Strawberry Moon Roundtable

Staged across two floors of a former dairy factory in upstate New York, the Strawberry Moon exhibition was a reunion for artists Christy Gast, Fabienne Lasserre, Halsey Rodman, and Molly Smith, along with curators Laura Kleger and Justin Schwarz, who all met at Columbia University's MFA program more than two decades ago. Friday Arts convened the artists to reflect on the work and themes in the exhibition, which presented more than forty works ranging from intimate watercolors to large-scale sculpture.

Friday Arts

Named the Strawberry Moon by the Algonquian tribes of New England to mark the wild strawberry harvest, the first full moon in June signals abundance, potential, and transformation. How do these themes, and nature’s cycles more broadly, factor in your work?

Molly Smith

I'm immersed in these themes at this time of year as my family plants crops and tends wild and perennial plants to grow and harvest our food. I want to capture what is around me in my paintings, capturing the ordinary beauty of moments in nature and the transformation of my surroundings. When working from the landscape, these ideas are always present in a subject that is living and growing and therefore changing. That's what makes nature in the rural surroundings where I live such a rich subject that I can return to again and again. It's still a thrill to have worthy subjects anywhere I look.

You’re currently working almost exclusively in watercolor. Why that medium?

Molly Smith

I mostly use liquid watercolors and inks and I love working with these fluid mediums. It's so direct and accessible and the colors can be so pure and vibrant. I think a lot about how water is a part of everything in the landscape—the snow, the trees, the lakes—and using water to move my pigment around makes so much sense. Also, when I go out in the world to paint, I need so little, I can even use the water from the nearby stream to mix and dilute my pigment!

Halsey, your work calls attention to micro-transitions around us that are not always perceptible, but also rhythms of time beyond the human ones. Can you define the idea of plant time? And geologic time?

Halsey Rodman

Everything is changing and every scale of time is present in everything all the time and we are made from ancient matter! There is nothing new in this world but our lives are very short so we attach ourselves to the observable scales of time and we make too much of them. Plant time is very slow from a human time perspective: it is usually difficult to observe a plant undergoing change (of course there are exceptions) but day to day and year to year the plants grow and become different.

Paying attention to plant time is a way to see out of my own discontinuity, that glittering cloud of emotions and goals and quotidian activity that I refer to as myself. I see plant time as the very beginning of a glimpse into geologic time, a way to think outside of my way of being in time. I am calmed by the thought of trees growing in a forest and through this I can just barely begin to imagine what a thousand years means.

Fabienne, you’ve long explored the idea of bodies in your work, moving from figurative to abstraction. Can you speak about the return to figurative in these ceramic forms?

Fabienne Lasserre
My pieces always hint at the body through tactile qualities and forms. They also always imply and depend on moving bodies looking through, walking around, or peering over them. They seem made to frame, enclose or embrace a human body and to incorporate its movement and gaze, especially when installed together as a group. This act of surrounding a body really interests me.

Recently I started to create body parts—hands, feet, arms—with ceramics out of a desire to interrupt my abstract vocabulary. What will happen if my abstract language, rooted in the experiential and the phenomenonal, has to co-exist with figuration, with narrative and symbol? Will it work and more interestingly, how?

How did ceramics emerge as a new medium in your work?

Fabienne Lasserre

I am a very happy participant of Ceramics Club, an informal and fluid group of artists and friends who are not ceramicists, founded in 2007 by Pam Lins and Trisha Baga. We meet and make ceramics together, with no particular end in mind. Pieces and jokes crack from all sides. It’s a respite from the pressures of professionalism, mastery and generally having your shit together. My daughter Lou (age 11) is also an enthusiastic member and keeps me on my toes. I got hooked fairly rapidly and started incorporating the ceramic pieces in my work.

Christy, tell us about the interplay of sculpture and garment construction in your work.

Christy Gast

What interests me is that textiles are never truly flat. Even a piece of cloth contains the memory of twisting, weaving, folding, and draping. I think of my sculptures as extensions of those operations, taking structures that were designed to move around a body and allowing them to develop their own logic and presence in space.

What are the origins of the Möbius loop of entwined bodies in Smile and Four Button Fly? In the latter, can you talk about the Mobile Tinctorium and direct printing of foraged plants?

Christy Gast

Drawing is often where I work through structural ideas. I've long been interested in knots, braids, loops, and other forms that fold back on themselves and generate complex relationships from simple rules. Smile grew out of that interest. By linking four pairs of trousers together so that each shares a leg with another, I was able to build a continuous form that feels simultaneously familiar and impossible.

