Conversation with Swoon aka Caledonia Curry

Please enjoy my conversation with Caledonia Curry aka Swoon. This is a warm, wide-ranging conversation Callie talks about her journey from street art and wheat-paste portraits to massive collaborative installations built from salvaged materials – including the famous floating rafts seen at the Brooklyn Museum. She shares how reuse has been central to her practice from the start, driven by environmental awareness and a love of found materials. The conversation also touches on her humanitarian work in Haiti, the tension between solo and collaborative creating, her deep connection to the ocean, and her current shift toward storytelling, puppetry, and stop-motion animation.

https://swoonstudio.org/

https://www.uncsa.edu/kenan/artist-as-leader/caledonia-curry.aspx 

https://www.heliotropefoundation.org/ 

https://musicboxvillage.com/

TEDxBrooklyn 2010 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5298KZuW_JE

Finding Good in Our Own Limitations, TEDxPittsburghWomen 2020 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MUjIlXmXptU 

Swimming Cities of Serenissima - Empire Me https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x5dwosy 

https://www.faile.net/

https://swoonstudio.org/#/submergedmotherlands/

https://deitch.com/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Dark_Dark

https://riversofsteel.com/attractions/carrie-furnaces/

This podcast was created by Natalya Khorover. It was produced and recorded by Natalya, as well as researched and edited by her. SALVAGE is a product of ECOLOOP.ART.

If you enjoy this show, please rate and review us wherever you’re listening—and be sure to come back for another conversation with a repurposed media artist.

Music theme by RC Guida

Visit Natalya’s website at www.artbynatalya.com

Visit Natalya’s community at www.repurposercollective.com

Visit Natalya’s workshops at https://www.ecoloop.art/

Transcript

Welcome to Salvage, a podcast for conversations with artists about the repurposed materials they use in their art practice.

Today I'm excited to interview Caledonia Curry aka Swoon.

Callie is a classically trained visual artist and printmaker who has spent the last 15 years exploring the relationship between people and their built environment. Her first interventions in the urban landscape took the form of wheat pasting portraits on the walls of cities around the world, a project that is still evolving alongside her place based work.

She has a studio practice of drawing, printmaking, architectural sculpture and installations. Caliie's work has been collected and shown internationally at galleries and museums, including the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Brooklyn Museum, the Institute for contemporary Art, Boston, and the Sao Paulo Museum of Art. I have to say, I'm a little bit nervous, but I can't wait.

This is going to be a fabulous conversation.

Thank you so much, Callie for joining me here. I've been dying to talk to you for ages. Awesome. So thanks for having me. Yeah. I actually don't remember exactly when I discovered your art, but I do remember rushing over to the Brooklyn Museum in 2014 to see the Submerged Motherlands. And I remember being an absolute, you know, jaw dropped to the floor.

It was just incredible. Thank you. Thank you for seeing that. It's that's one of the most major projects I've ever done. And so it just really, makes me happy that people still remember it. Oh, my God, yeah, it was unforgettable. It was so amazing. And I think at that time I wasn't I was reusing materials for my artwork, but I wasn't all that focused on them.

I was just sort of, you know, whenever it was convenient, I would reuse something. I was still shopping for new materials, but after seeing that exhibit and all that salvaged wood, I think that may have been one of the turning points for

me to go completely remixing those kind of materials. I love that.

So if you don't mind me asking, were you an artist as a kid?

Yes, absolutely. In that way that I think all, all kids are artists. And then. But then I got, like, quite serious about it when I was, like, ten years old, and I, like, I got, I sort of wandered into this painting class semi by accident that was like, retirees. And then I, but I was like ten years old, and they were like, it's fine, just come.

And, and then they like, kind of like taught me. And it was sort of a remarkable. Yeah. Life moment. Oh that's amazing. And I think kind of a lesson honestly. Like, I wish that would happen more. You know, they talk about like in Germany, like college kids living like with with nursing homes. Yes. I'd like to have, like, a little kid taking art classes with like, people who were basically in retirement was so cool, I loved it.

I actually did that to my daughter by accident. I was taking a life class

while she was in school, but she was sick one day. Not really sick, but sick enough to not go to school. So I took her to the with. With the teacher's permission, I took her to the life drawing class with me. She must have been like eight.

Uhhuh. And she totally, like, was into it. Yeah. From life and, you know, and we were surrounded like I was. I think I might have been the youngest in there. Everybody else was retirees. Yeah, she totally like she was into it. It was amazing.

And I think actually, now that you mention it, I think that you probably can kind of borrow their focus too, because, like, you know, adults are able to focus for longer periods of time.

So like when I left that first class, I was like shellshocked by the fact that I had stood there and painted the same thing for five hours. I was like, I don't know how I did that, you know? But I think it's sort of that environment of, you're sort of in training to the adults and you kind of become able to do that.

Yeah, yeah. No, it's really that's a really amazing experience that you had. And then I know you went on to Pratt, which is I'm also a graduate of Pratt. I'm just a just a few years ahead of you, though, just a yeah, I had a great time. So you went to Pratt in the 90s then? Yeah, I graduated in 89.

