Conversation with the Artist Transcript
25 July, 2019 at Kaleidoscope Gallery, Sevenoaks, UK with Amy Zamarripa Solis and Melissa Hill, with a blessing ritual performed by Venetia Nevill.
KG: I’d like to introduce Amy Zamarripa Solis. She’s a writer, playwright and filmmaker, founder of the Latin Voices Live! Festival, co-founder of the Writing Our Legacy arts programme, playwright of the La Llarona theatre production presented at the Brighton Fringe Festival. Please won’t you welcome Amy Zamarripa Solis.
AZS: Lovely to meet all of you and thank you very much for having me. I’m really delighted to be here today with Melissa, a fellow artist and North American. Melissa Hill is a contemporary artist whose work examines displacement and economic development issues. Melissa and I did our undergraduate degrees in New York at Sarah Lawrence College, where Melissa earned her degree in Economics. She is an award-winning financial researcher, having worked on Wall Street and in the City. Please put your hands together for Melissa Hill and her inspiring work tonight.
MH: Thanks everybody. Before we get started, you’ll notice there’s a table here which was made by one of our fellow SVAF artists, Venetia Nevill who I’d like to invite to do your blessing ritual you’ve designed for us.
VN: I’m very honoured Melissa invited me to perform a blessing ritual to bring something with a spiritual dimension to this very powerful installation. I quite often feel powerless and helpless in the face of knowledge of conflict zones and the sorts of issues that are going to be discussed here tonight. One of the ways that I find can help is through intention, through getting together with other people and having a singularity of thought about something positive that one can do. That can be as simple as just making - what we’re going to make is a space with prayer flags.
What I’ve brought, is briefly, I engage with materials and I’ve related this show with materials that you find in Africa. So, I’m going to invite people to touch and do things with the objects. This is some clay, the same clay Melissa has used. We are made of clay, we have the same – you know we can unite with the people we’re going to hear about in Africa. The idea is to just touch the clay and if you feel like it maybe make an impression in it. Just make conscious contact with the possibility for change. Whatever has meaning for you, whatever resonates with you. And if you’d like you can take a feather or some cedarwood which is what they do in Africa with what they have are power figures, called N’kisi. And so you can make a mark and to have, for me, to have an open mind. To me this clay shape is like a head, and for me to have an open mind with what is happening around the world, and an open heart.
And then these are sheets of paper that have been torn off, and I’ve collected some iron in this bowl from a spring, and these are some clay pencils. So I’m just going to do one now, just to start the whole process. So I dip the pencil in the iron, which is one of the minerals mined in this area, and I make a symbol and again have the same feeling of intention for peace in the region. So I’m dipping it in this iron which came from a very special spring. The iron is about the proper use of will and protection and how we can use our will in good ways as opposed to an evil way.
Then I’m going to invite other people to make them, and then I’m going to hang them on the line here, so it’s meant to be a peace flag and I’m going to hang the first one on it.
And the then the last thing is this is a water basin, again with water from the spring. The water can be misused out in Africa. Some of the soldiers believe if they douse themselves with water that it gives them some protection. So this is like a counterbalance, so what I’d like is if people would like to wash the clay from their hands, they’re welcome to do that. In the bowl I’ve ground crystals. I’ve ground healing crystals as opposed to the copper and the iron which is mined. I’ve got more information on that if you want to ask me about that afterwards. But water carries memory and again it’s all about having our awareness open and the unity of the group together with a purpose makes a difference. It genuinely does. So I’m just going to make my own wish for peace over the water. Thank you.
AZS: Okay, now we’re going to pick Melissa’s brain so let’s go. First off, can you tell me a little bit more about why you decided to make this body of work SACRED VESSEL? As you can see, we’ve got 48 pots laid out before us in a specific way. I’m really interested to know more.
MH: So the 48 pots are to represent what I came across randomly almost was a statistic that 48 women per hour in the Democratic Republic of the Congo are sexully assaulted, many of them in the context of the civil war there. That number 48 just struck me. I was angry, upset, all the negative emotions, and as an artist we’re told when you’re upset, make art. So I said, right, I can’t let this number go. I wanted to make a piece that would convey the feeling that I have about how big a number that is, forty-eight. What 48 women might mean, and in one hour. When I started thinking that through, that nearly 1000 women per day. Investigating further, reading the stories, if you’re interested you can look online and there are agencies helping the women to tell their individual stories, I would encourage you to do so.
So I wanted to represent not literally the individuals because the number 48 is a statistic. What you’re sitting in and amongst is really an infographic, but hopefully one that is a bit more emotive than one you might see in a magazine with little stick figure people communicating what that number is.
