Frame 61October 24, 2019

Cecile Johnson Soliz

Frame 61October 24, 2019

“I’ve always been interested in the interrelationships between categories of things, like, art, design and craft, or ceramics and sculpture, or the pictorial and three-dimensional.”

Interview by: Isabel Sachs

Could you give us some insight on how you start a new project? Do they always start from a form of drawing?

With projects and new work, how they start is not so clearly defined at first. It’s more like working hard and things become clear over time. Many experiences contribute to what happens in the studio and in projects, although I might not be conscious of these at first. It makes the creative activity mysterious and surprising. Have you ever felt like you started something before you knew it? I have, and it takes all kinds of forms from drawing to photography, making things in the studio, imagining, writing, talking…

I draw all the time in a small sketchbook I carry around. I draw in the studio too. I draw sculptural thoughts and thoughts for larger drawings. I like the idea that drawing is thinking visually. Thinking visually in this way is different from thinking day-to-day. The sketchbooks contain many thoughts and sometimes designs for things like workwear, furniture, objects and tools. Over time, drawing enables me to gain clarity and perspective.

In a studio day I make lots of things. Each process, the making of things and the drawing, informs the other. I make a lot and throw a lot away. I also reuse materials once works have been shown and I make instructions for works that I treat in this way, so they have a life.

Alongside working in the studio, sometimes I’m asked to do a ‘project’, or, sometimes I initiate one myself. This can give me a chance to do something I’ve always wanted to do and work with others like at Red Bank Manufacturers on ‘Skyline’. Both strands of working are equally exciting for me and each informs the other.

Could you tell us a bit about yourself and your background? Where did you study?

I was born in Germany and grew up in a small cattle farming town, Merced, in the San Joaquin Valley in California. I am American and from the age of 12 grew up in a number of countries: Mexico, Bolivia, Brazil, Italy and then Wales and London. Art was a big part of our lives and valued in our home. My mother was an American immigrant of Bolivian heritage, also an artist. She taught my three brothers and I to draw from an early age.

When 17, I lived in Rome opposite the Campo di Fiori and went to High School. I wandered the streets after school and drew everything. Later that year I lived with two British artists who told me about art schools in the UK. I wanted to stay in Europe and study art so enrolled onto a Foundation Course at Cardiff College of Art. My first art tutors in Wales were brilliant. I went onto Goldsmiths for a B.A. and later, M.A. Fine Art. I was put in the ‘backfields’, an area designed for students open to experimentation and new ways of working. We were taken seriously from the beginning and in return asked to be thoughtful, original, to be informed and work hard. I especially liked the diversity of artists we met and the intense culture amongst art students of all years, living and working together in a city that was thrilling.

*Twist, Oriel Davies Gallery 2018-2019. Photo credit: Dewi Tannat Lloyd*

A lot of work is incredibly architectural, almost industrial, such as SKYLINE. How did this series come about?

Skyline came about from a project I initiated in 1999 that was supported by the Cardiff Bay Art Trust and Red Bank Manufacturers. I designed and made over 100 pots in the ‘Specials Department’, a huge aircraft hangar-sized workshop at Red Bank where ‘clay-workers’ made ‘Specials Pots’. Working with this small group of men was an eye-opener for me. Each object they made had a time limit on it, their own stamp (a letter or number) to trace the object back to them and they worked in a team. If they could find a way to minimize their manual labour, it was an asset. They liked making things well and were part of a tradition with special skills. It was a way of life. ‘At 14, it was down the mine or make chimney pots’, they told me. We would banter endlessly propped on our worktops about the similarities and differences between art, craft and design. ‘If I’m an artist, what are you?’, I asked them one day. Craftsmen, architectural ceramicists, ceramicists were all rejected. ‘We’re Clay Workers’, they told me. And what I was doing…making a sculpture? A chimney pot? If it’s functional can it still be a sculpture? If it’s a sculpture can they touch it? How will it be seen from ground level? One day, Pete crossed the huge space of the workshop, propped himself on my workbench and said, ‘What you are doing is making a sculpture that looks like a chimney pot and that will be used for an umbrella stand’. Discussion over. Working on such a large scale with clay workers over a long period of time was inspiring in so many ways and a great education. I will not forget the intelligence they had in their hands. I enjoy working with others who have ideas and skills that challenge and stretch my own.