Wow. And people I mean, I remember because I was there in the late 90s and and so I do remember people, you know, just saying how different things were in the, in the 80s. Yeah. So the whole neighborhood dramatically changed in the four years that I was there. Okay. Yeah. Well, the the story that I heard that was like, amazing was like some students would walk along inside the train tunnels to get to Pratt because they were like.

They were like, we prefer it than walking the surface streets. It was like, damn, that's wild. It's like, you know, I did not experience that. But I think that was a myth. I just thought it was kind of funny. So I was doing some research on you for this, and I saw that you were a part of something called the Toy Shop artists at Pratt.

And, yeah, it was it was like a little it was like a little gang that we, we call the Toy Shop Collective. And, it was, it was sort of like, if you imagine, kind of like activist agitprop and street art and like pranks and like just, you know, kind of joyous, like trickster ism. That was that was us.

Is that when you got your nickname Swoon? I know it was a little before that, but but, you know. Yeah, just pretty much all kind of happening at the same time. It was, you know, it was like I had been I don't actually remember exactly. I think Toy Shop started. It was some folks that were still at Pratt.

I think I was graduated already. I think I may have started going by soon while I was still at Pratt. It was it was the thing where I, like, was working outside. And then I decided to take a name. And then I had this memory of a of a dream that someone had had. And I at the time I was like, well, you can't name yourself.

I don't know if that's true, but that was just my thinking. I was like, well, that one came to me from someone's dream, so I'm going to I'm going to accept that one. Well, I think it's lovely. I didn't know your real name for a long, long time, which is Caledonia Dance Curry. And people are always like, what?

That's totally. You didn't need it. You didn't need a pen name. But but I you know, it was just kind of part of that thing of like wanting, you know, it's sort of like makes a little alter ego. Yeah. Well, and you were doing a lot of street art at that time. And I think the exact thing for street artists is to.

Yeah. I mean, it's like you're doing illegal stuff. And so it's like some people, I've seen people sign their own names, but I just wasn't going to. So when did you start using materials such as, you know, salvaged wood and things like that for your art? I'm pretty much from the very beginning, you know, because it was it was there was a lot of different things that, that we were thinking about.

But certainly one of them was the waste stream, you know, and, and just the sort of sense of like, environmental, the sort of slowly unfolding environmental catastrophe that we are still in, you know, and there are so many different ways to address that. And there's all kinds of conversations about what's effective and what's not. But at the time, I just was sort of being like, well, what's at hand for me?

And what was at hand was just like reusing as much as I possibly could. Yeah. So I saw even now on your website you still have like you have prints on doors and scraps of wood and things like that. Yeah. I also you know also I think like so it was kind of a couple things that like working on the street, you're really participating with the language of architecture, like the human figure is meant to go in a doorway, right.

Like there's, you know, there's the sense that like, humans and our habitations are like, you know, the that there's a, that there's kind of this relationship between the two. And so, like making portraits out in the street was like always kind of making portraits in relationship to architecture. So, so in that way it was also natural to like, work with doors and windows, because those that particular body of portraits was always designed in relationship to architecture.

But, you know, also like, you know, I just would find things like, I mean, particularly in New York at that time, just the amount of street garbage of things that were really like, infinitely usable was so high. And even like when we built the rafts that you saw in the Brooklyn Museum, we would go to construction sites and be like, hey, you're about to throw that away.

Can you, like, forklift it into our pickup truck? And like, sometimes they would, you know, and yeah, so it was like a way of trying to even kind of get ahead of that. And those, those rafts floating magical spaces. I don't even know what to call them. That was really incredible. How did you even come up with that idea?

It was one of those things that it started like, I think a little bit at a time. There's a friend of my name, Orian McNeil, who passed away recently very tragically. And, he used to live on he was probably the first person I knew who had a boat. He did this wild thing where, is a strange story.

He had been electrocuted by, like, a city. Something like a like a con ed situation, I think. And then he got a settlement and bought this boat with it. And it was just like a sort of an unusual, like event that he was able to do this thing, and we were all like, whoa. Like, you live on the Gowanus Canal.

Like, this is wild, you know, and not Amsterdam. What's going on? Exactly. And he just was such a pioneer in that way, you know, and we were all, like, obsessed with, like, like I had, I had the year before that, I had gone to the Netherlands and been seeing all these different, you know, paintings and the Vermeers and all this beautiful stuff.

And then I went to, like, a museum of Viking ships, and I just, like, fell over. I was like this, this fucking canoe is more beautiful than any object I've ever seen. And so it was also that feeling, you know, where you're just like, oh, like something about the vessel, you know? And then, you know, so it was like a bunch of different kind of things like coalescing and, and also at the time, I was thinking so much about how do we make art when we feel like outsiders and how do we make art for the outsiders?

We felt like when we were kids growing up in our towns, like far from the centers that we live in now. But like that, it was so important to sort of receive these little drops of knowledge being like being like, there's a lot of different ways to, like, create a world, you know? And so I feel like for me, the rafts were like this kind of statement of like, there really are a lot of different ways to create a world, and that those, some of those ways can travel and some of those ways can, like meet the 16 year old kid that you used to be, like living in the town, like sort of waiting

for an answer to the question of like, why am I such a weirdo here? Well, I love the they're very they're very childlike. I mean, obviously I see the adults on them and I'll share links, in the show notes to the videos of these, but there's something very childlike. If you I don't know, I could see a bunch of ten year olds building something like that.