The Mobile Tinctorium was a systematic study of the dye chemistry present in a particular ecosystem. It was a way of putting chance operations into practice; the location determined the color palette. Four Button Fly extends that approach through direct printing with walnut tannins, iron and indigo. Although the work has shifted from felted raw wool toward cellulose fibers and sculpture, I'm still interested in creating processes that allow materials to exceed my intentions and participate in determining the final form.

You’ve been interested in depictions of textiles and garments in art history for a long time. Where did that draw come from?

Christy Gast

I grew up in a rural environment, far from museums but surrounded by people who made things with their hands. My mother was a seamstress professionally, my grandmothers made garments and quilts, and I spent a lot of time sewing and doing 4-H projects, so textiles always felt less like materials and more like a way of understanding the world. Later, when I encountered the extravagant drapery of Renaissance painting and the deep histories embedded in cloth, I realized those same questions about bodies, labor, desire, and transformation had been there all along.

Molly, your practice has elements of series or a diaristic approach. Do you draw your source material from memory, observation, or both?

Molly Smith

I paint my everyday views when I work from memory and en plein aire. I want to capture what is around me in my paintings and capture the ordinary beauty of moments in nature. I used to use a camera daily to capture the landscapes I'd paint but when I moved to a rural area I began painting the views surrounding me from life.

The memory piece is something I started decades ago, in work that was not landscape. As I'd walk through the city, I'd try to visually record something interesting I saw in my memory and see what was distilled from it when I was back in the studio. Now this practice applied to landscape is a bit different.

Path is a good example—I've been piecing it together from memory over a month. It is the path I walk daily between my homestead operations and house, and I study the way the light looks at dusk or dark, as I look at the horizon through the trees and my path might be lit by a headlamp. This piece then changes each time I come back to it with a new observation from my experience. I like the time that this practice now takes and allows.

Fabienne, tactility is an important part of your work, can you speak about the material friction with your surfaces now that you introduced ceramics?

Fabienne Lasserre

I’m always looking for ways to combine glossy, gritty, crunchy, shiny, juicy . . . I choose my materials as a complement, counterpoint, or contrast. Most of the glossy materials I use are connected to industrial or commercial realms: vinyl, resin, enamel and urethane paints. Ceramics has its own way of being extremely shiny and hard and yet also being earthy, a primordial process of fire and heat.

The colored glazes are applied to the object but they reach such high temperatures in the kiln that they vitrify and fuse with the clay in a way that makes the separation of the two irrelevant. The way color and object merge in ceramics is very unlike the way paint exists on a surface of an object or a canvas. Forcing together these different materials and surfaces, I’m also mixing their different ways of evoking meaning and of hosting questions. The pleasure and the challenge for me is to find ways to bridge those differences without cancelling them out.

Halsey, tell us about the bronze commas introduced in The List, both on a thematic level and in more formal sculptural terms.

Halsey Rodman

I’ve always worked using the logic of AND rather than OR. Not this OR this but this AND this. The comma is related to this mode, a kind of adaptable conjunction, an object that invokes iteration, listing, addition, etc.

The List combines two current flows of work: the Metronomes and the Listening Objects, using physically embodied commas to create a “set” of sequenced works. I think of this as forming a sentence of objects though it is probably more accurate to call it a list or sequence.

Both the Metronomes and Listening Objects are open-ended series, accumulating meaning through iteration along with incremental development and change. The Metronomes describe a multivalent relationship to duration, engaging both the time between moments and the accumulations of moments that compose deep time. The Listening Objects are open circuits derived from the eccentric tactile form of ears. Their glossy surfaces gather the surrounding light into channels of reflection, a transposition of sound into light. The commas are both conjunctions and the means to construct an open set, one that is reconfigurable and inherently unfinished.

You often iterate or work out conceptual themes over decades. What does it mean to have such a long-gestating practice?

Halsey Rodman

It takes a really long time to have a thought. Sometimes I’m frustrated by my slow pace, by the length of time it takes for something to arrive, but it’s not really a choice. There’s this amazing documentary about the musician Beverly Glenn-Copeland where he says “Be Ready!” That’s how I feel about a long project, it’s getting ready for something to arrive. If it was a shorter project, then the thing would be a different thing, a shorter thing but at this stage, I’m interested in the longer things.

Everything is made from instants so maybe it’s more a matter of staying with those instants, listening to the instantaneous carefully and for a very long time. There’s also something about staying with a thought over time; there are so many demands on our attention, so many reasons to constantly look away, towards the “new” thing. Even though I’m as distracted as anyone else, I want something else, something that can only arrive over time, with a kind of concentration. Staying with a project over an extended length of time is a form of concentration, a way to bundle the fast and the slow together.