1. Background

Your parents were artists, your father a painter and your mother as well, and ceramicist. Your website statement states the kites originate from memories from making a kite with your father, which was beautiful but didn’t fly. Star Kite, Night Kite, 2024 pays homage to this memory and integrates needlework from family members as well. Where and how did you grow up, and when did you first know you were an artist? How did childhood shape your materials and aesthetics, starting with 2021’s A Tree That Bends in the Wind, the earliest work in the show? How did you come to that work in the process at the time?

I grew up in a small town in the Berkshires – in a valley surrounded by mountains. Because my parents were artists, and there were generations of artists and makers of various kinds in my family, I never really had a decision to make about being an artist; we all just made things. I drew a bit, but outdoor play was the most compelling. Building fairy houses out of pine needles, climbing trees, and exploring rivers and woods. The event that shapes the work is actually a rupture; when I was twelve, we moved from this idyllic landscape to New York City. We moved to Soho starting in 1977. The city, and especially that neighborhood, was very raw. I did not like it and began to have a deep wish to return to the landscape of my childhood.

In the city, I was exposed to various forms of art-making, including large-scale sculptural installations, street art, painting, and performance. My classmates were creating zines and making music, and a close friend’s family was deeply involved in Fluxus performance, so I also had the opportunity to witness that. Then, my father and I would often go to the MET and look at ancient art and European painting. This type of exposure to expansive and undefined creativity prompts you to think about art in an open and creative way. There was not a lot of separation between creating and living, and that is basically how I prefer to be now.

I am attempting to make the work primarily through play and problem-solving. I follow impulses without too much critique. If I do this, I come up with more surprising solutions. 

The Tree that Bends in the Wind (2021) started as a mistake. I was trying to create a sculptural painting—a fabric house tent painted on all sides. I began by laying the fabric down and just painting whatever images came to mind. At a certain point, I realized it was a terrible idea – it was too large and ungainly – so I cut out some of the pieces I liked. One of these became the central panel of The Tree that Bends in the Wind. I felt that it needed a frame, so I painted some extra pieces, sewed them around it, and then it felt finished. I don’t use stretcher bars or gesso anymore because canvas prep is tedious, and I avoid things I don’t enjoy. I also don’t really want to be too closely involved in a painting dialogue. I would rather be adjacent to that. It’s too loaded with history for me to find a place within it.

The kites, especially the black star kites (2024), are recent works and are based on a kite I made with my father as a child. It was a black star kite that was really beautiful, but we could not get it to fly. I started thinking about this kite as symbolic in several different ways – in terms of what kites symbolized – but also as an embodiment of my father – his great talent as a young artist, ambitions to soar, the precariousness of flight and life, then also the kite as a conduit between sky and earth.

2. Interconnectedness

Lost & Found by Kathryn Schulz, a book you prize, fulsomely describes the interconnectedness in loss and love. She writes, “Of every kind of and that we experience, I find this one the most acute—the awareness that our love, in its many forms, is bound inseparably to our grief.” (223)

Her sliding scale of joy and anguish parallels the circularity in your work, both in imagery such as cosmos, flowers, and kites, and processes such as sewing, sculpting, and staining.

Schulz observes, “The and – is not just a feeling of conjunction; it is also a feeling of continuation. The abundance toward which it gestures—the sense that there is always something more—is not only spacial but also temporal.” (232). The book opens with a quote by William James: “Nothing includes everything or dominates over everything. The word “and” trails along after every sentence (A Pluralistic Universe, cited p. ix).

The ubiquity and generosity of And applies to Tail of the Cosmos and the exhibition installation. The oversized flower greets us, a front-facing entity beckoning. We move around it, meandering with the stem into a deeper time and space. There is a clear mirroring of front and back, dark and light, near and far, day and night. How does sewing, staining, and sculpting material create a material logic for you? And more literally, how do the flowers and kites work with the mirror pieces?

The interconnections of life forms and the intersection of opposites or opposing forms that Schultz highlights are themes I continually return to. In her case, love and grief, and in my case, earth and sky, day and night, big and small, near and far. These are all mirroring ideas. Schultz writes about the notion of “AND” as the concept that connects everything to everything, and that is the conjunction I use to connect these opposing forces.