I mean, they wouldn't be as esthetically beautiful and have all the details, but there really is something very childlike to them. Absolutely. I mean, I think sometimes, like I'm working on some film projects right now, particularly this one fairy tale called Civil Sisters is the one that I often think of this way, where people are like, is this for kids or is this for adults?

And I'm like, inner child. I don't know, like, it's not quite. It's sort of in between, you know, and I do really feel like that space is I mean, it's kind of just like it's such a radical, wild realm, like the realm of the inner child, right? That it's like we still have the sort of wildness and the unresolved fears and torments of childhood.

But like, now we can get a job and buy power tools, right? So, like, not like what happens when those two forces collide, right? Oh that's fun. Well, even you think if you think back to childhood fairy tales. If you think of Grimm's fairy tales. Oh my goodness, are they really for kids? Yeah. Well, yeah. And are they, are they, are they like.

Yeah. Are they to sort of like resolve conflict in the psyche or are they to scare the shit out of the kids so that they don't go into the forest? Maybe both. Oh, yeah. And but so it's one thing to think about building these things, but it's another to actually construct them to to be able to float down the Mississippi or the Hudson Lake or, you know, the Adriatic Sea.

Work with someone who knows shipwrecks. Shipbuilding might be a strong word, but, so the story goes. Have you ever heard of somebody called, The Floating Neutrinos? A group called The Floating Neutrinos I have, yeah. Yes. So, Papa Neutrino and the Floating Neutrinos docked here in New York City for for, I think a few years, actually.

And they, they did they did an Atlantic crossing, like the wildest thing you've ever heard in your life. Like, it's my personal opinion that they survived by coincidence and miracle. Like, it's not we did not do an Atlantic crossing, by the way, when it came time for us to go to Venice, we broke them apart and put them in a shipping container.

Okay, but the people who were so intrepid as to do an Atlantic crossing on their own rafts are the people that essentially taught us how to build those rafts. And and then, you know, it also came from friends just groups of friends who have built all kinds of stuff over their lifetimes, you know, had started punk circuses, had helped found Burning Man back in the whenever the hell that started a million years ago.

You know, people who kind of were there at the inception of a lot of really radical things that involved, like rather death defying architectures, sort of became part of, of, figuring out how to make that happen. That's one of those things that in a million years, I couldn't have done it my way by myself, or even without those specific people.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, it's certainly seems that way. You had a very large and dedicated team to help put that together. Yeah. I mean, it was, you know, we became it was like, you know, a place to live for the summers. It was, you know, became this kind of real. I don't know how to describe it, but it was just like a bit of your own world that could kind of, like, go adrift and it sounds magical.

I wish I could. It was incredibly magical and incredibly dangerous. Yeah, and tiring and taxing, but just, unbelievably magical. Like, I was kind of in withdrawal, I would say, for, like, a good ten years. Like, I would just be doing anything, and I would just be like, why am I not on the raft? You know, I would just be like sitting on a bus or like sitting here and just being like, you know, it's hard.

Like once you've lived that way, it's hard to come back. Yeah. Would you say that, you creating those magical vessels, ship ships? Was that, like a start of you building magical spaces? Period. I mean, I'm thinking about your music box village and New Orleans and even your, you know, the buildings that you created in, in Haiti.

There are, yes, something magical about all of them. Yes. Absolutely. Absolutely. I mean, I my first thing that I built was, the Deitch Projects installation in 2005, and then the very next project was the rafts, and the, you know, and sort of, you know, these are all collective endeavors, particularly the Music Box Village. I sort of ended up just being a very small part of that in the end.

But was there kind of right at that genesis when my friend was like, hey, what should we do with this house? You know, and I think that the spirit of the rafts like it sort of. It can't help but be, you know, like the first sketch that I made, it was basically just like one of the rafts, but with musical instruments.

And I was like, let's take the house and do this, you know, because music was such a big part of the raft. There was a band called Dark, Dark, Dark, and they would play while the rafts would move, or sort of part of the performances. And so there was always this sense that the raft could sort of turn into this like clockwork music box.

And so I think that for me was was my point of inspiration with the Music Box. And so, yeah, you know, and also the, the homes in Haiti, you know, we collaborated with folks in Haiti that were incredible sculptors and artisans. And that's a big part of why those look so saw. And, you know, they're so, very different than a lot of other things you see built in earth bag because folks, there were stone carvers.

There's this is a village of woodworkers and stone carvers. That's just like one of the things people do, kind of like as a hobby, because they have this beautiful river stone, and it's just part of the culture. And so when it came, you know, when when we started collaborating, we were like, wait, this is like we really have, like, this kind of copasetic connection with these folks at this level of like, craft and beauty.

And so it just became that kind of collaboration where, where it kind of worked on that level. That's that's really amazing. But did you when you decided on that village as where you were going to build, did you already know that there were all these craftspeople there? Yes. Yeah, it was, it was we were introduced by there was a lawyer in New York who had a friend who was from the village, and she came with us.

She's from she was Haitian as well, but had lived in the States. And so she kind of introduced us and we met everyone. And and it was it was like everybody. They were like, oh yeah, tons of artists, like, we work on permaculture, we do all these things. And we were just like, okay, cool. Like, this is and you know, there was then people were already organizing into like a mango growers association.

