In Conversation:

Debrief Interview by Dara Vandor

Natalie and Tamara were interviewed after the project’s completion and the final submission of their work. The interview has been condensed for length and clarity.

RULES OF PLAY:

Six artists of varying experience and background, working across diverse media, were blind paired into three teams of two. Their brief was to take either eight days each–or sixteen days per team–to collaborate, conceptualize and create work based on a theme dictated by the DEALR. The materials and time they invested were supported by the project. Their project’s progress was charted and aided along the way by the DEALR, via Zoom. What they came up with? Call it chance, call it luck, or call it art. 

DARA: Tell me about the finished works and what they signify.

NATALIE:  We decided to create a realm that is indoors. Through the video and the still images, we wanted to create a concept where playfulness and fun really expressed how the pandemic was and how we as people had to find things to do.

TAMARA: The mobile was meant to represent a childlike, soothing coping mechanism that we all had to figure out during jarring isolation. We decided to take a really brutalist style by using heavy iron because we were taking a postmodernist, ironic, surreal approach. The garden was a representation of how the lines between outdoors and indoors became blurred. We saw this ironic trend happening during the pandemic of liminal spaces being created due to the absence of hegemonic aesthetic standards from galleries. We were creating our own garden spaces indoors, we're creating our own gallery spaces, our own studio spaces in our bedrooms. In terms of the video itself, we used the temporal aspect of the objects hanging from the mobile changing throughout the video. The video started off with ambiguous objects, like hair combs and windows being taken on and off of the mobile. Later on, the objects evolved into literal body parts, hands and faces, which was meant to represent the daunting task that a lot of people were faced with during isolation of re-evaluating and rearranging parts of their identity.

DARA: And there were also still images.

NATALIE: The drawing of the organic sculpture beside it was a representation of memory from what that image was. It is about how we always talk about our past and everything that's happened prior to the pandemic.

DARA: Could you describe your style, both aesthetic and the way that you work, and then describe your partner's?

TAMARA: My style touches on a lot of traditional aspects of pottery, like traditional amphora and Greek and Asian pottery. A lot of my style is defined by the texture and the remembrance of textures from diasporic lands. I'm from Syria and the Philippines, and I take a lot of colours, textures and forms not only from the pottery there, but the architecture. It's a lot of nostalgia and remembrance. In my work, I explore a lot of themes of process versus outcome. I feel like 90% of my practice is about the process. I'm spending a lot more time learning about different ways of creating with an end goal of making a traditional-looking pot that looks like it was pulled out of the ground from like, 600 BC, but by using modern methods.

Natalie's work is super dreamy, that's what really attracted me to it. The forms that she uses are so alive. And it's ironic. I think that I try to explore a lot of irony in my work, but I have trouble doing that, because of how traditionalist I am. Working with Natalie was really fun, because she’s very playful with the way that she uses objects. That helped open my mind up a lot within my own practice, because it's so surreal.

NATALIE: It's actually funny—when I was thinking about Tamara’s work as well, that was literally my definition of it. I would see her ceramics and I would think that it was something that had been in the ground for 300 years. She has a visual way of storytelling which I find very beautiful as well. She is very chill and goes with the flow. Tamara makes things that really mean a lot to her. The whole process is what's really important to her. That's also important to me too. I'm someone who really focuses on the process and the making. I like to focus on raw materials, and I like produce and vegetation. I'm a homebody, so my home is something that is really important to me. It is filled with greenery, because I like to bring the outdoors in, and it is something that is very easily controlled. I create these organic sculptures and I make them into different sets. I like to add soundscapes to my work because I just find that music really helps with storytelling and adds that element.

DARA: Did you know each other personally or peripherally before the project began?

TAMARA: No, we didn't, not at all.

NATALIE: We were introduced because of this project. When looking through Tamara’s work, I just felt a really good connection. We had a really similar aesthetic, and I thought that we would work really well together.

