Christy Gast interviewed by Bonnie Huang
B.H: I want to start off with a conversation on the work that you're doing here in the workroom Swale House.
C.G: My proposal was to do a project called Heart of Goldenrod, an evolving sculptural projected involving growing and dyeing with goldenrod, which is a native plant that offers an astounding range of colors for textile dyes--especially on wool--ranging from pale yellows to really dark greens. There's an example in one of the pieces in the room, the felt flag that is suspended from the stick in a stack of dye pots. The darker colors are derived by using iron in the dye mixture or cooking it in an iron pot. The technical term for what happens to colors when iron is introduced to the dye is “sadden,” or “saddening.”
I intended to be actually cooking dye here, but since the Parks Department doesn't allow open flames, and it takes an incredible amount of heat to make textile dyes, I shifted the focus to a more discursive workshop series. When I dye with goldenrod, the workflow is normally to use about five, dye pots made of different metals: stainless steel, cast iron, copper, aluminum, tin, and brass. If I can use an open flame and rest those pots on it, I can produce a wide range of colors using the same dyestuff. I designed some cast concrete stoves that are part of the sculptural element of the project which are highly efficient, basically small furnaces. But since the Parks Department doesn't allow open flames, and water is an issue as well on the island, as well, the project has developed towards pulling textual and textural metaphors from the dye processes and collaborating with other artists to do experimental projects that, in a more discursive way, think about those metaphors and play with them.
B.H: Could you elaborate a little bit more on maybe the different metaphors that are in specific colors that you have in mind?
C.G: The first workshop was called Felting / Feeling. We used some of the language from the wet felting process, like the term “shocking,” for example, which refers to the way the fibers are treated when they’re submerged in hot and cold water and massaged aggressively, to talk about ideas of emotion, representation, visibility, and responsibility in art. At the same time, we made some wet-felted pieces as a group. Next week with the writer Denise Milstein, we're offering a writing workshop around the idea of “mordanting,” which is the process through which a mineral molecule is introduced to the protein of the wool, which allows dye molecule to bind to the fiber and create color. The root of the word mordant has to do with biting or adding teeth. We will collect seawater from Buttermilk Channel, mordant some wool in it, and then think and write about processes of transformation. The dye color that comes out of the plants, it doesn't actually bond directly to the protein. It bonds to the mineral, without which the color transformation would not happen.
This weekend with the poet Charity Coleman, we had a program called Liberation Botany in which she performed a poetic oratory, a discourse around naming, in terms of the sort of scientific names that have been applied to plants and animals in North America.
B.H: And, I'm curious about your draw to poetry and to spoken word, and things like that. It seems like it's a large part of what you're incorporating into this project. I that you have done some performance art in the past. Could you talk a little bit about maybe what's the draw towards that for you?
C.G: In terms of performance, one of the first things that I did when I finished my undergraduate studies was to tour with the circus that was founded by a group of artists, Cloud Seeding Circus of the Performative Object. That was a formative experience for me as an artist. And in terms of poetry, at my home in upstate New York in Dutchess County, I host a poetry residency called the Sappho Room. It’s a simple room with a beautiful library of books sent by artists and writers when I first moved there, which was organized by the writer Jarrett Earnest.
The residency is about building a network, or a community, and making space for creative people to work in the house where I'm also working. I take up a lot of space as a sculptor, so I thought it would make sense to carve out a quiet space for writers, specifically queer or trans writers, a room of their own. It’s informal. There’s no application process or website. I say it’s for friends, lovers, and friends and lovers of friends and lovers. Writers come for anywhere between two and four weeks at a time and focus on their work. We eat dinner together, take walks, explore, talk about books. Having that residency in a room that's very similar to this workroom inspired me to do a more discursive project in here.
B.H: I'm curious about too, the kinds of techniques that you talked about just now that goes to the dyeing process. Did you have mentors and teachers who taught you these techniques? And also, do you approach the making process from a more traditional kind of sensibility or do you like to experiment a lot with the dyes in the work that you're doing here?