So there was like it just felt like, just like a click, you know. Yeah. It just it clicked. That's amazing. How many buildings did you build there? Eventually. Just let me see three homes and wait. Yes. And one community center. I'm like, I'm like asking that right? Three homes and one community center. And that's been 15 years now.

So it's a complicated project. I actually we're at the stage where, you know, I'm thinking about shutting down or substantially closing the Heliotrope Foundation because it's just a variety of things. But it's been very hard for me to maintain in the last couple of years. And so I'm actually looking for a long term partner. So I'm asking everyone, including you, if you know anyone.

So there's this after school program there, called Club Observatoire, and it's this beautiful program that we like essentially help support, but it's really led by folks locally, and it's kind of, you know, Haiti is in such a moment of instability. And so having just that little bit of like, like a, like a friend across like, you know, in, in the rest of the world being like, we got you, we see you like, at least there's like this kind of, like small, like bit of education and kind of meal programing that can still go on, like, even if school is closed because of, you know, chaos happening or even when, you know

And so we've been supporting it for like over ten years. And now I'm looking for somebody who wants to be connected with the school program and to support a school program. So it's, it's, you know, it's it's a it's it's not a huge lift. And so I do think it's possible, but, you know, it's definitely a lot to ask.

So I'm, I'm, spreading the word as much as I can. Definitely. And the Heliotrope Foundation is something that you started and that was that only for this project in Haiti or was it for something? No, it was because there were a few projects that I was working on, and I sort of realized that there was this common theme of like, how do artists address crisis?

And sort of finding it was like, okay, whether we're talking about an earthquake or we're talking about an economic disaster, or even if we're talking about, you know, mass incarceration and how we address, like addiction and healing of trauma, like that, that, that when artists like sort of step to trying to grapple with these problems, we're often thinking about things in like a slightly different way than, you know, somebody who is, like, deeply embedded within the problem and that sometimes that kind of unique perspective can actually, like be an infusion of, of something necessary.

You know, at the very least, something helpful, a new perspective. Just a little joy and energy, you know, and so realizing that and that I had a few different projects that I was working on and that I had essentially gotten in over my head, and that I needed for there to be some infrastructure. I was like, this is not this is bigger than me.

And so I, I co-founded, you know, with a couple people, this organization, and then ended up bringing, the I worked on a project in Braddock that I ended up bringing to a close. It's now a project called The Sanctuary. I ended up repairing the buildings as much as I could, and then handing them off to somebody who is, is now, working on them to become really active community spaces.

That looks like an amazing space as well. Yeah. My goodness. Making tiles for the entire roof. Did you ever finish me? No, we did not. We. What we ended up doing was focusing on like teaching and doing job readiness training for kids aging out of the youth program with the tiles and and we never we ended up we never ended up tiling the roof.

It was one of those things where that was too heavy of a lift, and we were like, either we can stick with this goal of tiling the roof, or we can realize that our real priority here is people. And so we, we, we prioritized people in that instance. And then we ended up we ended up fixing the roof in a more standard way so that this woman, could take over the space.

But you know, like you're talking about reuse. The group that I was working with at the time were called Transfermeseum, and they were learning all about, deconstruction as as opposed to demolition. Are you aware of this process? I it's basically salvaging building materials to reuse in other places. Exactly. Because at the time, they were just running bulldozers over everything and collapsing everything into the foundations, so that not only was your lot effectively, like destroyed or very difficult to work with, it's also lost all that material.

So what they decided to do was they did a bunch of trainings with folks in the neighborhood, and then they and they also did trainings with construction companies. And then they hired a construction company, or we hired a construction company that worked that knew how to do the deconstruction versus the demolition. You know, it's slower. We brought, you know, folks from the raft came and joined and helped.

It was like a whole thing, you know, because you're taking apart the building brick by brick. You're using the timbers, the beams, you know, it's it's a whole process de nailing millions of boards. It's a lot of manpower. But it's, you know, it's again, it's that sort of question of like, do we do this slowly and like gain access to those materials and not destroy our site, or do we just do the fastest way, like the consequences be damned?

Yeah. Now, it's definitely makes sense to me. I mean, it's we are living in such a wasteful world. There's so much just raise it down and build something new and yeah, it's it's it's heartbreaking. It's hard. Yeah, yeah. And so much is lost culturally and so much is lost. I mean, just even, just architecturally, you know, that was like how we ended up in Braddock was, was there were sort of searching out artists and some somebody brought me to this building and they were like, look, they're going to tear this down.

Like, is there any way you can stop that from happening? And they were they were trying to do that all over town, because they wanted to preserve that bit of the city's history and culture and, and the building, it's a beautiful space. And they it's got this steel framing. I mean, it's totally of its time. You know, that, like from the steel boom, like it's right down the street from the steel plant.

And so it's got this insane, like beautiful, like kind of old school structure, but like built in these, like, incredible I-beams. And so, you know, it was just one of those things that's like, this is worth saving. Yeah. No, absolutely. I, back when I had a career in the film industry and we shot a movie in Pennsylvania, right in that area where there's a lot of the steel mills are just abandoned, and they're these, oh, yeah, amazing.

