Meera Sethi: Dematerialization, Care and Repair as UN/making

Meera Sethi standing beside a home grown cotton plant.

Welcome back to The UN/makers interview series that features creatives who consciously take up methods of un/making as part of their practice to help disrupt anthropogenic, perspectives and gestures towards land. This week I had the opportunity to speak with Meera Sethi about her interesting participatory mail art project Unskilled #newclothingcaresymbols, launched in 2020 during Covid lockdown. As a brief intro, Meera Sethi is an interdisciplinary Canadian artist who lives and works as an immigrant-settler in Tkaronto (Toronto, Canada), the traditional territory of the Anishinaabe, Haudenosaunee, Huron-Wendat, and Mississaugas of the Credit River. With an intuitive and research-based practice, Sethi moves between mediums to ask critical questions about migration, memory and care, and works at the intersection of the subjugated body and histories of cloth with a particular focus on South Asia and its diasporas. Sethi shares, “I am interested in the making, wearing, and disposing of cloth; the use of clothing as self-expression and resistance; and the ways textiles are constituted over vast geographies formed through empire, racial capitalism, caste, heteropatriarchy, and settler colonialism. Jill: Meera, thank you for taking time out from your busy schedule for this interview! I have recently been reading about mail art projects and dematerialization during the 60's, 70's and 80's. Could you begin by talking about the mail art project Unskilled, launched in 2020 with the support of the Centre for South Asian Civilizations at University.

Meera Sethi Care Label Design Sketches for Unskilled

Meera:l Clothing and textiles seem to me to be almost an invisible pollutant. Everyday we get dressed in a consumerist culture that encourages us to engage with fashion and look and feel good in what we wear. However, so little is said about the lifecycle of clothes, how they are made, and where they end up after we dispose of them. This life cycle of clothing quite literally travels the world from where the fibre is produced, to where it is manufactured, to where it is sold, and to where it ends up upon and after disposal. The textile industry also functions on vastly unequal labour conditions that exploit “unskilled” workers to produce clothes quickly for global mega-brands with high profit margins. To unmake this system, not only do we have to consume far less, we also have to understand the roots of this system that lie in the early days of colonialism, capitalism, and slavery. Jill: Yes! Consumers are often kept at such a distance from many of the physical and political-economic materials that go into making of a thing. So, the first time I encountered your work, you were producing a number of large scale, almost life size, mixed-media works on canvas entitled Upping the Aunty, which celebrated “the iconic “South Asian Aunty” for her personal style and their unique role in your life. What was it that shifted your practice towards creating a more participatory art project of caring and repairing textiles?

Meera: Part way through my practice of painting figurative works incorporating bright and patterned textiles, I realized that I wanted to have a deeper understanding of the images of cloth that I was painting. I began looking into patterns, colours and their histories, which opened up many new avenues of exploration. Part of this new direction was thinking about the making of these textiles. This led me to consider care. Through my painting, I was expressing care for the identity of the wearers of textiles, but I wasn’t explicitly extending care to the makers of textiles. So I re-focused my practice to consider both in relation to each other. Jill:. Aware of how the visual arts are very much a part of the global textile industry that works to colonize communities and land around the world through its production and waste, how do you see your praxis, particularly projects such as Unskilled, helping to unmake or undo different phenomena that contribute to the Capitolocene, Plasticocene, Anthropocene, etc...? Meera: Through my practice I encourage people to consider connections between ourselves, our bodies, and the outer world, whether that be the environment, history or community. In doing so, I draw attention to the social forces that impact and shape us, and either celebrate our resilience or ask audiences or participants to consider our relationship to self and others. Unskilled asks questions about how these various systems of power are constituted through the clothes on our back in an attempt to undo them. Jill: It takes a lot of courage to reflect on and adjust one's practice to acknowledge and deal with such realities. In making that transition, what else did you need to unmake, relinquish, resist, refuse or refrain from in order to imagine and put a project like Unskilled out into the world?