An important book for me, starting in graduate school, was Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass and What Alice Found There. In the book, Alice passes through a mirror and enters a world where everything is reversed and logic becomes nonsense. Some of the early works I made consisted of reversing images (mostly of living rooms) painted on the wall. Also, of course, in Alice in Wonderland, there are size shifts; things are in a state of becoming, moving from one state to another. The place Alice encounters, because everything is flowing between states, is highly unstable, perhaps disconnected in terms of its logic. Still, it has its internal logic where things do connect, now I think, through the idea of AND. The tail of the cosmos fits in this place for me because it is a form in the state of becoming. It is a flower (a thing) AND a place, AND the thing that is big should be small, AND the thing that I’ve made small should contain the big thing. But again, this is just me exploring various thoughts and examining my feelings of instability. 

The kites connect to my relationship with my father: making kites with him, as well as the love and grief I have for him. They are also hybrid forms that combine painting, sewing, and object-making. My use of materials is also interconnected. I like the paint to stain the surface so it becomes a part of it and doesn’t lay on top like skin. I like sewing, but not so much that the work looks like a sewing project – I use it primarily for construction. In the studio, I work in circles, moving between building, painting, sewing, and exploring new ideas and then returning to beginnings and revisiting previous ideas. I don’t really know where to locate the work. Returning to the idea of becoming, I like things to live in this mid-state, where it is not really a painting, but it is painted. It looks like a kite, but it doesn’t function as a kite. It is a flower, but it resembles a creature or becomes a place. It is in this mid-state that the idea of interconnection becomes most clear. The subject of the work is the connection between things as much as the obvious thing itself. 

So, to summarize, my material logic is to always locate materials in the space of AND. These works combine material processes to play in the between spaces. 

3. Intuition

You’ve mentioned remaking nature crooked, or off-kilter. I’m especially curious about the playfulness of A Flower That Contains the Sky (Day and Night) 2025. It’s innocent, yet attentively constructed.

The piece in the show is the third iteration of this idea. The first piece is a large vase form with an interior painted to resemble the night sky. I think I painted it this way the first time because the inside of a round form looks like the interior of a planetarium – something I’ve always loved. The second piece I made resembles this one closely. I loved the title of the first piece but wanted to approach it more playfully. These two pieces are very simple flower shapes like a child would draw. I put the sky inside to create the reversal. It’s a straightforward gesture. The piece has legs and feet, not a stem, just for fun. The idea, of course, is that everything in the universe is made of molecules that reconfigure themselves in various forms. This flower is more abstract than the flowers in the center of the room. I don’t want to primacy one mode of working. I don’t want to have a consistent or singular style. I try to represent my experience, which is characterized by multiplicities, shifts, and contradictions. It’s more honest for me to work this way. And humor is a good thing, especially when life is so complicated and serious much of the time. 

4. Continuity

Earlier work addresses landscape in exhibitions from the late 1990s – 2000s: Tropicalia (2001) and Plastic Replicating Garden (1998). How did these photographically-derived installations, a 132-foot mural for Thread Waxing Space, and massive pop-up in the York Street subway stop transform into the work you’re making now?

The continuity of the work may not be immediately apparent stylistically. Still, it’s rooted in the general subject of my place within the natural world — the idealized lost landscape of my childhood, attempts to re-claim that landscape through art, and the eventual return to a physical (not imaginary) landscape as an adult in the form of a real garden and the work that emanates from it. Also, the idea of approaching the world through a fantastical lens and experiencing it as a place of awe and curiosity.

The early works—Tropicalia, Plastic Replicating Garden, and Looking Glass House (at Threadwaxing Space)—were based on computer-generated drawings created from my photographs, which I used to produce large-scale paintings and installations. These projects all incorporate mirroring and reversals, compressing ideas of natural, artificial, and digital space. I liked the scale, the way the work enveloped the viewer, and the way I played with materials, such as working directly on the wall with upholstered vinyl and industrial paints. I was making them while living in the city and disconnected from the natural world. It existed as an idea and a memory. Since I was working from photos, the images have a one-point perspective that represents my position at the time of the click. 