Huge ghost structures that, yeah, to me are very exciting to see. Even if they're covered in rust. They're just so beautiful in their destruction. And yeah, I'm assuming that a lot. You know, this was quite a while ago, more than 20 years ago at this point. So you're probably talking about the Carrie Furnace, which is actually still there.

Oh well that's good. Yeah. They're doing something with it. I think that they are I haven't fall I haven't we, we yeah. I, we made a few visits there and of course we used to break in and stick around, but but we also made some official visits and and there were, there were projects going, which I haven't, which I haven't caught up with, but I'm pretty sure it's still there.

Yeah. Oh, good. Good. Because, yeah, it seems it. Yeah, I understand that it's a lot of work to make a structure like that, like that into usable space of any kind. Yeah, totally worth it. Totally. I mean, it's all about your values, right? It's like. It's like, okay, we don't, you know, people are out of a job, and yet we have this really labor intensive thing that we just don't value enough to put the money toward.

I remember when I was a kid, my town had the second largest wooden structure in the in America, and they tore down. Oh, it was really sad. It was this beautiful kind of magical space. You know, wood, I think, is maybe especially hard because of the, of the, of the rotting. But again, it was, it was ultimately just a question of values, like, if you want to save something like that, you can but but there just isn't the will.

please. Pardon this short little break. I just want to pop in here and tell you that this episode has been brought to you by Repurposer Collective. Our doors are currently open, and we would love for you to join us. If you are an artist who uses materials that others might consider trash.

This collective is the place for you. We are here to nurture each other, to exhibits together, to learn together, and to make a world a better place. I hope you'll join us. Go to Repurposer Collective Dot com. See you there. And now back to our conversation with Callie.

Speaking of reuse though, I was looking on Instagram at your installations for the Sybilant Sisters that you just finished, I think. Yeah. Did you reuse the parts of the tree from the Brooklyn Museum? Yeah, that's that's essentially the Brooklyn Museum tree. But but shifted. Yeah, I love that because I was looking at it going, oh wait a minute, wait a minute.

I know that tree. Exactly. Well, the Brooklyn Museum tree was 70ft tall and but some of it got damaged and actually had to be thrown away. So but what I was, what I remember this was one of those I love meditation, I was sitting in meditation and I was I had been trying to think about how I really want to keep this tree somehow, but the roots were just destroyed.

And all of a sudden I just saw it. I saw the branches dropped down and became the roots and the the the top just disappeared to the ceiling. Because the other thing is that the Brooklyn Museum is 70ft tall. Like, I never got another invitation to exhibit the tree in the seven foot tall space. Again, it didn't happen 25 spaces.

Yeah. So essentially the question was, how does this how does the tree adapt? And so that was the answer. And the other thing, the siblings sister. So not all of the materials on that are reused, but the a lot of them are reused from my step dad's junk shed. So, you know, I think also when we think about why, you know, are we into like reusing things?

I think for me, another part of the reason is my stepdad. So he was a house painter, and he was the kind of guy that just saw value in everything. I mean, a hoarder, he was basically a hoarder, but like a cool, oh, cool hoarder. And he would just continue to tinker and build and find this and that.

And, and he ended up building at 110ft of junk shed filled with tools and every kind of material you could imagine. And when he passed away, there was like a lot of question about what to do with it. And so I did a lot of building with it because I was like, wait, wait, I know what to do with these things.

And it was I felt like, you know, when when each of my parents passed away, I made some art around their passing with my mom and my my dad. It was portraits. And I did also make a portrait of my stepdad. But my real art, that was like sort of mourning and like mourning his passing and celebrating his life was the use of those tools.

It was like this way of being like, I see you, I appreciate you, I love this thing that you saved and like, now it's going to become something. Continue to become something. Oh that's wonderful. Wow.

you must you probably have a huge storage unit somewhere for all these things. I'm just like, I'm just having, like, a moment where I just realized that my poor friend, you know, the artists FAILE

The street artists, you know, they have a barn upstate and they're like, or just the sweetest, like, they're like my big brother's. There always have been. Just really supportive, like our whole, you know, we kind of came up together. Anyway, they let me leave a bunch of my stuff in their barn, and now I'm like, what? What? Why did I do that?

They probably, you know, I need to get it back, like, I, I'm, I'm feeling guilty. But essentially they just hit me this morning. But I actually had the most amazing thing happen to me this year. Like, I'm almost like, it's like that kind of thing where you're like, can I even talk about this? Like, is it real?

But I, you know, I've been doing a lot of creative transition, and I got to a place where I was a little stuck on, on a studio, actually, I was having trouble, like finding a space that I could work on my new stuff, like considering whatever I'm doing, a lot of experimental things. It's that don't make a lot of money right now.

So I was like, how do I what do I do? How do I do this? You know, how do we still keep working as artists when we're in such an experimental phase? That's like not making sense to the rest of the world yet. So and like, that's the for me, that's like the true creativity is you have to keep going down those paths.

Like, you can't just, and so I put out a call like, does anyone can, like, I'm in a pickle. Can anyone help? And I like just the kismet of the universe. I, like, lucked into this moment where this studio program needed, like an artist who was a little further along in their career to sort of be like a, like, almost like a low key mentor, but, like, you know, in an unofficial kind of capacity, but just sort of being there when people need you and, you know, sort of just, being present in that way on this floor that was residency.