Meera: Unskilled was about unmaking our limited idea about care and clothing. When seen from the perspective of Western consumerism, conventional care labels on clothing only address care for the garment through washing, drying, and ironing, and do not take into consideration wider circles of care such as what is it made of, how did we acquire it, who made it and under what conditions was it made. I asked people to open their closets and interact with a piece of clothing as a way to care for these other aspects of the cloth, essentially to consider the entire cycle of clothing production. I resisted restrictive notions of care that treat an item of clothing as an end point. Instead, I now see clothing as assemblages of seen and unseen material that requires care at every stage of their lifecycle. Jill: Did you receive any inspirational or hopeful responses to the project and find that it helped others to unmake their ways of thinking about or interacting with textiles? Meera: The labels with the 41 new symbols got people thinking about new ways of engaging with cloth. People who previously didn’t think about the process on which clothing arrived in their hands, began asking questions. Unskilled provoked questions about the social, environmental, and labour relations of cloth. I mailed out hundreds of labels and received some responses with people sending images or sharing stories of interacting with the labels. Most labels however left my purview and continue to circulate in the world.

Jill: I would imagine that control or collection of outcomes is one more thing that an artist needs to relinquish when they put art like this out into the world. I know I still have my labels and need to sew them into one of my many thrifted and repaired clothing items. Thinking about Unskilled and other participatory projects such as Christina Battles, Ishtar's International Network of Feral Gardens, what else do you think needs to be unmade if artists are to commit and be able to sustain themselves through more ephemeral, educational and activist work? Meera: One question I feel will become increasingly important to artists is the environmental impact of artist materials from paint all the way to large-scale installations. Art does create a lot of waste and often requires a lot of storage. These are questions one will have to take into consideration when making work, especially work that addresses the undoing of damaging relations. In Unskilled, I was insistent on using a 100% cotton label free of plastics and ensure the project was mailed out in recycled envelopes through standard mail.

Meera Sethi, Unskilled Clothing Label printed on 100 % cotton.

Meera Sethi, Unskilled Project being placed in cardboard mailers made from recycled materials.

Jill: Wow! Thank you for providing a perfect example of how we can all pay more attention to our material choices when designing a project. You mention that you utilize a research-creation methodology within your practice. Is there anything you have had to unmake about yourself through research or as a result of outcomes from the creative process and interacting with others? Meera: As an artist and queer person, I am constantly in a state of unmaking. For much of my life I have had to create, bend and destroy rules and ways of doing. This is so intrinsic to who I am that it is difficult to parse through. I have forged my own path as an artist that did not follow conventional approaches or timelines. For example, I graduated with a masters degree in Interdisciplinary Studies while pursuing a self-taught practice of graphic design. As an artist, both these trajectories eventually filtered into an art practice that is inquisitive, research-oriented, multidisciplinary and highly visual. Jill: Is there any book, essay, blog, or podcast you would recommend to others that can help them unmake colonial, capitalist, or patriarchal perspectives and gestures towards land? Meera: In 2022, I participated as a feature artist at Nuit Blanche in Toronto with curator Dr. Julie Nagam with a project titled Colour of the Year. As part of Julie’s commitment to Nuit Blanche, she hosted a podcast series called Belonging to Place in which she interviews many artists and culture-workers about their practices and their relation to land and place. It’s a bit under the radar, but a truly remarkable collection of voices and stories that unmake our understanding of land and belonging. Jill: Thanks for sharing these additional projects and references. Final question for today. What do you feel needs more unmaking in the world, or more specifically, the art world, to design a more equitable and sustainable future? Meera: A continued focus on dismantling the sexism and racism of the art world that gatekeeps, not only artists, but curators and artistic directors as well. We need radical visions and voices in order to truly imagine and build a better world.

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Exhibiting nationally and internationally, Sethi’s work can be found in the permanent collections of the Royal Ontario Museum and the Wedge Collection and has earned her multiple awards from the Toronto, Ontario and Canada Arts Councils, the Textile Museum of Canada, University of Toronto, Inter Access, and the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity. To learn more about Meera Sethi's past and upcoming projects visit her website and Instagram account.