TAMARA: When I first saw her work, I was really into the playful and ironic nature of it, because I personally had so much trouble doing that. My work can tend to be very stoic, and very still-life. But the way that she portrays still life and her images is so dynamic—it's still but it's not, you know, there's an element of growth and movement with objects that are both alive, organic, and not.

DARA: I was really struck by the temporality, vulnerability and fragility in both of your regular practices as well as in this collaboration. Ingrid used the term Dada-esque. What did the process look like?

NATALIE: Dada is something that I look at, and I'm inspired by it. I wanted to create something that would help with showcasing Tamara’s ceramics. I started with the organic sculpture. I wanted to see which fruit or vegetable had a connection to what we were working on. A part of our project was about memory. I knew that blueberries had a connection with memory, and when you eat them, it helps with your brain. I wanted to add that element and then create a physical object to go with it, and then have that flower on top of it. I started with sketching blueberries and strawberries. I wanted to see how it would work with the landscape of the moss. After that, I added the music which also complemented Tamara’s motion, and the way that she touched and interacted with her ceramics.

TAMARA: I thought it was really interesting that Ingrid said that it felt Dada-esque, because their whole thing was that they had an anarchist rejection of beauty and social organization. I could see how the irony of certain parts of our project resemble that, especially because we approached the exploration of this project with a very postmodernist, ironic lens, specifically in our rejection of form following function with the mobile materials. A mobile is meant to be light and airy-looking, but we used very brutalist, heavy black iron to make it. I'm glad that the temporality and the fragility came across in the video. That's exactly what we were going for, because the rearrangement of the fragments of one’s identity during the pandemic and lockdown was defined by a convergence of fragile transient experiences throughout. The video was meant to seem very chronological, a condensed moment concerned with identity, exploration, play, and creative evasion.

In terms of what the process looked like, I remember really stressing out about what exactly to make for the mobile. I think that there was a eureka moment for me when I started reading more books on post-modernism, and realized that this was exactly what I wanted. Post modernism is a deviance from modernism in that it's not really the object that is the point. It's actually the discourse, and the subjective experiences of the final project. Once I figured that out, I was like, okay, I'm just going to start making random things that come into my head. What did I really identify with during the pandemic? I brushed my hair a lot, because I had nothing else to do. So, I made a comb. I collected windows for some reason, so I made windows. I knew I wanted to make creepy faces looking back at me, and hands, because there were some dark moments in that identity exploration that I wanted to come across.

DARA: You have both mentioned irony in your work. I'm not sure that came across to me. Tell me more about that. Was that a stated goal at the beginning, that you were going to make ironic work?

TAMARA: I don't think it was a goal in the beginning to make something that looked super ironic. I think the irony on a conceptual level had to do with opposing the hegemonic aesthetic standards of galleries. We wanted to create something that looked almost installation-esque, but in my living room. There's irony in that. There was also irony in the materials that were used. Hanging heavy stone ceramics from a mobile and seeing it kind of tilt in a really precarious way looked kind of dangerous. With a lot of these ideas, the form was counterintuitive to the function, which we realized later on answered the questions that Ingrid asked us to think about.

DARA: What did a working session look like? How did things get done?

NATALIE: We did Zoom sessions with Ingrid, but we mainly relied on phone calls and texting. Because we have such a similar aesthetic, us working separately and then coming together worked perfectly. We didn't necessarily need to be working in person, and we kind of just did our own thing. During the shoot date, we placed everything together, and it went perfectly well.

DARA: On top of the challenges inherent in a project like this, you had to deal with COVID and the cycles of lockdown. What impact did the pandemic have on the process or on the concept?

TAMARA:  I think it had an influence on the entire theme of our project. Both Natalie and I have undergone a creative reconstruction during the pandemic. If lockdown didn't happen, I wouldn't even be doing pottery full time.

DARA: Were you working a 9-to-5 job before the pandemic which was taken away?

