As the new Executive Director at Contemporary Craft, I’m setting out on a mission to connect our circle of staff, board, patrons, and artists more closely. The field of craft is built on and strengthened by community, and I would love to be of service in making sure that we’re all going beneath the surface, to get to know one another. One of the ways that I’ll be moving toward this goal is by writing a regular series of blogs. Some of them will focus on individual artist practice, projects from collectives, or the lineage of makers within a certain craft media.
During my previous time at Contemporary Craft, I managed the studio and education programs. One of the experiences that I distinctly recall is when Julia Harrison came to Pittsburgh. For those of you familiar with her work, what might immediately come to mind is her series of carved mouth brooches. They are immaculately hand-worked to convey such expression and detail, it’s no wonder why many of us are able to quickly recall them. During Julia’s prior visit to Contemporary Craft, I was lucky enough to take her workshop Jewelry that Grows on Trees, where I learned to seamlessly inlay metal into wood, which was a game changer for me!
So, to kick off this blog endeavor, I decided to revisit my acquaintance with Julia and bring everyone up to speed with where she’s at today…
RR: Most people recognize your name in association with the series of carved mouth brooches that you did – can we start by talking about that body of work, and at what point in your practice that was your focus?
JH: The fact that people know me for that work is a blessing and a curse. I started doing it when I was in graduate school, so I probably made my first mouth pieces in 2003. They come from a lot of different things, which is one of the reasons that I got so into it that work. It was a spider at the center of a very big web. It pulled together my interests in a lot of different things, and it was also a way of learning things that I wanted to learn. By doing the different mouths over and over again, I was learning about economy of expression – not overdoing it – and finding out what are the details that will let someone read emotion from a chunk of wood. The work also talked about the feelings and personal ideas that I was putting into it.
My work is very unpublished, so part of why people have seen those brooches is because that’s been the body of my work that’s been most shared. Also, I think it’s recognizable because of the expression in the work, most people have been able to find something within it to connect with.
That work did not sell particularly well, so it’s interesting when people recognize me from that work. They tend to ask why I don’t make more of it – they’re equating that because they’ve seen so much it over and over, it must have been commercially successful. For artists just starting out, it’s important to recognize that seeing a lot of something doesn’t necessarily mean it’s monetarily successful.
RR: That starts to get at a larger discussion in general; an aesthetic vs functional aspect to some degree and then production jewelry vs art jewelry, or exhibition vs retail.
Right, and to say the mouth brooches haven’t been commercially successful is probably reductive, because they’ve gotten me exposure and they’ve probably gotten me invitations to teach classes or show other things, so they’re part of the larger ecosystem of my career, just not a money spinner. But luckily that’s not why I was making them. I work in a lot of different techniques and media, and what I’ve discovered is that the difference between the things that I fabricate and the things that I carve is that when I want to make things to have or just exist I fabricate, and then I carve the things that I need to think about. That is because the things that I carve are incredibly laborious and time intensive, but the reason that it works when it does is because I had all of that time and effort to work through the ideas. When I’m carving something, the amount of time spent passing my hands over the object that I’m carving compared to if I were making it in clay or wax or even metal-that passing of my hand until the surface changes is proportionally so much more of an investment in time.
RR: Sure, and in this particular instance it speaks to the intimacy of that particular work. You spent so much time personally becoming one with the work, and that became apparent with each individual piece. Beyond the mouth pieces and jewelry in general, this is maybe a good transition into a larger discussion – is carving your primary practice? Or maybe more so, because I know you’re doing some work in other media, do you feel that you’re selecting your materials based on the individual concepts, or do you have a primary media?
JH: I have two different dynamics that I work with. One of them is carving, working reductively or subtractive, and that is a core part of how I do things. But more so it’s a core part of who I am, so it’s something that I do at least a little bit of everyday. And I’m often thinking about carving when I see different materials, such as stone. So, it’s not necessarily about the individual material but more about its relevance to my everyday life.
