 | Award-winning artist Jessica Stockholder creates some of her renowned sculptures in her home studio. She says her work, like philosophy, probes questions about "how we experience, what we experience and how these things are meaningful." |
Assembled throughout Jessica Stockholder’s large, light-filled studio are more than a half-dozen works that
are still in progress, but even in their unfinished state, the pieces are characteristic
of the artist’s distinctive style: a merging of the mediums of painting
and sculpture and a melding of disparate, everyday objects. I don’t use this stuff — the materials in my work — because
I think they are funny. We live with this material all of the time. I respond
to things in the world the same way a painter responds to how color feels,
or to the gesture things have: the gesture of a mark you make or the gesture
put into the design of things. So my work is in some ways quite conventional
and traditional — it involves my response to materials and how they can
be manipulated and used to contain form that is meaningful. That said, my work
is also light, optimistic and, at times, funny. I’m interested in qualities of material. I love plastics. Right now
we’re surrounded by plastic, and its colors are incredibly beautiful,
but it’s not highly valued. It’s considered cheap, but it’s
not cheap: it has a big environmental cost that we’re all aware of, so
it is kind of burdened by that. Also, ironically, plastic is not very plastic:
It is not easy to manipulate. With wood, for example, you can sand and shape
and cut and carve it. Plastic melts, it’s toxic, it’s hard to cut
and it cracks easily. Just the implications of the word “plastic” are
interesting in relation to the material, and all of that enters my work. I started as a graduate student in the Yale M.F.A. painting program, and I
moved to the sculpture department in my second year. I might be the only student
in the history of the school to be transferred like that. I love color — it’s my point of departure. But color is hard to
talk about critically. People say ‘Oh, you are a good colorist,’ but
what that means and how you distinguish a good colorist from a bad colorist
is hard to say exactly. Color is very hard to articulate, and it is hard to
measure. It’s relative. We see color via light and the color of light.
How color is experienced also has to do with how big it is and what colors
are next to it. So it is very fluid, not fixed. My work isn’t narrative the way a novel is narrative. I create experiences.
My work is an experience in time and space. I understand it in a way that is
akin to philosophy. Philosophy is a discipline that asks questions about how
we see things, how we think, how we are structured in relationship to what
we are thinking. My work asks questions about how we experience, what we experience
and how those things are meaningful. What are your inspirations for your work? Just moving through the world inspires me. Moving here from New York was inspiring.
Here I experienced shopping in all those big-box stores for the first time.
New York didn’t have them then and Vancouver, where I grew up, didn’t
have them. The shopping experience here affords a view of material moving through
our systems that was shocking, exhilarating and stunning for me. I started teaching at Yale when I was 40. I don’t think it would have
been good for me before then. Now being involved with students forces me to
re-frame my own questions in relation to how they understand the world that
they are growing up in. — By Susan Gonzalez
T H I S
Color, ‘stuff’ and ‘moving
through the world’ inspire artist
Stockholder, who chairs the sculpture department at the School of Art, has achieved
international renown and a number of awards for her art (see related story). Art reviewers and critics have praised her work for its ability to entice
viewers to move around her pieces and look at them from every possible vantage
point.
In one of her studio works-in-progress, such commonplace items as a plastic shower
curtain, a rubber car mat, a kitchen pot and a glass rooster are juxtaposed in
such a way to explore aspects of consumer culture.
“I think this piece is about the ‘surfaces’ of things: how
shiny objects can be something very expensive or opulent or, to the contrary,
something very crass, cheap or fake — what people understand as having
cheated them in some way,” explains Stockholder.
Various lamps decorated with different types of animals or fowl are placed chaotically
together in another unfinished work, while other creations feature a combination
of plastic storage bins, building materials and other household decorations,
some brand new and others well used.
Stockholder refers to the widely varied items that become part of her sculptures
as “stuff,” and says that she gets them from a variety of sources.
“I search through TJ Maxx (which has such an assortment of weird things
that I find interesting), Home Depot, Target, Goodwill. Hotel Liquidators, Odd
Jobs or Odd Lots and even my basement whenever I need stuff,” comments
the artist. “Sometimes I have plans and am looking for specific objects,
and other times I just respond to what is in front of me.”
Stockholder recently discussed her work during an interview with the Yale Bulletin & Calendar
at her home studio in Hamden. An edited version of that conversation follows.
Your work has been described in a myriad of ways, with some saying that you
collect all sorts of “junk” and transform it into art and others
calling your installations or sculptures “funny.” How do you describe
it?
What kinds of materials do interest you?
While you are often described as a sculptor, you see yourself as a painter
as well. How important is painting in your work?
My work isn’t sculpture or painting, but a combination of both, resting
heavily on the conventions of painting. The conventions that tie sculpture
together as a field are much less compelling and less identifiable than what
we understand as a painting convention.
Since the pedestal was taken away from sculpture, sculpture exists hanging
on the wall, leaning on the wall, smeared on the floor, or as sound and space,
and so on. Sculpture can be so many different things, while painting, most
of the time, is something on a flat surface, usually rectangular and is framed
in a way that makes it evocative of space. It often evokes a world separated
from this one we are in.
My work relies on the conventions of painting to cohere. I’m interested
in picture making and the surface of things, and in the wall and other kinds
of surface as evocative of space — fictive, imaginary space. Also, I
think to really understand my work you have to have some sense of framing in
mind, which comes from photography and painting and books and magazines. You
can’t be alive in this culture and not have some very vivid and always-present
sense of framing.
It doesn’t really matter to me whether my work is sculpture or painting.
It matters how and at what junctures my work relies on various traditions.
As a painter, how important is color in your work?
For these reasons, color often makes people uncomfortable.
I like all the difficulties inherent in color. It also functions as a kind
of metaphor for emotion. It is linked with questions about the relationship
between mind and body. Color is very physical. You can’t see it unless
it is attached to something fixed, to some matter in the world, and there needs
to be light. Color always appears as if it’s attached to things, but
it comes to you through light, which moves through the air and is active. Color
embodies things I’m interested in about being alive — questions
about how much we are our mind and our body, and also the reality of having
thoughts and feelings, which are real but ephemeral: you can’t point
to them.
Color exists in a space that raises questions of perception.
Do you have any particular themes in your work or do the pieces ever tell
a story?
I also love reading fiction. I particularly like fantasy fiction like “Harry
Potter,” “His Dark Materials” by Philip Pullman, and Marquez’ “One
Hundred Years of Solitude.”
My work can be understood as filmic, in that it involves an accumulation of
images, experienced through space and time, that as they are remembered add
up to something in the end. But unlike film, my work, for the most part, doesn’t
move. I value the static and slowness of still things — things that are
moving much more slowly than our bodies.
How does teaching affect your work? Do you see young artists at the School
of Art whose work reflects your influence?
Most art students have anxiety about their influences as we are all striving
to make work that is ‘original.’ However, we are, nevertheless,
all in conversation with each other making art, and I do see that my work has
influenced that conversation.
You’ve mentioned that you are doing less site-specific installations
and more studio work these days. Are you enjoying this shift?
Yes, I am. I’ve worked hard for 20 years traveling to various nooks
and crannies of the world. Traveling takes its toll on a person. This way of
work is very performative.
Right now, I’m enjoying working in the studio. And I’m working
on some larger projects closer to home. At this moment in my life I am valuing
my attachments to this community that I live in. I am enjoying a sense of settling
here and being responsible to this place that I live in.
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