Sara Schneckloth Questionnaire

Leslie Hinton
Arth/film 555
Dr. Cooley
Questionnaire for Sara Schneckloth 
 
 
 
Do you feel that your work is more about the process or more about the final product? 
 
 Both are intertwined - the process is ongoing, with ‘final product’ being more of a resting point rather than an end.

Do you sketch out each piece thoroughly or are you more attracted to an immediacy and spontaneity of your work/ mark making?   Would you call the way you work visceral and intuitive?    
I like to have a sense of a loose structure in which I can invent and explore the themes that are most relevant, but it is rarely a pre-determined event. Drawing lends itself to this kind of immediacy, in terms of both materials and how they are handled, and there is always the sense for me that I’m witnessing a thought evolve as I work. The initial phases of the process are much more visceral/intuitive than pre-conceived and intellectualized, but there is a moment in which I do come at the work from a more analytic bent.

What sort of information do you think can be revealed to the viewer about you by means of your medium/technique---do you think choice of media can reveal information about the artist?   Should a creator be concerned with this information?   
Yes and yes to the last two parts. Different mediums require different kinds of patience, planning and precautions - drawing in readily accessible mediums conveys a sense of ease and spontaneity, but there is, I hope, also a sense of mystery in how the raw elements come together in different ways on a surface. Some moments are unmistakably the stuff of ‘traditional drawing’ whereas others are more layered, fused and complicated. If anything, it may give a sense of using the most mundane materials (tempera, charcoal and graphite) to try to generate a unique sense of visual place.

 
Is there any sort of criteria that must be present in your surroundings in order for you to work---i.e.  must you be listening to a certain type of music, using only a particular brand of charcoal, or even wearing a specific hat---anything customary  that must occur or be present in order to get connected to your process.   

My studio is very much a sanctuary - I have tried to work in other environments but there is something to be said for the safety that comes with the closed door and familiar setting - it allows me to take greater emotional risks with the process, and build on past momentum. I have worked more ritualistically in the past, mindfully occupying a specific mindset as a way to identify the heart of the emotional state I want to explore via the work. Recently, this aspect has fallen away somewhat in a more analytic bent towards exploring new combinations of materials and compositional structures.


 
A quote from your website  :  'My work strives to embody  moments of remembering and raise questions about the relationship between the body's physical performance of memory and inscriptive practice'       Is this performance one that you do in the privacy of your own studio -I imagine this performance being almost comparable to some sort of way to release an intensity and become in tune with ones subconscious--almost having ritual like qualities ---is this true at all for you?  Am I on the right track to understanding your methodologies?  -Could your work be considered a manifestation of memories through the act of visual creation? ---What relationship do you want the viewer to have with your work if any at all?
This is a good assessment of how I practice. The mark is very much a product of a body fully engaged in the act of making, and it is a body informed by its history and memory of emotional and psychological experience. I believe memory informs so much of how we move, how we hold ourselves, how we inscribe a surface - by consciously channeling this ‘ritual remembering’ I am hoping to give past experience an imaged present.
    
 
"In the gesture of drawing, there abides the question of how human beings hold memory"  Your reliquary pieces almost remind me of a vessel holding some sort of intricate web of information, similarly to the way in which the human mind stores memory.  Do you think that your art making is a reaction to this storage? It is how you handle being human to a degree? 
A complicated question, but basically ‘yes.’ It deserves a longer answer, and is part of a conversation moreso than an essay here, but I will attach a segment of a talk I gave a couple of years ago that speaks directly to this idea.

Can you tell me a little bit about the process surrounding "In Haptic Recall".  How long did you work on this piece?  From the slide it appears as though there is multiple layering of paper and media. What sort of autobiographical impulse can you say you achieved with this, if any?  Does the title explain a recall of a physical touch or are you referencing a mental grasp/touch of a memory?  Does the act of repetitive mark making in this piece illustrate any sort of desire to achieve a greater awareness of your own self? Connecting to ones self?      
 
Here is a few pages from the artist talk I mentioned above - I think it gets at the heart of many of the questions - it is a rather long read, but it is fairly on-point in terms of process.
How do we hold memory? Thinking here both literally and figuratively – question functions on two levels - how do we hold the actual stuff, the things, the objects of memory, but also, how do we physically hold on to memory and emotion in our bodies? How do memories hold us?

Article in a few weeks ago in the New York Times Science section on the enteric nervous system – the ‘brain of the gut’ – talks about a related phenomenon – how emotional stress and trauma and anger affect the body, specifically the stomach and intestines. Children whose parents divorce or died while they were young experience greater gastric distress as adults – the article also brings up discussion of butterflies and other physical reactions to stress. Stomach holds emotion first, down to the serotonin. Interesting article about the scientific connection between emotional and physical experience.

It’s along these lines that I started thinking – if I occupy a certain memory, actively grieving, what happens to my body. When you remember times of embarrassment, your face flushes, if you remember excitement or danger or fear your body responds – with adrenaline or muscle tension or a stomach clench. I realized that as I was making these drawings, as I was immersed in the act of seeing and drawing, of remembering and drawing, my body was going through a whole set of reactions and making marks that came out of those physical places of memory. My stomach would hurt, my shoulders would tighten, I would clench my teeth.

Next artistic impulse was to try to visually answer the question – Where do I hold emotional memories in my body, and how? What would it look like to see the container for these emotions?