AZS: And in particular I think the issue of women in not just in Third World countries but that plight, you know you hear these stories. I remember hearing about factory workers in Mexico in Juarez where they were being killed and going missing in like thousands. And they’re all taking the same bus to go to work in the factory and then they’d never appear or they’d find their bodies chopped up. I was reading there was a charity that was trying to find justice for the families who were looking for these women. When you’re living in the comfort of your home, you think how can we even be living in this world where people are trying to earn a living like we are but aren’t safe.
MH: Definitely so. I think that’s interesting what you’re pointing out, that women are particularly vulnerable. So rape is being used as a military tactic to clear land, okay, in a military zone which is very valuable because there is mining there. So instructing militia soldiers, or government soldiers, both, to attack specifically women and girls and to attack them through their fertility in particular is using a social taboo to military advantage. If the women survive it, they are so devastated by what has happened to them, they can either not tell anyone about it and hope it stays a secret, that’s kind of unlikely given the way rape is used in a lot of circumstances. Or, the family and the village are so embarrassed by them, they are literally considered bad luck once they’ve been violated and attacked, that they will be driven out of their villages. And that drives them into the towns, they can’t work anymore, they may lose their children, these kinds of things. So pinpointing the attention on the women will destroy the communities very rapidly, and dissipate not only the social structures but also the culture as women are the repository of a lot of that local culture. So in rural communities its very devastating.
AZS: And how does this connect to your art practice up until this point? You’re a mixed media artist, I’d say. You work in lots of different interesting areas. Can you talk a bit more about that for people who don’t know your background?
MH: Okay, I had a career for a long time as a product designer and so my approach generally, I mean a lot of artists may specialise in a medium and I wish I could do that. What I tend to do is start with an idea and then think about what materials might be appropriate for communicating that idea. For example, a previous project I did was about the Rohingya Muslims being driven out of Myanmar which is now being called a genocide. I was very upset about that, and I felt like the scale of people being driven across the border it was this repetitive occurance, so I designed a wallpaper about that. I wanted it to be really overwhelming, massive, and repetitions, repetitions, repetitions of these figures. In this one I felt, as Venetia was commenting about the use of power figures in the shamanic tradition in the region, um, female figures are a part of that tradition as well. That’s kind of where I started with the idea of this project. I thought, okay, I really like this sacred bowl as it’s already for the culture shaped like a woman and what that represents to them is, yeah, a place of healing and strength. But they don’t make clay ones. They’re wooden. And I was like, I don’t have any experience working with wood, how am I going to make 48 wooden women, how is that going to work. It was a friend who turned me to clay. She said you can work efficiently in clay, you can work in scale.
AZS: So this is your first time working in clay?
MH: Yeah, I mean, you know, since school days.
AZS: Oh, wow. It’s been really interesting watching the development of this project, seeing the pictures you’ve posted on Instagram. They all have a very visceral feeling to them, and some of them really speak to you in the way that they are all different, the way they are shaped, and the designs.
MH: Yeah, do we have any ceramicists, any real potters present? Before I say anything totally outrageous? Are real potters going to be upset with me?
AZS: It’s from your experience though…
MH: Oh yeah, of course. The way these are made, people probably remember from their primary school days making pinch pots? So these are pinch pots, just really, really big ones. They start as great big balls of clay, and I have to slam them, I don’t know what it’s called you have to compress the clay, there’s a term for that, some technical term. And then make the first indentation, probably four big indentations with my thumbs. Then after that it’s more like a punch pot than a pinch pot because you have to get the clay thin enough so that you can fire it, you can’t really fire thick clay. It’s a very physical process and quite laborious.
AZS: Also the way that you fired them. You didn’t use just a conventional kiln. You’ve got some of the pots that look more like broken pieces?
MH: Yeah, right. Originally I wanted to do it the traditional Central African way, where they put all their pots in a pit and they put loads of material in and set the whole pit on fire. And I thought, wow! This is totally what I want, this big, extravagant, dangerous thing. But you can see my first pot there, and the one behind it, The Third, there was a high casualty rate of my pots using that method because I didn’t really know what I was doing. Then my friend who is a real potter lent me a real kiln. So then I went through the first stage of conventional firing and then I go through a modified raku method where they’re taken out at 1000˚ and then I put them into a steel tub basically and put a lot of combustible material on top and then it is sealed. So you have to do that very, very quickly. That’s what gives it the black colour and also the bursts of black. That’s why each of them has pretty unique colouring and marks.
AZS: Have you thought about, you know, the Japanese are interested in that practice with the broken ceramics. I was looking up that practice where the pieces are put back together with the gold. It looks incredible. It would fit with the theme of your work. I don’t know if you want to do a second stage, but I think it’s very expensive? (Laughing)
MH: (Laughing) I did look at it, yeah. And all those things: it’s hard, and expensive, yeah.
AZS: You kind of think, oh I’ll just get a bit of gold leaf and then it’s like, wait a minute.