C.G: I started to do this work after I had done several projects about forests and landscapes that were more performance and film-based. I was really influenced by the writing of Donna Haraway and a book called How Forests Think by Eduardo Kohn. Rather than put the lens or the gaze on the forest or the landscape, I wanted to see how I could make work that felt more collaborative, to work with the forest. I began a long process of learning to read the forest, which meant taking walks either by myself or with other people, collecting leaves and flowers of plants that I didn't know, identifying them and beginning to understand what properties those plants have that might be, or had in the past been, used to make colors. The idea was similar in a way to John Cage's interest in mushrooms as a sort of chance operation; it was to see what I found on those walks in the forests that I was exploring in different residences that could produce colors. Through that process of dyeing wool, the plants I encountered offered a color palette that I would then use to make artworks. The forest determined the colors.
B.H: There's a lot of site-specificity that incorporated into your process. How do you look for for these environments or situations?
C.G: Mostly I end working in places through relationships that I've built in my work, or where I lived for a while, like in Utah or the Everglades in Florida. I lived in both of those places off an on. And then, based on the nature of my work, I've been invited to take part in long-term projects like Ensayos in Tierra del Fuego, which is directed by a close collaborator, Camila Marambio, who I've been working with for about 10 years.
B.H: So a lot of the work then is a response to the environment that you're living in.
C.G: In conversation with the environment that I'm living and working in, and with other people and animals and plants that are living in those places as well.
B.H: How long have you been living in Upstate New York?
C.G: Only a year.
B.H: How has living in that landscape influenced your work?
C.G: I was drawn to the region because I needed to shed the limitations of being in an urban environment and working in confined spaces. I was seeking out, already, residences that would give me an opportunity to have outdoor studio space, and I wanted to set up a permanent situation to work in that way. And I also wanted to start growing my own art supplies, which I have begun to do.
B.H: You work in a very wide range of media: video, performance, you're doing a lot of dyes, you've done soft sculptures. How do you decide on the right form for a work?
C.G: I would say that the work tells me what the form needs to be. There's a conversation between the content and the material that happens in my head or physically in the studio, until it just feels right. And I think of the exhibition space, the travel requirements, the production requirements of the work. If I have to take a sculpture to a location to make a film, then I have to make sure that I can physically do that and so that might influence the form that it takes. So it might be collapsible, might be made of a textile, that kind of thing.
B.H: Is there anything that you wouldn't use? I'm just curious.
C.G: I'm not exactly sure if there is anything I wouldn't do. I mean, I wouldn't do anything that feels unethical.
B.H: [Laughs] That's very fair. What does your research look like before and during the creation of a piece? Do you do a lot of sketching?
C.G: It looks like a lot of printouts, photographs tacked to the wall, big pieces of paper with a lot of writing and quick sketches on them. Piles of books on the table.
B.H: And working with so many collaborators, whether it's the poets or more on a scientific level, what is it like to work with others, especially people who might not be visual artists?
C.G: It's a really wonderful process because everyone's creative, right? Scientists are creative, writers are creative, curators are creative. And we hold that creativity in different ways and in different forms. In the collaborative process, we inhabit each other's worlds for a short period of time, which really sticks with you. And then there are a lot of shared Google Docs.
B.H: Do you have a specific audience in mind when you're making work? A group that you want to speak to? I'm asking because you make work in response to an environment, and I'm wondering if that's the same for audiences.
C.G: That's an interesting question because the audience that I make the work for is the people that I'm talking to; people, animals, plants in the environment that I'm thinking with. And if there's a venue like this where I'm invited to do a project, there will be a certain audience that’s drawn to the venue.
B.H: You said that your work is for the people that you're making it with, or the animals and the environment that you're making it about. How does that work?
C.G: Sometimes animals are in the audience, to be honest, like the scent pieces that have to do with the beaver.
B.H: Yeah! I really liked that. [laughs] Oh, and that makes me want to ask—I thought that work had a sense of whimsical, almost fantasy playfulness embedded in it. There was another video with a performer kind of...acting as a mermaid?
C.G: Oh yeah, uh-huh. Yeah.
B.H: I thought those are really wonderful kind of elements of your work, the playfulness in there. Is that something that you try to instill in it or does it just kind of happen?