TAMARA: Exactly. I was working at a café six days a week. I dabbled with pottery, but it was very functional. I made work on the side for extra cash, like mugs and stuff, which I sold through Instagram. There was nothing childlike and fun about it, I looked at it as a trade skill. But when the pandemic hit, I created a studio out of my old bedroom, and I got a little banding wheel. I started playing a little bit with forms. Then a studio came along. I wasn't working at the time, and I just took on the studio and made it a full-time practice. During lockdown, that's when I started really playing and collaborating with different ceramicists, sculptors, painters and illustrators. That's when the real creative exploration came for me.

DARA: It seems like the pandemic was the crucible for you becoming an artist.

TAMARA: That's exactly it. I would have always been dabbling with it in some way as I always have been. Once the pandemic hit, I was like, well, now that I have time, and now that I have a studio, let me try to stop being so escapist about things and just really dive into this and see what happens.

DARA: What about you, Natalie? What impact did the pandemic have?

NATALIE: I was in my last year of school when it hit. I was doing photography–mainly fashion and portrait–and working closely with people. I was also into plants, but I never was into the whole plant community or purchasing plants for my home. When the pandemic happened, a lot of people who graduated had this identity crisis, because we didn't have the resources that we had when we were in school, or that we would have had when we graduated. I began to think of ways that I could keep myself busy, so I decided to photograph more still lifes. That's when my obsession with vegetation came in, buying one plant and then buying like 30, and just being engulfed in so much greenery. I wanted to showcase what I created in my home and bring that into my work by doing these still lifes and then creating these sculptures that were made out of raw materials. I wouldn't have even thought of using vegetation from outdoors and bringing it into my work.

DARA: I don't want to diminish the effects of the pandemic, but in a way, there was a silver lining for both of you during this period.

NATALIE: Yeah, exactly. I feel like all artists had to find some way to support ourselves, mentally as well. Because it was always a waiting game. You didn't really know where the end was. We all had to really force ourselves to change the way that we saw our art before the pandemic and change it into a pandemic-friendly environment.

TAMARA: Nourishing our sanctuaries became a huge theme.

DARA: Ingrid mentioned that she had no idea that you were both musical before she paired you. Can you tell me about your musical influences? Were there shared reference points or overlap?

NATALIE: When we came together to do the shoot, we found out that we had the same taste in environmental music, and that type of genre.

TAMARA: I remember freaking out when Natalie sent me the music that she made before we met up. I remember calling her and texting her being like, this is the coolest thing I've ever heard. When she actually played it in the space when everything was set up, everything just came to life. I remember pulling up references like this Roberto Musci track called “Nexus on the Beach,” Tim Hecker, Gigi Masin, Harold Budd. I would literally listen to Natalie's music in the same playlist as all of those other people. So yeah, there were intersections there for sure. I was really surprised.

NATALIE: I love ambient music. I'm not someone who's great with words, so I like to add music to my work so that it brings a sort of vibe.

DARA: I love that you found someone who clicks with your interests on two levels. The visual and the musical.

NATALIE: We were going back and forth sharing references, and I just loved every reference that Tamara was showing me. It was just so weird; it was as if she was my twin.

DARA: What did you learn from each other while working on this project?

TAMARA: I learned about patience and attention to detail from Natalie. Even just watching her setup in the space, watching the intricacy and focus that she was taking to make these tiny, fragile blueberry sculptures. The care that she put into setting up the moss and then repackaging it to use it for next time. She was very nurturing with her materials. Clay is something that you don't really think about being very precious because there's loads of it all over the studio, but watching the way Natalie treated her materials like they were very much alive taught me a lot too. I started doing the same thing with my clay, treating it in a more precious way. I began saving nice clay, putting it aside for products I might use in the future because I learned about caring about it. The patience that Natalie had in conceptualizing the project was also important. It was a big learning experience for me to watch her cycle through different ideas instead of just running with the first thought right away.

NATALIE: I learned from Tamara that confidence is number one. As someone who's still emerging, it's really refreshing to see how okay she is with who she is. I also learned how eloquent she is with her knowledge and art. She creates objects that are made today, but they look so ancient and beautiful. I would not be able to make that myself, and I don't know very many artists that do that. It makes me inspired and motivated to create work that has more meaning and more depth.