MH: Yeah, it turns out not so easy! (Laughs)
AZS: I really like how you’ve got the different bowls there. You’ve got sort of different states of being that are expressed. And then with the markings, you were telling me that they were symbolic as well.
MH: There’s a very ancient tradition in central Africa called scarification of the torso. Boys and girls both do it, and on through the rest of their life. The markings are meaningful in the context of the culture itself and I wanted to respect that because some of the real marks are from rituals and things like that. In my case, the markings on these pots are not intended to be copies of anything I came across in my research because I wanted to respect their religious traditions around it. They’re inspired by the practice and I did it because I wanted each pot to have it’s own individual identity. I think it also indicates a life previous to the trauma, is the other thing. It’s an important thing to remember about sexual assault. Some of you here have very possibly been touched by that in your lives, to know that there was a life before, then there was the assault, and the life continues after if the woman survives. In the context of war many of them don’t survive. So I find that an important element that hopefully people will take away and get. The individuality of a person is not their trauma, right. They are still a person with experiences and their own life and their own opinions and the trauma is not the defining aspect. But it shouldn’t be diminished either.
AZS: Thank you. One of the things I’ve been thinking a lot about…I’m from Texas in Austin, and at the moment the plight of the migrant children is really in the news. Before this I’ve been making a lot of my own work about the economic reality of people trying to come over and make a better life and what kind of life do they face when they do come over to the US. Sometimes it’s not great, but what they’ve left behind is horrendous, like a lot of people coming to this country. But the migrant children, I’ve just been broken by that because you just think what can I do? I’ve got this connection and this sense of protection but, I know with your work that was a similar response that you had. Why do you think we need to think about these issues here?
MH: Okay! Yes! Thank you for that question! So my feeling is that governments or bad guys or politicians or whatever rely on good people being complacent and feeling like what can I do. What can I do? I’m just an individual, and the bad guys, I’ll just call them the bad guys, take advantage of that, of us just trying to be good people, and be effective and do the best thing and blah blah blah. Meanwhile the bad guys just carry on with their badness. In doing this project I was definitely confronted with that. I started from a place of anger. I didn’t have anywhere to go with my anger, so I was like, I’m going to make art! I’m going to make these pots! And this has been a ten month project and I’ve had to process my anger over that time and think about what I was going to do with it. (Indicates to artist Ruth Dent) Ruth your art deals with that that evolution of emotions and, yeah, perspective on things over time. Yeah, I think the place I’m at now is my goal with this piece is to encourage people to investigate the issues in the world that resonate with you, maybe anger you, upset you, or make you think why isn’t there justice in this area. It may not be central Africa, it could be totally different, and I think that’s great. And then to investigate what assets and skills do I have to bring to try and make a difference. Like Humphrey (indicates to Humphrey Pring in the audience) with setting up Sevenoaks Welcomes Refugees, that’s a thing you can get involved with locally. Or Yasmin (indicates to Yasmin Reeves in the audience) literally going to Rwanda and sharing her professional skill set with orphans, young men there and creating an opportunity there for them. I mean, it just has to be really personal. Events like this I’m really happy tonight that people have an opportunity to connect with each other, have these maybe really challenging conversations, or heartfelt conversations with each other about your own investigations about what you want to do with the problems in the world. And then people will have ideas around that.
AZS: That’s something I think a lot about. I’ve read on Twitter “All Art is Political” and I went, I don’t think that true. I think art can be political, and maybe should be political, but it’s not. I’ve seen lots of nice, very nice art, but with no political drive behind it. Even when in my introduction it was mentioned I wrote a play for the Brighton Fringe. It’s called La Llarona, about the Mexican myth of the weeping woman who symbolises the time of the conquest and this figure who cried for Mexico. Her tears made a river and she’s forever looking for her children. I felt I wanted to bring that myth to life and make it modern because it is a modern story. This woman crying for her lost children. I thought I wanted to use theatre – I’m not a theatre maker, I’m a writer really, to make people aware of what’s going on. I worked with a director and got into playwrighting and it was a lot. It was stressful, hard work but worth it . We had seven sold-out shows at the Fringe. But at the end of it you wonder, have I made a difference? Should I have been raising money from the ticket sales to send to people? Are people really thinking? Has their consciousness really shifted? It’s a question about art.
MH: I want to talk about that, actually. So an interesting thing, and I don’t know if male artists have this issue (looks to artist James Knowles in the audience), but it feels like women artists are expected to work for free, and if they deal with difficult topics, a political issue or human rights issue, they’re expected to do it for charity even worse, so if they make anything they should give it away. I don’t think that’s totally right. I think it goes back to investigating each individual needs to make a decision how they can make a difference and not put that responsibility onto artists, performers, whatever. It cost me a lot of money to put this show together and nearly a year of my life. And we sit here and decide if it’s successful or not, and if everyone thinks it’s terrific, then I should give any money I manage to make back, over to charity. If people here want to give money to charity, please research the many agencies working with these women or in the region and give to the ones that resonate with you. That’s your responsibility. What I’ve done is tried to tell people there’s a problem, we’re all part of the problem. If you care, then here are some different directions you can take.