I worked in this way, creating painting-based installations and then mosaic public art installations, until about 2008 when I had a major rupture: my father had recently died, my gallery had closed, the economy had dived, and I had a small child and financial problems. Many of my experiences in the art world also disenchanted me. My response was to step away and focus on my family, trying to heal myself. I continued this way for about seven years, when I began to work consistently, creating small abstract paintings of patterns, movements, and cell structures, as well as functional pieces in the ceramics studio.

In 2018, we purchased a home in upstate New York, and I realized my dream of recreating the garden of my youth. I began to study everything I could about flowers, trees, and plants and built a series of flower beds filled with mostly native species. 2018 was also the year of the Hilma af Klint show at the Guggenheim, which influenced the paintings I was making. I continued to create small abstract paintings with increasingly more plant-like forms. 

In 2019, I saw a Vivian Suiter show at the Paula Cooper Gallery. This show resonated with me because of the way she hung the loose panels and worked outdoors in Guatemala, a place I had known from traveling there in my early twenties. These two shows, combined with my experiences in the garden, pointed the way forward with the work. Working the soil, planting, and moving rocks, among other tasks, changed my relationship with the natural world – it was a full-body, visceral experience that brought me back to wanting to create work about the landscape from a deeply personal perspective. The idea of the vista no longer made sense. I wanted to create work that incorporated my memories of landscape and the experience of working within a natural environment. I purchased a bolt of dressmaker muslin. I began painting large-scale images on the unprimed fabric, inspired by my small paintings, feelings, and impressions of nature, while also working in the ceramic studio to create more unconventional sculptural forms. I began looking at artists like Kim McConnell and Alan Shields. I also began to think about the early strip and shaped paintings my father made in the 1970s. 

In 2020, when the pandemic struck, we relocated to upstate full-time. I could no longer work in the ceramic studio, so I transitioned to papier-mâché, creating my first pieces from newspaper strips and flour. At this time, I also had the impulse to begin sewing onto the paintings – to connect them with fabric straps, sew panels together, and add frames. 

By 2022, I had a sizable collection of large sewn paintings and papier-mâché sculptures – mostly abstract but heavily influenced by my experiences working in the garden. I realized I had a body of work that I was interested in showing and began inviting people for studio visits. In early 2023, I exhibited a selection of work at PS122 for the first time, and I’ve had the opportunity to show a few times since, including here at Satchel Projects, as well as upstate, and to create props for a dance performance through Norte Maar.

5. Garden

Your garden at this moment features 98 flowers and herbs, and 6 types of trees in upstate New York, expanding installation to the scale of an acre. You mentioned you are not spiritual, but interconnection is how many do experience spirituality. What layers exist in nature for you? How do you view the current Hilma af Klint exhibition and her multivalent approach to flowers that interpret character traits through flowers? For example, you grow bellflower, portrayed in the exhibition as a botanical drawing and Guideline: inability to use one’s inate aptiude! (p 54). Milkweed, listed on p 36 as common milkwort, entered June 11, 1919, has a guideline for humility, caution, tact, and accuracy.

My gardening has evolved from an initial desire to use color and form to paint a picture in space toward something more participatory and less controlled—a collection of mostly native varieties placed somewhat haphazardly according to the “right plant, right place” principle where soil and light conditions dictate location. Although I am not spiritual, I find the garden and nature to be awe-inspiring. Life is miraculous. The garden reveals the interdependence of all life forms. Co-existing and shaping nature changes how you want to be in the world—more patient and compassionate, to tread more lightly on the earth. 

Plants display distinct characteristics—some aggressive and dominating, requiring constant management to mitigate their dominance over other plants. In contrast, the delicate ones need extra tending that instills a deep sense of care and nurturing. I prefer to let things go somewhat wild to experience these interrelationships without dictating too much, particularly with weeds, which I allow to run wild for periods to understand their characteristics, how they thrive, and what damage they cause—sometimes through sheer vigor that outgrows and smothers other plants, sometimes through allelopathic chemicals they deposit in the soil.

