Fieldwork: How it began
Since you’re already here looking at my website, you know about my work with leather, but I am also a visual artist, and these two different creative lives don’t typically intersect. I have copied this blog post from my other website, which you can view here, because I want to open up conversation about the limits and expectations we impose on creative workers. I considered simply posting a link to my other blog, but I think the full text should also live here.
My daughter looking at an exhibition, Tate Modern, London
Fieldwork
Fieldwork was the title of one of my first big photography projects. I received some recognition for this, and my first solo exhibition in New York was even reviewed by Vince Aletti in The New Yorker. You can see this project here and read the review here. I chose the title because it touched on several aspects of the project.
The dictionary gives 3 definitions for fieldwork:
• A temporary military structure or fortification made in the field
• The gathering of data for research
• Work done in the field to gain practical, firsthand knowledge
I started this blog as a place to talk about all of the things that feed my life as an artist, and I have a long (and growing) list of topics I plan to cover. One topic was going to be off limits, but I’ve changed my mind about that. Many of us have day jobs. Some of us are instructors (I teach photography), curators, writers, waiters, office workers, and the list goes on. I even have a second day job, and I’ve managed to keep my worlds quite separate. This has been tiring and, I hope, unnecessary.
Gallery Tote, made with cowhide, linen thread, brass
I first started working with leather and started my own leatherwork business, Fieldwork Goods, in 2014. The business name made sense to me on many levels, as I believe this work serves as active and practical material research that is a supplement to my visual research as an artist, and these two creative pathways circle round to delineate the space of my interests in object-making. I have always loved the hands-on processes of film and darkroom photography, and when I started to work more with digital editing I felt my soul desiccating into fragile little piles of dust between me and my monitor. This is when I returned to making useful objects as a way to reactivate my creative energies, first with wood carving and then with hand-sewn leatherwork. What a revelation! I could easily edit images at the computer for several straight hours if I knew I would end the afternoon waxing linen thread and pounding copper rivets.
This is good. You should do it, too. My studio is divided right down the middle, set up for two very separate ways of thinking and making. I am my own studio mate. Did you know that the composer and pianist Philip Glass was also a plumber? He recounted a story to The Guardian about an incident on a domestic plumbing job when his two worlds collided:
“I suddenly heard a noise and looked up to find Robert Hughes, the art critic of Time magazine, staring at me in disbelief. ‘But you’re Philip Glass! What are you doing here?’ It was obvious that I was installing his dishwasher and I told him that I would soon be finished. ‘But you are an artist,’ he protested. I explained that I was an artist but that I was sometimes a plumber as well and that he should go away and let me finish.”
There has long been a suspicion of artists who make a living doing other things, but this bias of privilege really is absurd. Very few people can live off of their art without some other family money, which is the same things as saying very few people can live solely off their art. If you teach, as I do, that’s still a day job. This morning I came across an interesting article by Katy Waldman that was published in The New York Times in 2018. I pulled the Philip Glass quote from there, and the following observation from Waldman also resonated with me, especially her unexpected and validating use of the term “fieldwork”:
“For these creators, a trade isn’t just about paying the bills; it’s something that grounds them in reality. In 2017, a day job might perform the same replenishing ministries as sleep or a long run: relieving creative angst, restoring the artist to her body and to the texture of immediate experience. But this break is also fieldwork. For those who want to mine daily life for their art, a second job becomes an umbilical cord fastened to something vast and breathing. The alternate gig that lifts you out of your process also supplies fodder for when that process resumes. Lost time is regained as range and perspective, the artist acquiring yet one more mode of inhabiting the world.”
This is EXACTLY what my divided studio does for me, and I was quite stunned to see my situation so eloquently articulated. I use traditional processes to sew natural cowhide by hand. I make bags and other objects, and I get to solve dimensional and structural puzzles as I do this. I make objects that will last decades, and they are useful.
My leatherwork does not intersect with my work as a visual artist, but it fuels me. It gives me something physical to do while I step back from pixels on a backlit monitor screen. It replenishes me. I was speaking with a young artist the other day. She also stands with a foot in each world, and she had lots of great questions. As we were speaking, it occurred to me that my leatherwork might satisfy a desire to feel useful and industrious, as a counter to my work as a visual artist. My own observation surprised me, and I think a more precise explanation is that in one studio I make things I want to see, and in the other studio I make things I want to use. Both are equally valid, and both receive my full attention.
When I had my second child, our daughter Maisie, my love for our toddler son Miles wasn’t reduced by half. Instead, I stretched to become a larger, more loving person. This is exactly the same with my studio practice. When I sit down with a needle in each hand to construct a bag, this does not cut my attention to my work in photography. Instead, it energizes it. It’s free fuel. As my hands work through their line of perfect stitches, my energy is replenished as fast as it is burned. I want this for you, too. Find your other thing.
This week I’m featured in The Queue, the blog of the American Craft Council. In May I will be teaching leatherwork at the Penland School of Craft (super excited about this), and there are other interesting things in the works. Meanwhile, I am proud to announce that I was just awarded a substantial grant from the Minnesota State Arts Board to continue work on a photography project that excites the hell out of me (I’ll talk more about this later). For now, think about the things you do that keep you going. If you are still searching, make something. Take a class, squeeze some clay, carve some wood, knit a scarf. This does not diminish your work as an artist—it stretches and fills you. Find your other thing, and support artists who are doing the same.