AZS: There’s this movement in the arts where people are trying to make space for artists who are not white. You and I have talked a lot before about what does it mean to be a white artist and to be someone making art about a culture that is not your own.
MH: Yeah, I thought a lot about that with this project and in particular around the topic of dealing with black women’s bodies which have been brutalised. That is very much a topic around racial justice circles, why are white artists, white filmmakers talking about abuse of black bodies. These stories should be told by black artists, platforms should be reserved for black artists and filmmakers. I am totally on board with that argument. So, I spoke with a number of artists of colour about my project, was a following a useful path, did I have anything useful to contribute? So I reached out to convey my discomfort about this, and should I even pursue it?
One woman I spoke to, Fatima Najm, who founded Creatives Against Poverty and works with families who have been displaced and moved to the UK, and the women don’t know what sort of opportunities this new culture has for their daughters, what kind of freedoms this society offers to them and their daughters. They had no idea, about the school system, protection laws, everything. I told her about my concern about my project and she said, “You must do this project. Rape is endemic in all of the conflict zones. Our charity says we teach resilience to the women participating in our programmes. But what we really mean is healing sexual assault.” So when you come across women entering the UK as refugees, the odds are very high that they have been sexually assaulted themselves or have witnessed sexual assault of quite a brutal nature. Fatima told me many of these women are not in a position to tell their stories because they aren’t empowered within their marriage or their culture. Like they could be killed if they share their story. So she said I must share the story because it starts to create a space. It starts to break taboos. She said all artists should be saying it’s happening, whatever colour they are. And then hopefully, eventually like FGM was maybe ten, fifteen years ago people were a bit shady about it. Now people feel more comfortable saying it’s happening, it’s widespread, it needs to stop.
AZS: I think a lot of it goes back to understanding what your own privilege is. That’s a really big thing that’s being discussed. I think anyone can acknowledge what their own privilege is, and have a sense of responsibility for using your privilege where you can.
MH: Yeah, that’s why I didn’t want to tell individual, specific stories. You can search online, there are whole websites devoted to supporting women talk about the trauma they’ve experienced. So if you’re interested, that information can be found. And if you want to support that work of those agencies, please do.
AZS: I was visiting Gothenburg and they have this amazing museum (Röda Sten Art Centre). And inside there’s this enormous, cavernous industrial sort of space where they have loads of exhibitions. And I saw this Dutch artist Ditte Ejlerskov (Can You Hear Me?) where she was talking about her white privilege and her obsession with Rihanna, and I thought, I’m going to hate this. But actually I loved it. I really liked the work and what she was trying to say, reflecting on the themes around colonialism and notions of race and how we all fit together. It’s not necessarily clear cut.
MH: That’s a good point. Some advice I got from an African American storyteller called Michael McCarthy, who is also a former Black Panther so he’s got some pretty crazy stories, told me as a white person, if you want to engage in social justice, racial justice, that’s terrific. They need as many allies as they can get. But he said, “Check your agenda. Make sure you aren’t trying to be a do-gooder.” So talking with other artists here, if you want to delve into cultures that aren’t your own, have some self-interrogation about why you are motivated to do that. That’s the main thing. You don’t want to be a do-gooder. You want to do something effective, and what is that thing.
AZS: Yeah, I’m an activist in the black and minority communities in Sussex and the southeast and I have to ask myself the same questions. I know something about Mexico and Mexican culture, but I don’t know about people’s lives in Gambia, I don’t know what it’s like to be deaf in a conflict zone. You are always questioning yourself as an activist and an artist. But those are really important questions. If you catch yourself going through this thought process, write it down, blog it, put it out there…
MH: … and get feedback.
AZS: Yeah, okay, this is the final question. We had a discussion about a sociology course I did at Sarah Lawrence and the professor was Regina Arnold. She really liked to make people think and shake things up. She asked us to write about what is your most cherished assumption. Take you most cherished assumption and then disprove it. Basically, it was take the thing you really take for granted in society or the world or in your life, and then try to imagine what it would be like not to have that.
MH: Yeah, you dropped that on me I think the last time we met or a few months ago, I remember being struck by that. I thought that was so perfect because I think that encapsulates what my whole artistic practice is about. My most cherished assumption comes from my childhood where I feel like I was told you can rely on our democratic process. You can rely on the government. You can rely on these institutions to take care of you and educate you and give you everything you need and keep you safe. And I feel like that’s false now. And I’m mad as hell about it, so I’m making a lot of artwork!
AZS: (Laughing) And on that happy note, let’s open it up to discussion!