In answer to that, I started drawing things I called emotional reliquaries. Reliquaries are vessels for holding remnants, or relics, of the dead – they show up in many cultural and religious traditions – in Catholicism – saints have reliquaries that preserve remnants of clothing or possessions or even fragments of bones. They are decorated, often ornate coffers of wood, metal, glass. They are portable sacred containers that hold and protect and venerate what is left behind.

In many African cultures, reliquaries are kept that hold the bones of the ancestors – and tribal initiates interact with the bones as a way to learn family history. I felt like I was keeping my own reliquary in the form of my storage locker – bits of the past safely contained that I was learning from by taking them out one by one.

My reliquaries are done in mixed media – oil, charcoal and pastel on paper - many on toned brown paper. To make them, I occupied the mental space of grief, of loss, of anger and sadness, and tried to draw from the gut – starting with a gesture that carried some of the emotion related to the memory I was feeling – then I consciously built it into a form of a container – adding features that I pulled from the work I did with the inherited objects – adding handles, spouts, mouths, lids, turning them into vessels, literal containers. Most of these images are 30x40 inches in size. Body parts are integrated into some, and the term ‘biomorphic abstraction’ started coming into play in conversation about the work – they are both of the body but invented at the same time. They behave like figures, some feel quite animated, but they are still objects to me, like funerary urns or genie bottles holding something inside. This was a leap for me to move from observation to invention - I was making things up, fusing forms, creating new ones. Again, I would feel like I’d been on an emotional roller coaster after I’d finished one. Whether it showed in the work or not, was another question - sometimes yes, sometimes no. I grew to like or dislike them as figures or characters - some seemed more animated than others, some seemed defiant, others offered a sense of peace.

In this piece, this reliquary, I was working in a much larger scale – this is about 8 feet tall. 5 feet wide, in charcoal. The scale had me jumping, climbing, getting up high, down low. I decided to work in some other imagery – of teeth, flowers, the body, still making it a container – I had been reading a lot about reliquary figures in West Africa – small carved statues that sat on top of reliquary drums that contained human skulls and bones – the figures functioned as intermediaries between the living and the dead, serving as a site for ceremonial offerings and talking to the deceased. I was attracted to this idea of the intermediary object – something that could translate between the states of life and death, inside and outside, and serve as a point of focus or meditation. In a way, that’s what I felt like I was doing with my drawings. They stood in between me and the memory of my family, and it felt like by doing them, I was coming to grips with that separation.

This was also a departure piece for me, in which I realized that I needed to be working much larger as a way to more fully explore this idea of bodily expression of memory. More could come out if I could move in a larger and more expressive way, in effect making it more of a performance – and the drawings could be a record of that performance. In that stroke, my way of telling the story changed again, becoming even more abstract, but even more personal, because I had to get more of my body involved to make the drawings work the way I wanted them to.

I felt timid at first – I was not used to working on a large scale, and felt intimidated by the huge piece of paper. Decided to work on rolls of paper – that way I didn’t feel like I had to meet any specific edge – if I wanted to make a small drawing I could, and if I wanted to make one 20 feet long I could do that too.

What resulted was a body of work I hung as my Masters show this past march, called “working from the reliquary.” It was 11 pieces all executed on scrolls – some fully unrolled, some still concealing some of the image in the roll. All pieces were done with charcoal and pastel on paper – the longest was 17 feet when unrolled.

As you might guess, each piece started with a memory. The process of making the drawings became very ritualized. I would go to the studio and meditate on a particular experience – if something was painful for me to remember, that meant it was fertile territory. This was becoming harder and harder to do often, I’d been in this for about a year and a half now, and that was a sign that I was working through things - it was clear that it was a finite activity. But, when I would feel something in my body, tension, upset, I would make a mark on the page, paying close attention to where the mark was coming from physically. If the memory was marked by anger, the marks were darker and bolder, of sadness, they were lighter, more melancholy, of frustration, they were gnarled and confused. The drawings were begun in a state that was intuitive, automatic, and done in private. I made them on the floor, down on my hands and knees, physically on the paper. It often felt like a dance or wrestling.

Again, the idea of the gesture is central here – making a mark that feels honest and direct, essential. Many of the later marks became intentional, trying to craft a form on top of the gestures – a piece was successful to me if some of the energy of the original gesture carried through. A lot of the time however, a true mark would get buried under overworking, and under more static marks that tried to coach a piece into a certain form. This is I think a continual frustration in drawing – trying to keep a piece animated and alive versus wooden and flat.

I felt like I was acting out my insides and the record was the drawing, and that the drawing was the story.

Like the reliquaries, in some I integrated specific body parts, pelvises, bones, teeth, organs, eyes, mouths. Also like the reliquary containers, these drawings became figures, but they were less literally containers than the previous work – they became to me embodiments of moments of remembering that I could share with others.

They generated a reaction from viewers that indicated that some of the subject matter, some of my story, was carrying across without being literal. Some viewers felt ‘grossed out’ or saddened by the images. Others felt they were simply richly bodily and sensual. Some saw them as direct expressions of pain or suffering or disease - uncontrolled growth - like cancer. Again, the work spurred conversations with people about loss - they would identify with one, and tell me about their own sense of anger, frustration, sadness - for some people the work acted like a mirror - and for me this was one of the most satisfying parts of the whole project - hearing back from people who saw a part of themselves in the work. We tell stories to share common experience, to remind us we are all human, that we all feel pain, we all feel joy.