And so and so I am stationed there. But in addition, I'm working. I have a film, theater, storytelling, whole kind of experimental world that I'm working on, on a big chunk of this floor on the world Trade Center. And it's like, unbelievable. Okay, that's what I saw. It's like one of those things where it's the first time in my New York life that I've ever had an amount of space that's like my crazy hoarder spread out, build shit mind, like finally, finally make sense here.

Wow. So did you bring all your stuff in there? Yes. And how many? How long are they having you there for? Hopefully long enough. You'll be seen. But I mean, you know, hopefully long enough to, to realize this project. Oh, that's amazing. That's amazing. So you are basically making stop motion animation these days is all of the above?

Yeah. It's going to be stop motion animation, puppetry, live action. It's it's, it's going to be a mix of techniques. It's I'm sort of it's like I'm sort of creating narrative worlds that have multiple points of entry so they can be installations. I just did this Oracle deck for the Sybil and Sisters fairy tale, and I also ultimately hope to create a film.So

it's like I'm working on a few different of them. So I'm finally starting to understand kind of what my body of work is at this moment. And it's essentially these narrative worlds. So the two that I'm working on right now, one is called Sibilant Sisters, and one is called Queen Hattie in the heart Stone. And they're kind of classical fairytales in certain senses.

And then and it's a cohesive narrative with a beginning to end. But then there are kind of multiple ways that you can sort of get to know that narrative world. Oh, wow,

okay. I can't does that make sense? I don't know if that actually is making sense. So like the scope, the installation in Wyoming is sibilant. Sisters. So you come, you see the sculptures, you see the puppets, you see the drawings.

And if you want to, you can be like, who are all these people? What's happening here? And then you can listen to the story. You can get an oracle deck. You can, you know, look for the upcoming book. So there's like a few different ways that you can, you know, with the Oracle deck, you can pull out the cards, you can read about the different characters, sort of imbibe their story that way.

So it's like, you know, it's essentially a classical narrative, but it's being presented and in some in classical ways. Okay. Well, I'm really looking forward to receiving my Oracle deck. Oh yeah. Did you got one? I haven't gotten that yet. Okay. And I've never had an Oracle deck before. So I'm really excited about this. Great. Yeah, I, I, it's it's we just completed the Kickstarter, and I, like, fingers crossed going to get them sent to print this week.

So it's it's a little slow, but it's going okay. Slow is fine. There's nothing I, I think that's there's nothing bad about slow art. Yeah, well, because I want to do it right. I mean, that's what I discovered is like, I thought I was going to do something one way, and I was like, I can either make this take an extra two weeks and do it better, or I can do it now and do it bad.

And I was like, no, I'm just going to make it slower, you know? Yeah, yeah, yeah. So getting back to reuse

in a lot of your installations, you have these absolutely stunning paper cuts. Do you save them from one installation to the, to the other. Oh yeah. I save every delicate I save everything I mean, no, if if they get pasted to the wall, they're not salvageable.

But if they're pinned or pasted to, would you know, we were just unpacking in the big space yesterday, and we pulled out this piece of wood from 2005, and I was like, okay, I've never thrown away anything in my life. Like, you know, because you it's there's so it's just it's just so I love reusing them because not only is it just great, you have the work, you've already made it so you don't have to make it again.

But in addition to that, there's something so great about, like when you pull something out and you're like, this was part, you know, it's got a history to it. Yes. It's, you know, and you sort of you can see the marks where it's like, okay, here was where it was in this installation, here's where it was in this.

And it sort of contains, you know, and then eventually they'll come to like their final place, like the, you know, one of the rafts became part of something called the time capsule, and it's now part of the permanent collection in a museum in Munich and Munich called the Moca. And it's like it sort of spreads out on the wall.

So it's like that's where it's stopped. I get hit its final form, but like most of that stuff used to be one of the rafts called Alice. And then it was like we sort of once the raft got decommissioned, we, I like sort of spread it out on the wall, like transformed it out. And so that has sort of become this tapestry.

Oh, I love that.

Oh, one of the things I watched, I've, I've done a little research. I've been watching videos of you speak in your Ted talks and everything, and then one of them films, I think it was a film I came across.

It looked like it was a collage, and it said. And then she made something beautiful from from what was broken, you know, my friends, kids made that. Oh, really? Yeah. Oh, that was just such a beautiful phrase. Isn't that isn't that really beautiful? You know, it was in Braddock. There was a family there that was just incredibly supportive of our work.

And they would always bring the kids by, and they would, like, help, you know, just just help out on stuff. And just. Yeah, they were just helpful in tons of ways. And at one point, the whole family, like, made that really beautiful little, like, shadow box for me. Yeah. And then it ended up in the, in the Kickstarter.

So in all its scenes that in most of your projects you are working with others, you're collaborating with people. How is that really? How did that become a part of your practice? And you're like, you're like leading community projects. You're collaborating with other artists. How did that get started for you?