Hilma af Klint’s exhibition “What Stands Behind the Flowers” reveals her belief that flowers express the human condition, with each bloom linked to specific human emotions, characteristics, or states of consciousness. Her botanical drawings function as both scientific studies and guides to universal forces. To af Klint, “the world of plants represents in matter what nature spirits have absorbed from the intellectual energies of the universe,” encompassing everything from “forms of branches and flowers, numbers of leaves, circulation, root fibers, cell structure, color, aroma, taste, and movement.” While I don’t believe there is an absolute humanlike character that can be attached to a flower, observations in my garden make af Klint’s approach understandable. I am battling an aggressive Creeping Bellflower, an invasive European species, which contrasts sharply with af Klint’s delicate Peach-leaved Bellflower, which she labels with an inability to use one’s innate aptitude.  My humble milkweed varieties, which she equates with humility, are not particularly beautiful but fulfill crucial ecosystem roles as food sources for butterflies and pollinators. Each plant expresses its distinct character through its interactions with other species, its defenses or vulnerabilities, growth patterns, and degrees of heartiness or fragility, as well as the visual aspects of its flowers—form, color, and texture. They could understandably inspire interpretations of personality traits like grace, strength, fragility, or sensuality, providing the foundation for af Klint’s systematic approach to linking botanical observation with spiritual understanding.

6. World Building

Kites fly, space stacks, we zoom from earth to stars and back, traveling the cosmos in a relatively intimate space. What are your intentions for the installation? Has it gone to plan?

Schulz: “One of the many ways that loss instructs us is by correcting our sense of scale, showing us the world as it really is: so enormous, complex, and mysterious that there is nothing too large to be lost—and, conversely, no place too small for something to get lost there. A missing wedding ring can turn the modest geography of an urban park into the Rocky Mountains. … Like awe and grief, to which it is closely related, loss has the power to larger than when something important goes missing.”

Schultz: “Loss may alter our sense of scale, reminding us that the world is overwhelmingly large while we are incredibly tiny. But the act of finding does the same; the only difference is that it makes us marvel rather than despair. In all the vast reaches of space, among all of life’s infinite permutations, out of all the trajectories and possibilities and people on the planet, here I was…”

Our minds are constantly creating these size shifts. What holds our attention becomes large, and what we ignore or forget becomes invisible. You can see these size shifts in a few of the pieces, especially the flowers. 

Andrea Champlin (director) and I discussed various layouts for the show, but she ultimately selected the works and arranged them. The idea was to tell an open-ended story. On one side is night, and on the other is day. The cosmos and the sky appear several times; birds reference the sky again, and the flowers represent the terrestrial. It was important to me that the pedestals be low to the floor so that you looked down on the flowers, much like you would see a flower in nature. The shortness of the pedestals also ensured that the white boxes wouldn’t be too prominent in the room. 

I’m interested in the way we feel about things that are below us or are short, like small children – I didn’t want the sculptures to stare you in the face. The flowers have fronts and backs. One flower greets you as you walk in, the other faces away from you and looks at the painting, Snake in the Garden.” Each of these pieces was made as a discrete work. They are all very different; the space is intimate, and that makes the installation more challenging, I think.

7. Influences

What are some artistic influences, both long-standing and currently?

Gardening, landscape, memory are primary; other influences include Pattern and Decoration, interests in domesticity and fabrics. Among artists CG thinks about: Alan Shields, Matisse, Picasso’s sculpture, Laura Owens’ recent show at Mathew Marks because that scale of installation based painting is pleasing.

We have touched on many of these points, but Matisse has been an important touchstone for me since a very early age. I love his focus on domestic life and the way he breaks down form and leaves a lot unsaid. 

I am particularly interested in craft traditions, especially quilt-making, which I have referenced in the construction of the kite-paintings. 