Dr. Rachel Epp Buller: Writing, Walking and Listening as UN/making

Welcome back to The UN/maker interview series that features creatives who consciously take up methods of un/making as part of their practice to help disrupt anthropogenic, perspectives and gestures towards land. For those of you who were not able to attend the online talk with Dr. Michelle Wilson, her recorded interview is now available on Youtube. This week I had the opportunity to speak with Rachel Epp Buller for what I would consider to be inspirational work around speculative letter writing.

Rachel Epp Buller, Taking Care, performance of listening in words and embroidery. In/Visible Care exhibition at Outlook Gallery, Minnesota Center for Book Arts, 2022. Photo credit: Anne Labovitz

As a brief introduction, Rachel Epp Buller is a visual artist, feminist, art historian, professor and mother of three who holds a PhD in art history and an MFA in creative practice. . Her current writing and artistic research explores slow practices, such as walking and stitching, with a particular focus on letter-writing as an act of relational care and a radical intervention into practices of academic scholarship. Also regularly reviewing books and exhibitions for Woman’s Art Journal, Hyperallergic, and other journals, Rachel is a board member of the National Women’s Caucus for Art, a certified practitioner in Deep Listening, a Professor of Visual Arts and Design at Bethel College (KS/US), and exhibits and speaks about her work internationally. To read more about her practice and all of her acheivements, visit Rachel's website.

Jill: Rachel, thank you so much for taking time out from your busy and impressive schedule for this interview! In your brief bio above, letter-writing is referred to as an act of relational care and a radical intervention into practices of academic scholarship. I was wondering if you could start off by providing us a little bit of a context on how you arrived at letter writing as a practice and how you see it as a method to help unmake or disrupt industrial capitalism, technological colonialism, or other aspects of our highly accelerated and increasingly virtual worlds?

Rachel: I am a lifelong letter writer, and I come from a long line of letter writers, so this material form has always been part of my way of being in the world. There are so many elements that draw me to the epistolary form: the physical gesture, the material remnants, the slow time of exchange, and the opportunity to revisit relationships and conversations. It was not until I returned to graduate school to pursue an MFA in Creative Practice that I began to see the form’s possibilities for artistic and academic exchange. One of the most powerful possibilities I see in the letter form is an invitation to enter into a listening relationship. Letters can be a reaching out, a request to be listened to with the implicit understanding that the sender will listen to the receiver in exchange, if and when the receiver should respond. But it is a patient form. A letter sent through the post resists the technological immediacy and concomitant demands implied by, emails, texts, or instant messages.

Within academic scholarship, I’ve experimented with the letter as a mode of changing the manner of discourse between thinkers. Not to say that letters haven’t existed in academia. There is, in fact, a long tradition of public letters where one scholar might publish an open letter to another scholar, taking issue with an idea or interpretation, and using a widely-read journal to make one’s case and/or air one’s grievances. But in that mode, the letter becomes a vehicle for contention rather than for actual discussion. Public letters, I wager, are not often written with the intention of reciprocal listening.

In my own research, I’ve turned to the letter to facilitate dialogue with other artists and scholars - testing out new ideas or searching out nuances in established ones. My MFA thesis of 2018 was written entirely in letters, and in lieu of footnotes, I handwrote personal letters of citation to each artist, scholar or their heirs, whose work I cited within the thesis.(i) In 2019, I published an essay with Lena Simic and Emily Underwood-Lee based on an 18-month round-robin transatlantic correspondence, in which we thought through ideas together across extended time and space.(ii) The relational mode extends, I think, to the reader as well when letters are published as academic writing: letters in this form might well tackle weighty issues, but the personal address invites readers to enter into the discussion both because of its contrast to the closed nature of much academic prose, and also allows readers to imagine themselves as the letter’s recipients.