I believe I could be wrong, but I, I think the first time I ever, like, collaborated or organized something, I was really into doing like billboard takeovers. There were all these like, illegal billboards that were going up on Myrtle Avenue at the time, and it was very like it was very like this feeling that, you know, like the advertisers could, could sort of take over the space and talk to you.

But like, could you talk back, you know, or could like, who else can, can be on these walls? And so I organized all the well, not all, but whoever would, whoever was down, I organized in the painting department. I went up and down all the studios in the painting department, and I would bring people a piece of paper and be like, here's the size.

Paint a painting. We're all going to go out at 9 a.m. on this Sunday, and we're going to cover all the billboards in the block all at the same time. And it was it was actually like phenomenally stressful to organize because I didn't know what I was doing and it was illegal and yada yada. But some friends jumped in and helped me do the organizing.

That's how Toyshop started. Okay. Yeah, because I was like, wait. I was like, wait, I'm not alone organizing this. They're also organizing. They were like, we got my friend, we got my friend. I was like, whoa, who are you? So cool, you know? And then we just were like, oh, we got to do this. And, you know, and then and it and then seeing it.

So like we did the day morning, we did it, I was like, I'm never working with people ever again. That was too stressful. I don't how to do this. I'm terrible at it. And then we stopped and we ate breakfast and we walked back down the street and the whole entire street was transformed. I mean, from my perspective, that's like how it felt.

And, and I was like, never mind. I was like, when you work with together with people, you can do things you could never do on your own. Like it's just, you know, we we all become. And I just think, like, the human desire to be a part of something bigger than yourself is just monumental. But for me, it's equally and oppositely opposed by my desire to be a total control freak, to be by myself, to be like, let me do it.

Leave me alone. You know, that is like fully in opposition. Those two things are at war with each other all the time. Really? Okay. Oh yeah, 100% doing all of these collaborative projects. Yes. You know, and it's all about I think like sort of there's like it's all about sort of the negotiating that space. And sometimes you do need to just be by yourself.

You know, like my I did an animation called cicada that was basically my answer to my exhaustion with collaboration, where I was like, you know, I just need to go and be by myself in a room and do something that has no stakes for any community, that has no nothing. Like it's not going to get rained on. It's not going to be dealing with like building code inspectors.

It's like literally just me and my duct tape, you know? And that was like, oh my God. Like it was so healing for my soul. Well, it sounds like you need to like, balance that, like you have to have that those kind of projects in between your collaborative projects. Exactly. Yeah. Because it's like your source, you know, for me it's like touching back into my creative source.

I really have to quiet down enough to listen to that voice. And so doing those independent, you know, kind of contemplative projects is how I do that. Yeah. Yeah. Now I find that I.

You know, I have a community and I also do collaborative projects as well. And there are times when I find myself finishing some project or even in the middle of some project, and I'm sort of like, I don't know what to do with myself.

There's so much to do. I don't know myself. And then I'm like, I need to just go sit down and I need to stitch. Yeah, mine. Yeah. It just needs to be me working on my artwork. And it could just be for 15 minutes and then I'm good. I'm good to go. It's so regulating, right? You know, now we talk about nervous system regulation.

I don't think we really understood that like in the 90s you know. Yeah. But like it's like it's what it does. It just it just for me it like gets all my ducks in a row. Yeah. Oh my life. You know, it's like everybody. Wow.

I think it was, this was 3 or 4 years ago I think I think you were fundraising something for something.

And you made a print

of Thalassa And I had to have one. So I got it. Thank you. But I did not know that she was the goddess of the sea. I only just, you know, the other day read the whole of like what you talk about the story about it. She's amazing. So and to me she's well and she was part of, your submerged mother lands at the Brooklyn Museum to,

I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about your connection to the sea and how.

Climate change comes into your art practice.

well, I'm from Florida, and so, you know, I think I was definitely one of those kids where, like, for certain periods of my. Actually, I completely forgot about this. I actually was born in New London, Connecticut. Oh. And which is also on the ocean and it's freezing. But apparently I used to love it even back then when I would visit and I was a baby.

But, but then, yeah, when Florida flopping in the ocean, and and so I think I've just, it's one of those just always kind of connections. It's, it's, you know, in the,

the, the sense that the ocean is your, is your mom, like, is your sense of being like, it's the thing that's like me, actually, I just had the most beautiful experience.

My friends Coco and Skip, Coco Carroll and Skip Shire are a composer and performer team, and they made this beautiful, kind of coral piece of theater called We Don't Need the Sea to Drown. And they turned like that sentiment that I just expressed a feeling that the ocean is your mother, like, into this. Like, they sort of folded it into this coral piece where they had interviewed all these different people.

And anyway, it was so beautiful to have that sentiment, like honored and and in another artwork. It's amazing. Is there a way to see that? I think that I actually may have filmed it. Yeah, they may be recording it. Yeah. You can look up Skip, Skip Shirey and Coco Carroll. They're amazing. But, but so it's always been, you know, a just an instinctive part of my work from working on things like the rafts to working on pieces like to Lhasa.

Or, you know, just right now, you know, the, the like surfing is just part of my, like, mental health practice in the summers. Okay.

I so Thalassa was, like, started right after the oil spill in the Gulf. And it was one of those moments like, you know, when a piece of news just shakes you in a way that you can't reckon with, you know, and I was I was working on the scale model for the music box, actually my first scale model for that.

