Interview with artist Carrie Iverson

I met Carrie Iverson at the Pilchuck Glass School in 2008. It was a growing time for me there - and I encountered glass as art medium for first time. Carrie was able to read into my work and interests at that time and gently introduced me to artists and ideas that later influenced my work. There is a mutual understanding and respect, I believe, for each other and works we create - and that sort of thing becomes essential in friendship with artists. She is a printmaker, painter, and glass artist, often combining various media into installations.

Carrie is currently finishing up her residency in Scotland and will head back to her current city, Portland.

About a year ago, I did an interview with Carrie about her work. Her transparent answers were helpful for me at that time and I got reminded of that interview recently. So here it is. I hope you find her insights helpful as well. 

 

Interview with artist Carrie Iverson (2009)

Gyun Hur:  You are currently based in Portland. Could you tell me a little bit about 

Portland and people and the art scene? What about Portland that suits and reinvigorates 

your studio practice? What drew you to Portland?

Carrie Iverson:  I've been in Portland for about nine months, so I'm still getting

acclimated and discovering the scene. There is a thoughtful and

introverted quality to the work here that resonates with me- it feels

very personal and vulnerable; industrial yet delicate. There is also a

strong non-commercial and collaborative tradition here which appeals

to me; it has been a great environment to refocus on content in a more

leisurely way.

I lived in Portland briefly after college, and have always loved the

city. A few years ago I started working in glass and began making

periodic trips here to study at the Bullseye Glass Company. My

developing relationship with them- I am now represented in their

gallery, and work and teach at their factory- was a major part of my

decision to move back to the city.  I feel like there is a new

movement in glass coalescing here, and it is exciting to be a part of

that.

On the personal side I had also just gone through a period of intense

upheaval (ending a long term relationship) and was looking for an

environment that was nurturing yet still urban. Although it is a small

city there is a great deal of innovation going on in industrial design

and a thriving environmental movement. It is also linked into the west

coast art nexus from San Francisco to Seattle to Vancouver.

In addition to developing as an epicenter for glass, I also have a

strong intuition that Portland is going to emerge as a significant art

center in the current economy. There are a lot of young artists moving

here, and an innovative non-commercial sensibility.

G.H.:  Where were you before?

C.I.:   I grew up in south central rural Virginia where my father was a philosophy

professor at Hampden-Sydney College, a small all male

Liberal arts college. I then went to Yale as an undergraduate,

spending four years in New Haven, CT. After college I moved to

Portland, OR where I worked a variety of jobs (bartender, cook,

waitress, etc.) and set up my studio. I missed the intellectual

engagement of school, and decided to attend the School of the Art

Institute of Chicago for graduate school. I was in the first class of

their interdisciplinary MFA in writing, and focused on learning offset

printing and artist's books. I then stayed in Chicago for twelve

years, connecting with both the printmaking and conceptual art scene.

G.H.: I am curious about how your art career started to unfold. Was there a pivotal point (it could be a place, a project, a person, an event...) in your life, which became a platform of you becoming an artist?

C.I.:  I have always used art as a way to process my experiences. Initially

my focus was on examining the inter-layering of my own memories, but

my interest has gradually shifted to creating more interactive

environments that incorporate the viewer as well.

I think my preoccupation with the processes of memory can be traced to

my childhood. Although I grew up on a college campus as the child of

academics, that campus was located in a very rural and primarily black

southern community. As is probably typical of a bi-cultural child, I

viewed myself as partially belonging to both groups but fully

belonging to neither.

 

This cultural disparity was also exaggerated by historical factors; my

particular county in Virginia was saturated in history—from the civil

war to the civil rights movement—and the presence of those events was

still palpable in the air. For example, the school I attended for

twelve years chose to close rather than integrate during the civil

rights movement. At the time I entered elementary school, there was

still implicit segregation and my parents were criticized for sending

me to the predominately black public school instead of the local all

white private school. There were also physical remnants of history all

around—from abandoned slave cabins, mass confederate graves, and civil

war trenches to the division of the town into black and white

neighborhoods.

The need to be able to read multiple sets of cultural signals also

heightened my perceptive abilities and made me more attentive to the

inflections and nuances of language.  As a child, I would hear the

story of Lee’s surrender at Appomattox, then the story of a slave who

be-headed his master in the field with a scythe. Although only one of

these stories is officially historical, both showed me how my town and

community perceived itself.

Consequently I spent a lot of time exploring abandoned buildings and

houses- in the woods near my parent’s house there was a whole

abandoned community of “freemen” houses built right after the civil

war. In most of them the kudzu and the vines had taken over, leaving

brick chimneys and sometimes even just vines in the shape of a house.

There was also a more recently abandoned church camp, which had rows

of beds, books, magazines- even clothes and shoes. It was eerie, as

though the people had just left, and would be back momentarily. There

were trenches, and tree stands and roadside shrines. Everything was

always perpetually falling apart, splitting and being spliced back

together.

G.H.:  I would like to revisit your project Wake in 2006. I think it has brought a lot of attention, not only because of its political assessment in the situation with Iraq at that time, but also its public and poetic gesture in creating a memorial. Could you talk about how the project started and the process of you gathering archives of information of these soldiers? 

C.I.:  It started out, in fact, with the Façade Project in 2004. I was

working as a printmaking tech in Chicago. The studio was beautiful, and its

building was half vacant. I kept having an urge that there is something that

I could do in that space. I was on my research on the soldiers in Iraq at that

time, and I thought perhaps the images of these soldiers could be somehow

complied as a memorial. The process was quite simple. Once I had a collection

of portraits, I photocopied them and started to tape on the windows.

The lights illuminated from the inside of building at night was allowing

these portraits to be seen in the most beautiful ways. Many people responded

to this project, especially because of our situation with Iraq at that time.

Then after two years, I was commissioned by the Brooklyn Public Library

to do a similar piece. One of the critiques on the Façade Project was

the absence of the Iraqi soldiers. So that element was added in blank

sheets of paper with individual’s names printed.

G.H.:  How was your interaction with the public while installing your piece at Brooklyn Public Library? Did people's infused political and personal views affect the way you were installing the project?

C.I.:  People responded with a lot of emotions. The dialogues that

I started to have with the real people who were being affected by the

event was incredible. Many told me about their own family members

who were in Iraq, and anxiety, frustration, and sometimes pride came up

in the conversations. I exactly knew how I wanted to execute the piece,

so being in a public space installing did not affect my work, yet impacted

my process of making this project.

G.H.:  You recently have been working more with glass. You talk about glass’s evocative delicacy as well as its harshness. To me, the material seems quite contrary to printmaking paper and its process. How did you come in contact with this material glass and what about glass that you found intriguing in addition to your printmaking studio work?

C.I.:  When I was traveling in Northwest few years ago, I saw a show

that infused printmaking and glass, which I thought as incredibly intriguing.

In fact, it was with the Bullseyes co., and they were also conducting a few

work shops during their show. I took a fusing glass workshops and ever

since then, I have been using glass. Glass art, to me, can be challenging,

because of its delicacy that a tendency of glass art product can be very limited.

It is where I started allowing other processes of making images into glass

I found an attraction. Its tangibility and fragility, I think, works beautifully

in my interest of encapsulating the memories.

FACADE PROJECT
Site specific installation, laser printed photos, 2004

FACADE PROJECT
Site specific installation, laser printed photos, 2004

Thank you, Carrie.