Rachel Epp Buller, marbled papers used in Pandemic Epistles, 2020-21

As an artistic medium, the epistolary form can privilege relational exchange in ways that resist expectations of capitalist productivity. Some of my work that involves letters circumvents the commodification tendency by embracing the nature of the form itself. During 2020-21, I embarked on a project titled Pandemic Epistles, a practice of daily listening and connection through letters. Every day for a year, from March 2020 to March 2021, I wrote letters on papers that I had marbled in the backyard, walked to the post box, and mailed off these invitations to listen. And

while I received many letters in return, and have maintained several regular correspondences from that project, the original gestures of text on marbled paper were all dispersed. The point was never to commodify, but rather to initiate and maintain relational connections in a time of pandemic isolation and disorientation.

Jill: Whoa. That's a lot of letter writing. Thank you for such an in-depth explanation! I wonder, did your PhD in art history inform or help you to unmake yourself from materials and modes of representation and presentation associated with European traditions of fine art, or were you always drawn to smaller, slower and more ephemeral modes of creative expression?

Rachel: That’s a great question, because it was actually just the opposite. My education has been wide-ranging. As an undergraduate, I fully embraced the liberal arts mindset and studied many things, earning degrees in History, Studio Art, and German. Immediately following that, I went on for an MA and then PhD in Art History, a program of study that I imagined would combine my multiple interests. And it did, to an extent, but it was also a narrowing, as any graduate study is, with professors making clear to me early on that “making” of any kind would be irrelevant to my training as a serious art historian. So I gave up on the studio art side of my life for years and fully committed myself to academic writing and research. Once I finished school, I returned to making, but it always felt “on the side” and disconnected from my “real” work. It was not until a decade later when I returned to graduate school to pursue an MFA, that I learned to unmake those imposed disciplinary boundaries and instead find ways to trouble them by working through and across them.

Jill: Right! I forgot how many other disciplines limit our scope and approach to learning. That being said, In 2021, you offered an amazing workshop entitled Listening Across Time through Epistolary Praxis in partnership with CoLab: Research-creation + Social Justice Collaboratory out of Alberta. For me that workshop really opened up how I could go about communicating research. Can you briefly outline the three different speculative writing exercises you facilitated for the group and what these exercises were designed to potentially unmake for those participating?

Rachel: Sure—that workshop brought together such a wonderful, generative group of creatives and I have to thank Natalie Loveless for inviting me to lead those sessions. Over the course of a week, with two long virtual sessions at the beginning and end, and some days in between to work, think, and offer peer feedback, we explored together how the letter as a mode of address might allow us to communicate in different ways across temporal divides. In the first exercise, I asked participants to write a letter to the past—to an ancestor, for example, or to their own former self, or a letter in the voice of someone from the past. Next, I asked them to create a letter as a form of listening in the present, first to answer the question, “Who or what needs your listening attention?,” and also to determine something about the recipient as well as the creative form. Finally, we discussed ways of thinking toward and engaging with possible futures, and the task was to write or create a letter that urgently needs to be sent, again considering which possible recipients most require our listening attention. For each exercise, I encouraged participants to consider what form their letter would take: Written words on a page? A performance, read aloud? Words written in sand or snow? Words going up in smoke after reading? As you probably remember Jill, we witnessed a wealth of creative interpretations. As I think back on them, many of them unmade the letter form itself, reconsidering what a “letter” can be, as well as rethinking who or what might be open to receiving a letter, and to what end.

Rachel Epp Buller, Fondly, from Valedictions series, 2019. Embroidery on handmade paper.

Jill: Yes people were much more creative than I could have imagined and really expanded my understanding of letter writing and its physical and deliverable forms. Has your research into the praxis of letter writing revealed other things that get unmade or disrupted by people choosing to slow down and write letters to living or in some cases, nonliving things.

