imagine the fundamentals will stay the same – the desire to learn, the drive to make, and my tendency to spend large chunks of time living out of suitcases. (Wanderlust appears to be incurable). But what I will be making, reading, learning, and where my suitcases will be parked five years from now, is really anybody's guess.
In the short term though, I am about to take my work out of the gallery and start photographing it out in the world. I have no idea how that will work out, but I guess that's the beauty of being an artist, right? Freedom to risk, freedom to fail!
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Artist Emily Jan at the Redpath Museum, Photo: Ted Tucker, © 2011 |
How did you find out about the World of Threads Festival?
I find folks who work with textiles or craft to be among the most connected lot of people I've ever met, and when our lives hit the Internet, those connections explode exponentially. So – I found out through the digital grapevine!
What interests you about the World of Threads Festival?
Well, in all honesty I have never been to one. I am a recent transplant to this corner of the globe so anything I might offer would be pure theory. But I'm very much looking forward to checking it out in 2012.
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Animal, Vegetable, Mineral, 2009, 8" x 8" x 8", materials: found wood, moss, and rodent skull, cotton (shibori/lye), craft flowers, acrylic paint, glass. |
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Detail: Animal, Vegetable, Mineral, 2009, 8" x 8" x 8", materials: found wood, moss, and rodent skull, cotton (shibori/lye), craft flowers, acrylic paint, glass. |
Is there anything else you would like us to know about you or your work that we have not covered?
I just exhibited Dürer's Rhinoceros this June in Mexico (in AIRE: the 6th World Textile Art Biennial held in Xalapa, Mexico City, and Oaxaca) where it won third place in the Oaxacan Salon de Reciclaje (Salon for Recyclability in Textiles). It was a pleasure to get the chance to exhibit in an area I feel very connected to, from my summers working and teaching for Oax-i-fornia (www.oaxifornia.org).
Before that, I showed The Tigress of Jowlagiri in the Romerías de Mayo Youth Arts Festival in Holguin, Cuba this past May. It was really a trip to see how the populace there reacted to a big fuzzy sculpture shown in unconventional surroundings (the courtyard of the Casa de la Cultura). It swayed in the breeze like it was walking. I had to run to the store at the last minute and buy four sacks of lentils to weight its feet. A local English professor was so enamored with it he wrote it a sonnet. And the children! It was all I could to do keep it from being ripped off its pulleys and hugged to death. Definitely a different experience from showing in the white cube!
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Detail: the Norns, shown at the Alphonse Berber Gallery, Berkeley, CA, as part of New Nature, 2009, dimensions variable, materials: hog gut, reed, zip ties, wool, resin, pumice, light, shadow, techniques: knit, crochet, installation |
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Detail: the Norns, shown at the Alphonse Berber Gallery, Berkeley, CA, as part of New Nature, 2009, dimensions variable, materials: hog gut, reed, zip ties, wool, resin, pumice, light, shadow, techniques: knit, crochet, installation |
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Warthog, shown at Paxton Gate Gallery, San Francisco, as part of words once spoken (solo show), 2010, 50" x 28" x 36", materials: hog gut, reed, zip ties, resin. |