C.G: I just think it's important to leave space for magic to happen, not to overly script the outcome of the work. And, so, things like the merperson and the beaver work can only happen when you leave the door open for the unexpected.
B.H: I was interested, too, in how a lot of these works you’re traveling and looking at places and making work through a cross-pollinated lens with environmental issues and things like that. I'm wondering how do you engage with immigration or human migration in your work?
C.G: That's a really good question. I think with a lot of the work that I do that has to do with landscape and the environment, the absence of people is really important. And that absence in a lot of cases has to do with how we understand wilderness in the United States, which I see as a manufactured emptiness resulting from settler colonialism.
B.H: Can you elaborate a little bit more on the manufacturing of wilderness?
C.G: The Wilderness Act defines the meaning of wilderness in terms of federal land. It states that wilderness is “untrammeled by man.” Untrammeled means that wildernesses are spaces that are not maintained or used by humans. That act was passed in the mid-twentieth century and reflects an understanding of those places at that time. If you go back a hundred years or more, to the westward expansion of the United States, the “untrammeled” appearance of places we refer to as wilderness are the result of military and capitalistic pressure on Indigenous people, both passive and aggressive. Disease, military and social campaigns. But in the 15th century, before colonization, forests in the Americas were managed by people for people on a very, very broad scale that is almost invisible to us today, because the scale of management was so different.
B.H: I actually read a little bit about that, in the book 1491—
C.G: Yes, I read it too.
B.H: The part that struck me was when they were talking about how the prairies as we think about them now were heavily managed with fire and—yeah I guess that really makes you reconsider what's considered wilderness especially on a governmental level. Does this shift when you're making work outside of the United States? Or like in the Americas, in general? When you make work in Europe, do you have to deal with the same kind of thought process in regards to those human-nature interactions?
C.G: Yeah, definitely. The project Vi ser på korn på Ruene (Hva skal kyrne f ores med?) that I recently did in Norway, although it was specific to one farmer and his fields in Skiptvet, also connected to global trade because this farmer was trying to make a feed mix for his cows that didn't involve soy. And the soy that was mandated by the government to be included in the feed in order to to get the right nutritional content for the dairy cows producing organic, local milk was imported from Brazil, where the Amazon is cut down so that multinational corporations can grow soy. That was a major part of the conversation we were having with the farmer and with the members of the community who came to the field to draw the plants that were being grown--the experimental mixture of grains and legumes meant to replace the imported soy. The story of a place is different in every place. But really—nothing is so local.
B.H: Everything wraps up on a more global scale, I guess. You mentioned earlier that although there aren’t always people present in your work, people are still implied in the space--kind of how we talked about people, or the lack of people, being implied in wilderness spaces. I think that's how I was interpreting the lack of people and faces in your work.
C.G: True, there aren't that many faces in my work. I’m thinking about, for example, the exhibition Inholdings, which focused on a former missile base in the Everglades. The work told the story of change in a landscape over time: deforestation, agriculture, the discourse around invasive species, ecological restoration, and the reality of the Cold War in that place, simply through the juxtaposition of images of plants that were screen printed onto the body of a life-sized replica of a Nike missile. There were clearly a lot of people involved in producing that reality: the current scientists and land managers who are trying to remove the invasive species, the people who worked on the military base, the farmers before them, indigenous people before the farmers. What I'm representing is the evidence of those stories that the plants witnessed, or are artifacts of—living artifacts of.
B.H: When you have work with all this research that goes into it, does that get presented along with the work in some way? Do you write a wall text that usually goes with it or is it pretty open?
C.G: There's usually a press release or something with a condensed version of the story, but I think that people can come into a space and encounter an artwork without the didactic text to help them understand how to think about it.
B.H: To wrap up, tell me a little bit about what's happening in the future, in regards to this space, or other projects that you have going on?
C.G: I'll have a piece in an exhibition that's organized by the River Valley Arts Collective in Catskill, New York in September. And Ensayos, the collective that I'm a part of, we're doing a collaborative project in Brisbane, in Australia at Milani Gallery, that will involve an expedition up the coast. Research and singing and scuba diving, and...
B.H: The whole shebang?
C.G: The whole shebang!