Rachel: One of the pieces that came out of the workshop, Christa Donner’s Dear Human, is a great example of this. She conjures a series of letters, writing speculatively from the perspective of multispecies inhabitants of the West Ridge Nature Preserve in Chicago: deer, pond, tree, and tick address the humans who enter their space. These are layered letters: Donner records each letter as an audio file, which are then accessed via QR code by visitors who come to walk at the nature preserve. They walk, they listen, they become more attuned to their ecological kin in that place. She transforms the letter into an auditory experience, disrupts our assumptions of who can speak / write, and creates an experience that facilitates slowness, walking, and listening. I have to read in this work an implied goal of greater ecological awareness and activism, for if we get out of our cars and walk, and we listen closely to what our multispecies kin have to tell us, then surely we humans will be moved on some level to change our destructive ways of being.

Jill: Yes, I agree! I think what many might not understand is how important scientific, historical or observational research is when writing from another perspective. Can you talk a little bit about research-creation as a method of unmaking and how this can impact writing.

Rachel Epp Buller, Keep still. wait. this is the moment of no turning back, 2021. From After the End of the End of the World, a collaborative exhibition with Derek Owens based on a year-long correspondence and exchange of words.

Rachel: I think research-creation is what I was seeking for years, without even realizing it. As Natalie Loveless describes it in her book, How to Make Art at the End of the World, research-creation is a methodology that moves “beyond primary accountability to a specific discipline while still keeping the door open to discipline-specific knowledge. Simply put, it place[s] the curiosity-driven question first” (2019, p 25) This of course appeals to me because of my own multimodal research practice, in the way that it unmakes strict disciplinary divisions and expectations. Even further, though, I find that the critical issues that most concern me, like slowness and listening, are already explored widely across disciplines, with single affinity to none, so it makes most sense to begin with “the curiosity-driven question” and then determine the best form(s) for tackling the research. In my own writing, this has taken shape as I have sought to determine the best voices and genres for given areas of my research. As I mentioned, I have incorporated the letter form in a variety of my publications. Letters most often involve exchange, so some of this writing unmakes the academic privileging (at least in the humanities) of single-authorship. In an epistolary piece I co-wrote with Derek Owens, we removed any identification of whose words were whose, instead prioritizing the idea of a back-and-forth through letters.(iii)

Jill: I find that interesting that the two of you chose to relinquish your individual authorship, or one might say ego, to ensure that the art of exchange and listening came to the forefront. Is there anything else you have had to unmake about yourself through research, interacting with others, or the creative process of letter writing?

Rachel: Expectations of self is a big one. I find value in duration, repetition, sustaining in different ways for the long haul and waiting in periods of quiet anticipation. Letters of course echo many of these points. The more I embrace the practice of writing letters, the more I am able to unmake expectations and uncover the generative aspects of duration and delay, waiting and anticipation. Additionally, as my bio indicates, I wear a variety of professional hats and have wide-ranging interests on top of being a committed caregiver. I think many women of my generation were raised with the idea of “doing it all,” after second-wave feminists worked so hard to open doors for us. But what I’ve come to accept for myself over time is that I might be “doing it all,” but I likely won’t be doing it all at the same time. There are seasons and cycles when some areas take priority over others, or some demands are louder and more insistent than others. Then there are those moments when my own interests shift and I make choices about which kinds of research to privilege.

Rachel Epp Buller, Letters to the Future #2, 2018 Ink/word drawing.

Jill: If you think about the commercial art world and how it upholds stereotypes and expectations of what it means to be a successful artist, what else have you had to unmake, relinquish, resist, refuse or refrain from in order to work the way you do?

Rachel Epp Buller, Taking Care, a participatory project of listening in words and thread. Installation view, Borough Road Gallery, London, 2019.

Rachel: Probably my biggest resistance has been to the production mentality of the commercial art world. I think I used to feel insecure that I wasn’t making more “stuff.” I’m a very slow maker in comparison to my highly productive artist friends who constantly make new work for exhibitions and festival or art fair circuits. I do love to make objects, certainly, and I relish processes like printmaking, book arts, and embroidery, but so much of my work is conceptually driven. There may be objects attached to the some of the ideas, which might be sold, but so often my primary interest is relational exchange within the creative process. I continue to unmake my own learned expectations of who an artist is and what an artist does as I deepen into creating the kind of work that feels urgent to me and I hope speaks to others as well.