Laura Owens, enveloping domestic space. My interest in this work dates back to my early projects in installation, where an immersive environment is linked to the kind of trippy ideas I associate with Through the Looking Glass. – scale shifts, big abstract paintings, and tricky little games in the desk and books next door. I like the way she incorporates a variety of art-making traditions, including decorative arts, handmade, and digital. I respond to the way she is always working at the edges of things – one genre glides into another. I like the way she treats painting as an environment that we have to navigate through. Each door opens into another smaller room to explore. I also responded to how joyful and hopeful the work was. It’s essential to recognize the positive aspects of the world and draw inspiration from them, especially in these challenging times that are politically dark. We need hope to guide us out of the very negative place we are in right now.

8. Memory

You’ve described poor memory, where gaps in experience can be filled in by others, to avoid knowing or controlling outcomes. Schulz describes bereavement fallacy in similar terms. How are such lapses visually or materially realized?

Emotion and memory are always intertwined. Strong emotions—whether love or grief—alter our memories and experiences. They say love is blind, but I think love is blinding, creating a lens, like loss, through which everything is filtered. The blindness creates these gaps in perception. It’s something I’ve noticed in myself and something I want to incorporate into the work. I don’t want to tell the whole story. I want to provide pieces of a story for the viewer to find their own place within the work. The space happens through the way images are developed and through the use of materials. 

None of us can fully recall and materialize a sensation or memory. So, vagueness is a pervasive quality that is good to bring into the work. I don’t want to flesh out an idea by making stuff up. In my earliest memory of a garden, I am tiny, maybe on my knees, and I am looking into a patch of what I think must have been tulips. I can sense the velvety softness of the light green stems and leaves, with blobs of pale red and yellow, as the sunlight washes out all the color, evoking a feeling of general freshness and warmth. What I don’t know are the actual shapes of the flowers, the quantity, where I am, or why I am there. These are the gaps in memory that I find interesting. 

Starting from the group of works as a whole, there are gaps between the works, each of which could be seen as an incident or a small situation. It’s not a show featuring a suite of similar works. There are numerous changes from piece to piece. This work embodies my experience, which is not a continuous one. I am not trying to grasp the memory, thought, or experience fully, but rather glide more lightly over it so there is space for others to hopefully enter into the work. The dissimilarities create ruptures in the viewing experience. Starting from the subject matter, my goal is to describe a specific aspect of an experience or memory rather than every detail of it. By keeping it general there is more room for others to attach their own meanings to the pieces. 

A touchstone for me is this idea that comes from Matisse’s drawings. I believe Barbara Rose was the first to describe it. The discontinuous line, or broken line, has gaps, and the viewer makes a mental connection between the discontinuous lines, thereby filling out the form and creating the content. When the work is open in this way, it has more space for others to dwell within it. It is “unfinished” and can only be completed, in many different variations, by the audience that sees it. If this is a way for the image to remain open, then the way materials are used can also keep the work open. I like a bit of sloppy casualness. I’m skeptical of realism, perfectly drawn lines, or modeled space. I want handmade, soft, bumpy, and drippy. No virtuoso. The work ideally should have many gaps for others to contribute to its completion in their minds. Another way to say this is that I try to ask, open, or Suggest but not Answer or Tell. We know our world is in crisis, and the artwork in this room can’t repair that.

Elisabeth’s additional notes:

The gaps represent our interconnectedness and other spaces are not described.

Moving between sensation and image, they will merge and separate.

It’s important to make a mess. Matisse drawing line, leaving gaps in the line. Vision enters through the gaps in the drawing. The viewer completes the line. Matisse’s drawings aren’t hermetically finished but something to be impressed upon by someone else entering it.

She follows the whim, see where the work needs her . She has moved studios frequently in the past years: Brooklyn Plymouth St. to PS.122, to Chashama, then Elizabeth Foundation. She tosses a lot of work that’s not needed.

Shulz: “When they involve seeing, hearing, or sensing the dead, such encounters [re-experiencing a lost one’s presence] are called bereavement hallucinations, and somewhat more than half of people report having experienced them…In all of these cases, and perhaps in bereavement as well, the abrupt withdrawal of familiar sensory input leads the mind to fill in what has always been there before but is suddenly missing.” (p. 57 Lost & Found)