And I just remember, like, I couldn't stop crying and I was like, what's going on with me? And I was like the there's this feeling that this great harm had been done to all of these creatures and all in this body of water that was so familial, to me and to all of us. But I could feel how familial it was to me, you know?

And I was like, could I make a drawing that sort of shares that sense that the ocean is our body, that we are not separable from this? And, and so that's where that drawing came from.

Yeah. No, it's it's just it's such a beautiful image. Although I have a confession to make. I don't have any tattoos, but if I was going to get a tattoo, I think it would be a drawing of yours.

Oh. Thank you. It's so beautiful. I love the way you draw. It's. Yeah. Thank you. And then I also. Okay, I know I wanted to ask you about your

your paste up art, because from what I didn't understand is that it's those beautiful images you draw, and then you carve into a piece of plywood to make prints from or linoleum.

Yeah, usually linoleum. So hugely labor intensive because they're huge too. Yeah, yeah. You know, I realized the other day where I was like, I don't even know if I've seen another linoleum block print, like the the Donangemma, the mother that was at the Brooklyn Museum. It's about 12ft tall by 12ft wide. And then we built it into the sculptures.

It was almost like 18ft tall. And I was like, you know, I don't know that I've that I was like, that thing was. So it's so, you know, to carve, to carve a portrait, to get the portrait right, to carve it in linoleum, to do it at scale, to print it. It comes out backwards. You only get two colors, you know, you're really wrestling with it.

And then to get the print right, all those things, it's such an incredibly intricate and intense process that, it's that's why that's why that work looks a very specific way is, is that it's coming out of that really hard one process. It's amazing. I've carved one linoleum block, one small one. One. Yeah, one. So I have a slight understanding of what's involved.

Yeah. And when I see pictures of you carving with tools and everything, it's. Oh,

I mean, they take, like a month. It's like a month of carving. And yet all of the white spots, like, eventually with those huge ones, I would have to get people to just carve out the white for me, because it just was. It would be a month of me carving just the black.

Yeah. And then I would have to have people cut away the empty parts, you know? But but yeah. And it's, it's also why I've been working in different mediums now, like as I'm doing storytelling, I'm having to shift into different mediums because as I'm, as I'm spending so much more time on writing it, it's really important for me to like to work in ways that are like essentially quicker because it needs I need to sort of be able to focus on the whole narrative.

Yeah. So I'm doing some block printing still with that stuff, but it's not able to dominate my life in the same way that it was. Well, luckily you have all of those, I don't know, what do you call them?

Blocks, I guess. So you most of them, I just yeah, some of them are destroyed. Some of them have, you know, are part of collections.

But I do have some of them. Yeah. And I have blocks still. So you know that body of work there is, there is still some of that remaining. But essentially, yeah, it's sort of starting to feel more like it was an era. And I'm, I'm learning how to evolve.

So you, you don't do the street paste up anymore, do you?

No, I quit doing that in 2017. So yeah, because it was the same. It was it was totally dominating everything that I was doing and I needed. I sort of felt this new thing coming, and I was like, you know, I actually have to. It's like you're stacking plates. And I was like, I finally have to start taking taking off plates off the bottom.

If I'm going to add anything new.

Yeah. Understood. Understood. Wow. Well, thank you so much.

Yeah. Thank you that this was a fun conversation and and. Yeah, lots of, you know, it's it's always nice, like, when you have a conversation and you, you know, just even gain insights about your own, you know, thoughts and process, like, yeah.

Sometimes you just have to speak it out loud, right? Yeah. Yeah. Awesome. I love the quilt behind you, though. Oh my God. Yeah. This thing is from the 30s. It's beautiful, isn't it? I love it, I've had this thing for here for years and it's just, you know, again, it's like. It's like, I think that we love, like, if you love reuse, you probably also love the hand.

You know, like part of why we love these older materials is because people don't do the same level of craftsmanship anymore. And so this sense of saving these hand-carved doors and all these things is sort of a way of like making sure that stuff doesn't disappear as well. Exactly,

exactly. Yeah. Now there's just something so different when you're making it by hand, step by step, slowly.

It's it's in there. And that love is in there. It stays in there.

Exactly like that's

awesome. Right. Well, good. Thank you. My.

That was such a delightful conversation. I hope you enjoyed it just as much as I did. Please follow Callie/ Swoon. All the links to everything we talked about are in the show notes, including links to a whole bunch of videos where you can really get into her. I learned so much more about her practice and everything that she's done.

She's had the most incredible career. So I hope you've enjoyed it and

Please follow the podcast wherever you're listening to it, share it, and leave a review here and there. I would love to know what you think. If you have a suggestion for another artist that I should interview, please do send me an email or a DM and let me know who you think I should interview.

I'd love to know. And again, the doors to the Repurposer Collective are open. So if you are a reuse artist, your tribe is waiting for you within the doors to the Repurposer Collective. Join us! Thanks so much for being here.

This podcast was created, produced and edited by me, Natalya Khorover. Theme music by RC Guida. To find out more about me, go to art by natalya.com to find out about my community go to Reurposer Collective.com and to learn with me check out all my offerings at EcoLoop Dot Art. Thank you for listening.