Jill: I think you told me that you are now in the early stages of writing a book on listening as artistic practice, and it incorporates letters as well as instructional scores, alongside and within critical discussions. Could you share a little about the walking or listening methods you speak of and how you see either of these helping to unmake anthropogenic perspectives or gestures towards land?

Rachel: Much of my current research investigates how listening might be enacted and/or facilitated by specific artistic gestures. As a certified practitioner in Deep Listening, I follow Pauline Oliveros’ proposition that we might listen in ways that involve more than just our ears as listening is a whole-body experience. My artistic inquiries propose modes of listening through hands and feet, letter-writing and walking, stitching and drawing. In Winter/Spring 2022, when I had the good fortune to be a Fulbright Canada Research Chair in Arts and Humanities at the University of Alberta, I carried out a daily practice of walking as a way to listen in a new-to-me place and with the land and its inhabitants. I set myself a score for Winter Walking (2022):

On many of my daily walks, I walked by myself in the North Saskatchewan River Valley. Occasionally I passed other humans on my walks, but more often I found myself attuning to the creaking trees, calling magpies, howling coyotes, dripping snowmelt, where my footsteps in crunching snow were but one of many elements in the sonic landscape. I learned through walks with Indigenous education professor Dwayne Donald and studied his writing on walking in the land as a reparative gesture that helps us recognize and strengthen relations with our ecological kin. Donald writes, “By walking and listening, people begin to perceive the life around themselves differently. They feel enmeshed in relationships.”(iv)

Through a practice of daily walking, I experienced a move from generality to specificity. The idea of “tree” transformed into individual, distinctive trees, whose personalities I came to recognize and notice as they changed with the weather. I perceived the life around me differently. While on my walks I watched dozens of snowshoe hares hopping around my neighborhood. Then, once home, I was able to watch the hare who nested for weeks in the snowbank outside my window, watching me as I watched him. Walking and/as listening has become for me a vehicle for paying attention in daily, specific ways to the lands that I inhabit, and in continually trying to recognize myself as one inhabitant among many, seen and unseen.

Jill: Your practice seems to point to how nature is the earliest form of an audio book! Speaking of audio books, are there any other books, essays, blogs, or podcasts you would recommend to help unsettle the visual arts and promote more ethical practices of care?

Rachel Epp Buller, “A Score for Seasonal Listening,” 2022. Day 92 in A Year of Deep Listening, Center for Deep Listening

Rachel: I am always seeking out transdisciplinary projects that speak to my central concerns. Recently, some of my favorite books have been Jenny Odell’s How to Do Nothing, a book that beautifully calls for shifting our attentions and intentions; the collectively written Care Manifesto that lays out our interdependence and what survival demands of caring relations; Octavia Butler’s Earthseed trilogy, which helps us imagine future caring relations; Simon Garfield’s To the Letter, a social history of the epistolary form; Richard Power’s novel The Overstory that outlines the histories and sentient relations between, and facilitated by trees; and Maggie Berg and Barbara K. Seeber’s The Slow Professor. This book provides prompts for how to change our ways of being in higher education. I also really appreciate The Year of Deep Listening initiated by Stephanie Loveless at the Center for Deep Listening, in honor of Pauline Oliveros’ 90th birthday. I feel grateful that one of my listening scores was featured as part of this project on day 92.

Jill: Where are you witnessing other positive examples of unmaking happening within your extended community?

Rachel: Megan Arney Johnston’s concept of Slow Curating, a phrase she coined in 2016, privileges the relational possibilities of curating and seeks to unmake the notion of expertise. Certainly, art historians and museum curators generally have trained expertise in their fields, but Johnston’s curatorial experiments show how other forms of expertise, from lived experience to community collaboration, might equally be positions from which to curate and engage broader publics.