Working in industry setting can do that, and the scale is terrific. When I was walking the streets of Rome and drawing it gave me an appreciation of sculpture and its’ potential within architecture and city spaces. Ironically, I had never seen the chimney pots of Venice until I’d made my own at Red Bank.

I still think of the Skyline pots as being a little like still lives, except larger in scale. Much of my earlier work was like drawing in 3D with clay. I was initially painting still lives and I found making them more interesting, so I did. Working larger allows me to use space and time in architectural environments in a way I am intrigued by – real, actual space around and in between things, in time. Isn’t that what sculpture is?

What would be the best way to visualize it all in its entirety, as the audience?

A public sculpture can be placed anywhere, even better if it’s discovered as one turns one’s head or looks up at the sky, I think. I guess the best way to see Skyline pots is functioning on roofs and in exhibiting spaces. In Cardiff, we showed them in three places simultaneously: on rooftops functioning, in Cardiff’s Central Market high up and at the National Museum and Gallery of Wales, in my show, ‘Regarding the Function of Objects’. There, we showed a row of tall pots that could be looked at and experienced close up. Unlike on rooftops, they appeared more like artefacts: remote, non-functional, and curiously akin to the early Roman clay pipes in the National’s collection. During that show I was invited to raid the storerooms in the basement. I amassed tools from throughout history and arranged them in a large glass cabinet with my own at the entrance to my show. Years later, when Skyline pots were shown at the Bay Art Gallery, I exhibited the tools I designed to make them alongside the pots. The tools show the iconography of the spirals and are beautiful objects in themselves, like many tools are.

I wonder if people can still order the chimney pots from Red Bank (now called, Forterra). I like the idea that anyone could choose and arrange their own pots on their rooftop when installing them.

At Red Bank, I enjoyed seeing the pots accumulate in the aircraft-hanger workshop during various stages of drying, some wrapped up and others waiting to be put on a pallet for the kiln. I think seeing them close up is curiously wonderful, because you’re all the while imagining them far away while standing in front of them. The spirals create patterns that are decorative profiles with iconography taken from buildings such as stairs, the shape of a house, corners, cornices and other things. Although decorative, the spirals are also functional, guiding wind up and rain down.

*Cecile Johnson Soliz: Regarding the Function of Objects*

*Skyline, Red Bank, Specials Dept, 1999*

*Women's Workwear Prototypes, Bay Art Gallery, 2011*

You have spoken about tour practice and particularly to the importance of drawing and its relationship to sculpture....

Probably all my work is drawing. I draw on flat paper with charcoal in large and small drawings. Sometimes I sew drawings together. These days I draw with materials in a physical way - wrapping, rolling, scrunching up, squishing, twisting, gathering…physical gestures and actions that become objects – sometimes it is unclear what the object is – a drawing or a sculpture or a hybrid. I like that words don’t always satisfy what’s been made, or, that the object questions our definitions and categories of things.

I’ve always been interested in the interrelationships between categories of things, like, art, design and craft, or ceramics and sculpture, or the pictorial and three-dimensional. Recently, like in TWIST at the Oriel Davies Gallery, I made conversations between flat drawings and sculptural objects – things that belong together and are one work with numerous elements. I’m interested in the relationship between looking at a picture and experiencing a sculpture – how one can inform the other - enrich, challenge or undermine it... Pictorial space and real space are so different. How does time exist in each? What kind of experience does each offer the process of looking, the process of experiencing? What happens when one circles a sculpture while seeing a large drawing out of the corner of one’s eye? What happens when a flat drawing becomes sculptural, is filled with air and light?

I’m fascinated by all these things.

Are there any artists that currently inspire you?

At this year’s Venice Biennale, I was moved to see ‘Family Album’, by Alban Muja for the Republic of Kosovo. It’s an extraordinary and important work. Also, I enjoyed discovering the work of Ulrike Mueller - beautiful small enamel paintings on steel and woven textiles and the amazing, large-scale paintings on paper by Njideka Akunyili Crosby. I was completely enamoured by the Ghanaian Pavilion which was incredible. I am inspired by a range contemporary, modern and historical artists, craftspeople and designers. One of the most enjoyable things about being an artist is seeing so much art over years and discovering new and old artists all the time.

