Through a process that involves collecting an assemblage of found objects ranging from abandoned furniture to discarded materials and past-price flowers, the Seattle-based artist and academic Ellen Garvens sculpts vignettes that she then photographs or films, resulting in compositions of suspension which manage to be both awkward and precise. She is inspired to reassemble and repurpose in unlikely, often precarious ways, forming arrangements that disorient and reimagine. The resulting images suggest the potential to escape the mundane and animate new sets of ideas.
Garvens’s solo show, ‘Holding Unsteady‘, is on at Koplin Del Rio Gallery in Seattle through 5 November 2022.
Q > Can you tell us a little bit about who and what inspires your work and influences your practice?
A > I love to look at lots of different kinds of work. I’m drawn to multiple linear marks piled up on each other in drawings, surprise movements of the natural world, and the simplicity of certain sculptures. These things urge me to continue.
Q > Your work intertwines various mediums, such as sculpture, photography and drawing — tell us a bit more about these overlaps and how has your approach to art changed over the years?
A > As a small kid I Scotch taped things together — enough so [that] my mom hid the roll. I’m still doing the same thing! I approach mediums through the lens of another, poking at photography through the lens of drawing and sculpture and vice versa. Combining things, including the flat and the dimensional, is a way to force a redefinition.
Q > Tell us about your relation with the objects you select for your spatial compositions — and how, directly or indirectly, you use these to explore socio-political themes.
A > I collect different objects for colour, texture, and domestic references. They tend to be generic, and not valuable. For example, the furniture used is often out of fashion and left on the street. I enjoy using materials that are not associated with art making — like pasta, popcorn, old shoes, balloons, golf pencils.
At the same time I listen to the news in transit between home and the studio. The tension of contemporary life is definitely a part of the work. For example, Division is the title of one piece done in 2020 during the election. In it, an aloe plant is precariously balanced, almost stretched between two strings. I was thinking about the fragility of our system, of things pulling apart until the breaking point. The connection to socio-political things is indirect, and sometimes made after the completion of the work, but definitely a part of it.
Division, 2020. Archival inkjet print, edition 1/3
Q > Could you tell us about the creative process involved behind the work you’re currently exhibiting at Koplin Del Rio Gallery, in your solo show ‘Holding Unsteady’?
A > This work spans from 2018–2022. During that time, I changed studios multiple times, each one opening up different possibilities. My studio in the summer of 2018 had white floors. That brought the ability to visually flatten the space in new ways. During an artist in residence in Italy, during the lockdown in Spring 2021, I created work in each room of my apartment there. I included the walls and ceilings experimenting with perspective in new ways. I also, for the first time, created videos outside in the formal garden of Villa I Tatti. It was very challenging but it resulted in some new ideas about video. The studio I am in now is larger and the set ups have gotten bigger and more complicated. For all the work, my creative process involves curiosity, circumstance and trust.
Q > In a few words, what do you hope that viewers take from this body of work?
A > Pleasurable discomfort.
Q > Does your work as an art professor and your art practice ever overlap or influence each other?
A > They must. I have spent a lot of time with students, critiquing work, guiding them in their process. They have influenced me and I them. Looking at other artists’ work legitimises ideas. There are so many ways to approach the work, so many paths to take. Maybe it is freeing to me as an artist to be exposed to so many different artists.
Q > Which things would you like more of and less of in your life?
A > More exercise. Less bureaucracy.
Q > What patterns, routines or rituals define or help to shape your life and its rhythms?
A > With that question I immediately had an image of things swiftly flowing by me while on a walk. It is like travel; my mind is open to ideas while physically moving through different spaces. Seemingly opposite is my ritual of making a lot of to-do lists. The pleasure of crossing things off, moving through one’s mundane duties towards a clean slate, resolution or goal. Common to both, I do not hold still for long.
Q > What is one of the biggest lessons you’ve learnt so far on your journey as an artist?
A > Trust in the process.
Q > Where do you see yourself taking your work in the next few years?
A > It will shift. My studio will change. I still love the possibilities between drawing, sculpture and photography. I suspect I might lean into drawing and sculpture in a different way, while still embracing all three.
Ellen Garvens is a professor at the University of Washington School of Art, chair of the Photomedia Program. She received a B.S. at the University of Wisconsin (1979) and a MFA from the University of New Mexico (1987). She has received a Fulbright–Hayes Scholarship, National Endowment for the Arts Individual Fellowship Grant, and an Artist Trust /Washington State Fellowship. In 2021, Garvens was an artist in residence at I Tatti, The Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies. Her work has been shown nationally and internationally and featured in Each Wild Idea by Geoffrey Batchen, Contact Sheet by Light Work, and the journals Creative Camera and Visual Studies.
Currently, she photographs temporary set-ups that mimic drawings and play with visual illusion. Her work has consistently been a cross between photography, drawing and sculpture often blurring the boundaries between them. Also interested in documentary work, between 2003 and 2010 she made a series of photographs in prosthetic clinics in the U.S., Cambodia, Laos and Thailand. The images were then used as a catalyst to hear and record stories and thoughts from the patients, prosthetists and researchers.