Many of the artistic projects I find engaging prioritize participatory engagements that shift our attentions or work to disrupt cultural expectations. I’ll offer just two here. In 2020, US/Berlin artist Christine Sun Kim created Dear Essential Workers, a Times Square digital billboard installation visualizing sound and creating a kind of connective, public listening in a time of isolation. Drawing connections between musical notation and the gestures of American Sign Language that are equivalent to “sound” in deaf culture, Kim orchestrated community listening through a shared participatory sound engagement. One other example I’m thinking about is Tricia Hersey’s The Nap Ministry. In a public and private performance practice, Hersey advocates for regular pauses—naps—as a necessary antidote to centuries of racial trauma that actively resists the work-based values of capitalism and white supremacy. Through collective napping events, as well as her own personal commitment to daily rest, her Nap Ministry promotes rest as a form of relational community care learned by listening across time with her ancestors.

Jill: I love napping as it helps me process information, but like everything else, it is always at risk of being quantified and commodified in order to ensure productivity and profits. Ugh. Okay, last question, and thanks again for your time and generousity while responding to these questions. If more artists are to relinquish commodity driven approaches to art making and take up gestures of care and repair, what else needs to be urgently unmade in the world, or more specifically the art world, today?

Rachel: Already more than 30 years ago, Tronto and Fisher noted that we desperately need to “take care”of and “repair” our world if we hope to “live in it as well as possible” (1990), and I see how this applies not just to crises on a global scale but also more specifically in relation to art. We’ve known for a long time that “the art world,” as it currently stands, is an unsustainable financial model. Art cannot be an endless financial growth engine, and tying art to capitalism in that way effectively undermines any social power it might have. Artists have a vital role to play in changing our human and more-than-human relations—by working locally and collaboratively to model gestures and facilitate experiences that sound warnings, open up new ways of seeing and thinking, provide entry points into difficult issues, and begin to shift mindsets.

Rachel Epp Buller, Patterns in our Hands workshop, 2018. Flutgraben artist space, Berlin

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i Rachel Epp Buller, “Dear Friend: A Thesis in/of Letters.” Master’s thesis. Plymouth, UK: University of Plymouth, Transart Institute, 2018.

ii Rachel Epp Buller, Lena Simic, and Emily Underwood-Lee, “The Body in Letters: Once Again, Through Time and Space.” In Buller and Reeve (eds.), Inappropriate Bodies: Maternity, Art, and Design. (Demeter Press, 2019): pp. 331-344.

iii Rachel Epp Buller and Derek Owens, “’our hopes lie in a time of alliances’: epistolary praxis and transdisciplinary composing.” Something Other journal, special issue On Correspondence. (December 2018).

iv Dwayne Donald, “We Need a New Story: Walking and the wahkohtowin Imagination,” Journal of the Canadian Association for Curriculum Studies, vol. 18, no.2 (2021): 61.

The UN/makers Series & UN/making the Frame

For those of you who haven't seen the advertisement of the online interview series I am conducting, I invite you to come out on Thursday night from 7 - 8:30 pm to hear my chat with the wonderfully talented and thoughtful interdisciplinary artist Michelle Wilson. Recently awarded her PhD from Western University, Wilson's research has been helping to redress Canada's colonial history of the buffalo and is now working with the Coves Collective to help remediate soil in London, Ontario. To register you can visit the Eventbrite link or follow the zoom link featured below at 7 pm this Thursday at 7 pm. https://www.eventbrite.ca/e/jill-prices-unmaker-series-with-michelle-wilson-tickets-462169359997

https://us06web.zoom.us/j/83803870686

If you haven't been to check out my exhibition at Georgian College, UN/making the Frame is a large scale installation constructed from the lines found within one still life painting. Resisting the pressure and desire to create more drawings, paintings or sculptures for the exhibit, the entire space was constructed from only using reconfigured art works in my existing archive, ready-mades and black tape.