When I wrote my application for coming to Penland, that was a lot of my focus, the role carving plays for me. I’ve been working as an arts administrator for the past five years, and have gotten out of the habit. Not only was I not doing something, I was also not being something. When I’m not carving, I’m also not really being my real self. All of the best parts of me are somehow tutored or strengthened by my carving practice. It makes me approach the world with more of a sense of abundance; it makes me have more patience of myself and others; and appreciate transitions more than beginnings and ends.
With that as my core, I always have these fireworks going off in other directions. I don’t think it’s about being unfaithful to carving, but it’s about balancing things out, even physically. If I was always carving, I’d be a hunched gnome. From there I’ve been experimenting with caning and weaving, as well as building some furniture from scraps. And a couple of years ago I started to do public art projects. Right now, I’m up to my eyeballs in my second public art project. Formally it has absolutely nothing to do with my core practice, but emotionally and creatively they balance each other out and feed each other.
The project that I’m working on right now will be an interior piece that will go into a senior center in Seattle. In total it’s about 80 ft long and will be about 6 ft tall. Similar to the mouth brooches, this work gives me a web to bring in all off these different things. It brings in all of these people and community. It’s in a neighborhood that was Seattle’s classically gay neighborhood so that’s still a part of the user base, including a gay volleyball league that talked to me a lot about their coming out process. There’s also a Korean group that gets together for meals and dancing, and traditional Day of the Dead celebrations, along with gift giving for low income families during the holidays or showers for those who don’t have homes. So, part of the project is to show all of those things and how they become part of this larger fabric of the community center.
RR: It’s funny because when we set up this time to talk and you mentioned having a public art project going on, I thought to myself that our connection at this time couldn’t have been more intuitive, having just come from working in the public realm for the past five years. The discussion that I’m currently enjoying is around the transference that craft has into the public art sector, and I would argue that is a space where craft is predominate, because of the materiality– the wood, metal, clay, glass – those things that are obviously associated with our field. But I’ve found that for so many public artists, it’s initially a stretch for them to consider themselves craft artists, however once you start talking about the materiality and the processes and the love of those two things people start to say, “Ok, yeah, that equates.” So, I was intrigued to hear that you’re moving into the public realm, and curious to hear what you think about the idea of more craft artists intentionally engaging in public art rather than just exhibition or production work. Do you personally separate the two?
JH: I’ve had to separate the two for now, but I hope that I can get to the point where I can think of public art as being my work. But the thing that I liken it to most closely are those times in middle school where you had to do a group project. You always had to compromise with somebody else. Therefore, it doesn’t yet feel entirely like it’s my work or my process. So when I talk to people about it I call it public art, but in my own head I refer it to as a public project, and that’s helped me to not expect it to feel the same as my own creative process and to appreciate it for what it actually is opposed to what it isn’t. I do think that what you’re saying about craft is true. When I started applying for these public art projects, I’d talk about how my practice as a jewelry artist is great training for this. Because as a jewelry artist you’re having to make things in a very sensitive and thoughtful way, engineered to exacting specifications. If you’re making a ring that someone is going to wear for the rest of their life, you have to be able to think about what can go wrong, to make sure that it doesn’t to the best of your abilities. When people poo-poo jewelry as the “tiny shiny” field, they’re not understanding and respecting the amount of technique and engineering that goes into making jewelry successful. I am confident that is one of the assets that makes me successful in these public jobs. If I can figure out how to make a brooch stick to someone that is running for a bus, then I can figure out how to stick something on a wall where nothing is moving. It’s a different scale, but the challenge is not that different.
RR: The comparison to some degree, as you say, is different than your craft process. But I’d respectfully say that it’s not entirely different, because even with jewelry, it’s created for the wearer or the consumer. I hate to boil it down to the word consumer, but as someone who collects art jewelry, I’d say that even in that form, you’re making jewelry that someone is going to respond to enough to want to collect.