DARA: I was curious about whether it was a conscious choice to have only one of you in front of the camera for a collaborative team project.

NATALIE: I'm someone who is always behind the scenes. Tamara is really great with expressing her work—her and her work are really one and the same. I thought that she would be perfect as the model for this type of installation, because she's so confident in the way that she works and how she interacts with her pieces. I didn't think of anyone else but her.

TAMARA: I realized that it was a natural gravitation towards having me in the video. In looking at my portfolio on my Instagram feed, you can see the number of photos I have holding my work. I really like the idea of interacting with ceramics as functional objects. I see them as extensions of myself. Natalie and I had a really short conversation about the video, and I was like, hey, Natalie, do you want to be in it? And she was just like, nah.

DARA: In watching the video, I was struck by how intimate and tender yet playful the work was. Words like play and fun are used so often when we talk about creativity and making, but rarely in more formal contexts when we talk about work that is complete. Can you talk about fun when it comes to your work and in the larger scheme of art?

TAMARA: I thought a lot about bringing back the postmodernist approach and the absence of hegemonic institutionalized value systems of aesthetic and beauty and art. I think the reason that fun has become kind of a dirty word in the studio is because studio time has been really romanticized as this research-backed sacred thing. But you can't do it any other way by these hegemonic gallery institutions, or even the gallery mindset that people have. Play and creativity are huge parts of even the biggest gallery names, and nobody really talks about that. I think that for us personally, the conceptual part was really fun. To deviate from making traditional, ancient-looking things to making trinket-like things was actually really fun. I had that epiphany that I was just going to make whatever comes to mind, even if it's ironic, even if it doesn't necessarily make sense, because it provides some sort of discourse at the end of the day, which is what we're trying to do. The fun was a very serious thing in the way that we spoke to each other and navigated how we would come together.

NATALIE: Without that, we wouldn't have been able to have the end result that we needed. You need to be able to just do whatever you want, just do things that feel right, and have fun with it. Even if it's something that's really rough. I always have that aspect of fun in my work, because I think it's really intriguing. It's something that as a viewer makes you more inspired. As a creator, it makes you want to make more and have that kind of happy, happy aesthetic and happy space to make more fun things. Playfulness and fun can be serious, and it can be very beautiful and elegant.

DARA: As with most creative endeavours, there's often a large deviation from original idea to finished product. Was there something you envisioned that didn't happen or something that materialized that you didn't expect?

NATALIE: I wanted to make more of the organic sculptures and have the single still shots like we did with the ceramics. But when we were shooting, I didn’t think that they would fit in well with the other aspects. With the video, I didn't expect the finished product to look like that. I thought it was really interesting when everything was put together and all the scenes related to each other. It looked like she was moving from scene to scene, really going with the flow. I had this vision, but then it was practically the same.

TAMARA: I think we had like a loose idea of how everything would look. In person, it really came alive. Seeing the set, I didn't think it would translate through the camera the way it did. I had a whole different idea. When Natalie actually sent the final video through, it really did look surreal and way dreamier than I thought it would, which I'm really happy about.

NATALIE: When I was editing the original, my idea was to show a singular frame with Tamara going in and out. But when I saw all of the different clips, they related so well to each other, so I separated them into three different frames. I thought it was really great.

DARA: Was the project successful?

TAMARA: I think the project was totally successful. I think that we really got across the idea that meaning and function are now contingent in a post-pandemic lens of creating. I know that we had a lot of discussions about that and struggled with trying to figure out exactly what our stance was on the idea of form following function. I think that we really did create the discourse, at least. Not necessarily something that was so concretely delivered in a visual way, but it did create a discourse of play and function not following form. Having agency over identity. Conveying fragmented experiences over objective principles. It was all very surreal, but concise.

NATALIE: Yeah, same. It may not be something that is really literate, but everything in the project had a meaning. I feel like it was extremely successful. It was a project that I've never done before. Being partnered with an artist that I never would have thought I could partner with.