Beyond trying to be more ecologically friendly, something I was thinking about when conceptualizing the exhibit was how nothing is 2D or flat, as all objects, whether they be paintings, a table cloth or masking tape, only ever represent 5% of the total amount of material that goes into the making of something. By extending the picture plane of the still-life entitled Landscape on Table, which you can see in the back left hand side of this image, I was hoping to draw attention to how everything, including humans, are part of a much larger four dimensional ecology of physical and psychic material. When I say psychic material, what I am alluding to is how materials, things, images, colours, textures, spaces, and places have affect on those who encounter them. So despite the installation reflecting an environmental concern, which one might expect to be dark and depressing, I intentionally set out to design a space that emanates a lightheartedness and joy, while also illustrating how the old can become the new.

The unmaking of the picture plane of the painting also evolved into other approaches to unmaking the frame:

• house hold items were integrated to blur the lines between a gallery space and home,

• old frames were cut up to make a ladder,

• surfaces were mirrored to help create multidimensional reflections,

• old stretchers were deconstructed to signify a forest,

• canvases were cut from their stretchers and reconfigured into sculptures,

• the installation was extended beyond the confines of the gallery,

• objects were positioned in an abstract way to un/make our normal frames of reference when it comes to a thing's function or placement within a space, and

• flowers, a record player, salted licorice, exercise balls and push carts were placed in the installation to un/make the sterility of the white cube and stimulate senses often denied or discouraged within a gallery space.

Simultaneously familiar and unsettling, there are also juxtapositions within the space that point to connections between iconography and materials on display with a ceramic sheep placed beside one of my wool entanglements and a ceramic rabbit by Frith Bail situated so it is confronting a fur rug on the wall.

On clear display, is also the wonderful book by Seetal Solanki that outlines a number of creatives who are inventing new materials and using new methods that help to address the huge amount of waste in the world. If you are in the space, feel free to pick up the book and look at all of the innovation happening in the areas of design and craft which we can begin to incorporate as artists.

Also trying to un/make the idea that art is only an object that can be consumed, when in the gallery, visitors can view a series of stop motion videos that share the process of the installation. For me this is where the art lies. Then, and when the audience shifts from observers to doers. By drawing attention to the multiple stages of the installation and the methods of unmaking that were undertook to arrive at certain aspects of the show, I also draw attention to labour as a material that matters, somethings artists are drastically underpaid for despite what they bring to a community. To be honest, about eight days in, there was a part of me that wanted to retreat to my studio to paint over old works on canvas and questioned why I was working so hard for something so short lived.

For the most part happy with the installation, from a critical eco-ethical perspective there are a few things I would change upon redesigning the exhibit. By providing marker outlined suits for visitors my hope is that visitors would feel a part of the drawing and take up a variety of different prompts around the room that encourage play, self care as well as care of the space. Where this falls down is where I have encouraged people to eat bananas and and zest lemons, two fruit products that have to travel from way outside local food economies. There are also four different objects plugged in to help animate the space and keep my plants alive. We often don't think of our energy use in galleries, but just the lighting alone, left on all day regardless of visitors or not, is something to consider. I was also told that the tape I had bought for the install was contentious in that the owners of Uline are big TRUMP supporters. I haven't researched this for myself as of yet, but it provides one more example of how we need to unmake the distance between ourselves and what we are buying to become more ethical consumers and producers. If you visit the space, you will also be able to discern the number of car trips I would have needed to make to the gallery to complete the install. Working for 10 solid days, each day I would bring a new car load of "stuff" to the space as well as made many trips to thrift shops and people's homes to pick up my Facebook Marketplace purchase. As all things come to an end, there will also be all those car rides home from the gallery. I hope you will have an opportunity to visit and engage with the space before that day comes.

To read or learn more about the exhibition from outside of the region, check out the AKIMBO listing or listen in on the live artist talk on Tuesday, November 22 starting at 10 am. Link to follow.