JH: Right, and someone who is dented by criticism, that’s been the challenge with working in the public art environment.
The key to a successful vs an unsuccessful public project in my mind is not so much the artist but rather comes down to the community partner, because the artist has to have people who are willing to give them the liberty to create – the community partner has to be willing to say “we hired you because we trust your aesthetic, instinct, and what you’re going to bring to this, so we’re going to give you this space to get to know us and respond to that – but we’re not going to dictate that response.”
RR: Lastly, and to shift gears a bit, I want to ask you about the door knockers. When I reached back out to you, I wasn’t initially aware of this connection to our current exhibition…Food Justice: Growing A Healthier Community Through Art. One of my approaches to the social justice themed exhibitions moving forward is that we take on an activist approach to whatever we’re exploring through the art – essentially maintaining a willingness to literally be part of the solution – that way we’re promoting both dialogue and action. I can draw some obvious assumptions about the fruit and the hand, but I’d rather hear from you directly what inspired you to make that work.
JH: The strict inspiration for those are the hand knockers that I started seeing over the past five years. In my prior job I started a study abroad program where we would take students to Mexico and we would study with Master Jewelers there. I’m really an easy touch for anything that has hand imagery in it, and so when I started seeing all of the hand door knockers I started photographing and sketching them, which I realize the fondness for these isn’t something new, there are images all over of them. But what I try to convey to my students is that why you like something pales in comparison to the reasons why you like it, so having an affinity for something shouldn’t stop there, you should dig in and find out why. Otherwise it’s just superficial. So, I started thinking about the hands and what sometimes looks like just a sphere, it’s thought to represent a piece of fruit and they started to get more and more interesting and have more and more conceptual connections to what was happening in the world. For one, our relationship with our closest neighbor, Mexico, was very fraught. So, this idea of a knocker was something on the barrier between two people – marking the outside and the inside, but giving people a way of communicating beyond the thing and also how people communicate through food. And then of course living in Washington State, which is a state that has been enormously shaped by those who have come there to work in the food industry and specifically the fruit picking industry, that state wouldn’t be what it is today if it hadn’t been for everyone doing that work. But during the pandemic, I’ve been thinking about the people who are out there doing the fruit harvesting and all the while during the fires, with very little protection from either – the virus or the smoke. There was all of this churning for me about the food insecurity and for me struggling to articulate things, I often tend to find something in Japanese culture that manages to sums up or articulate things in a way that I never could. So, in this instance, a way of saying grace it translates to, “I receive,” or you are acknowledging that you’re the current link in a very long chain. So, for everything that comes to your table, your mouth, your stomach – it has come through so many hands. From the person who planted it, harvested it, canned it, stacked it at the grocer, cooked it, etc. There are so many people that fed you. And by taking the moment to pause, you’re paying respect to all of those people. So those pieces when I started to make them, I started to think about how they were a way of me saying, “I receive,” through my work. During the pandemic I’ve been fascinated to see how many artists have responded to need in very sensitive and relevant ways, so I decided this was going to be one of my ways. So, when I sell those, each quarter I set aside a minimum amount of sales from those pieces and then bump it up to whatever the next donation level would be and then make contributions to organizations that support food workers or food sovereignty. Then for the people who buy these pieces and wear them, jewelry is a great reminder of things you love and believe in so to have a pendant that is not only aesthetic but also has a reminder of what’s important to you, it’s also an opportunity to talk to people about things you believe in when you’re wearing it. This allows me to put into service something where I’m not giving, I’m just participating in the cycle.
A huge thank you goes to Julia for being willing to dive into this blog project with me, especially considering that she is currently in the midst of a multi-year residency at Penland! If your interest is piqued about her process, keep your eyes posted to our Studio site, we’re hoping to host Julia again to lead a workshop this spring.
I hope you’ll meet me back here for the next post!
Rachel