Others I am inspired by are people who are not credited or known for their work such as in the great nave ceiling at St David's Cathedral in West Wales. Sometimes artists are known locally but not internationally and some work in groups or collectives. I love the work of the coffin makers of Ghana and the sign painters and textile artists of Bolivia and Ghana for example. There are so many examples of beautiful things being designed and made by collectives to sustain local communities. It’s really inspiring.

How much have your surroundings influenced the forms you are drawn to, considering your international upbringing but having settled (for the time being) in Wales?

Since an early age I’ve been very inspired by travel, languages, people and things they make. This began when travelling from Merced to San Miguel de Allende in Guanajuato where I would live for a year with my family at age 12. Crossing the Mexican border at Tijuana, I saw numerous large sign boards, rows of them lined up to greet newcomers into Mexico. It was curious to not be able to read them but to be able to understand the pictures.

With objects and made things, seeing and experiencing them first-hand is different to seeing them in museums, galleries and collections. I like this directness and movement around things in the environment where they are made and used.

Experiences like, visiting the geometrically painted mud compounds in the Navrongo region of northern Ghana and seeing the colourful, geometric patterns on compounds designed and painted by local women; travelling to the Tarabuco market in Bolivia to see the traditional textiles and clothing worn for centuries by men and women who walk for hours on mountain paths to get to their Sunday meeting and talking-place; spellbound by seeing a donkey painted like a zebra on a street corner in Tijuana, with bat-man pinatas hung on a tree nearby; admiring signs painted directly onto walls to advertise wares and services: tires, machinery, tools throughout Bolivia. Similarly, in Ghana, hairstyles for men and women are hand-painted on boards and large-scale road signs, also hand done, celebrated the joys of sanitary pads, tractors or eating rabbit. In the Makola Market, well dressed typists sat in front of old-fashioned typewriters on tables waiting for work – legal or personal letter writing services were available. In Sucre I had my photograph taken by standing still while the photographer used a wall-papered, hand-made box with a bottle cap for a lens cap and a man’s suit jacket sleeve to take and develop my image there and then. In the UK, we eat fish and chips straight out of newsprint paper, still. At Red Bank Manufacturers, tools were gold dust. If borrowed, one could bank on a Mars Bar left in exchange on your work top. Tools were collected, talked about, invented, adapted - kitchen knives went missing from kitchen drawers at home…if they fit the job. Seeing clay workers have respect for some tools and a disregard for others was, for me, gave me the permission to disregard the authority of manufactured things. If it didn’t suit, turn it into what does. This is what happens all over Latin America and so many other parts of the world.

How do you go about naming your work?

Sometimes it doesn’t make sense to me to give an artwork a name, but I do see the need to be able to identify it, especially in writing. In TWIST, my recent show at the Oriel Davies, I didn’t have any titles or labels in the show. There were no words anywhere (except on the comments board). The experience was so different. I thought it was a better for this.

I like to keep things simple. Some titles come easy and some really do not. Sometimes I think the right word is there, I just can’t see it yet…and on the whole I like to call things like they are, because if there’s more to it, will be visible anyway.

Titling is akin to the question of lighting for me. I like having no lights…or natural light, but I also know that lighting adds a completely different experience to the work – makes it more theatrical, which can also be great. At the Oriel Davies, this was really noticeable, and I fluctuated between wanting lights off…and on. Given the right environment, it’d be wonderful to do a show with no lights.

Is there anything new and exciting in the pipeline you would like to tell us about?

I’m working with dancers in Cardiff for the Contemporary Dance Festival 2019. We’re doing a short, experimental piece at the opening of the festival, ‘Exploratory Dances for Drawings and Sculpture’. It opens on November the 8that Chapter Arts Centre.

cecilejohnsonsoliz.net

@cecilejohnsonsoliz

All images are courtesy of the artist
Publish date: 24/10/19

Frame 61