34 - Chalet Comellas-Baker (with guest co-host Stephanie Raines)—making art among Nashville sounds / May 20, 2021 by Vivian Liddell

Chalet Comellas-Baker on the inspiration for “The Lonesome Cut Up”:

I just watched this really cool documentary, you know, I'm living in Nashville now, so I had to watch that country music Ken Burns deal. So I was thinking about Hank Williams senior. And he wrote this song and the whippoorwill... he mentions the whippoorwill. I had already been looking up how the whippoorwill have been declining in population over the past, like from when he wrote it. This is what I looked up—from 1949 to present. What are the populations, the numbers for the whippoorwill? And they have been in steady decline. So I told him I was like, there's a project here, so I want to do something with this. But I'm not really sure what. One thing I was thinking about was I'll take the lyrics and I'll do this cutup technique. It's something that he used to do. It's something that David Bowie used to do. It's something a lot of musicians did. You just take it and the structure of it inspires the next iteration.

28 - Virginia Griswold—Harnessing Materials with Memory to Convey the Ephemeral / October 1, 2019 by Vivian Liddell

As a mold maker/caster I'm always thinking about sequences of objects and thinking about repetition of objects and the arrangement of things in a way that one object relates to another has been important to me for a long time, I think. So, I think objects all offer individually something to a conversation, but it's often as a collective. They come to be sort of greater than the sum of their parts in terms of conceptually what it could mean. So in this case the fragments are important I think to me in terms of communicating fragility—even sort of an ephemeral quality. There's maybe a question in these objects about if they're finished or if they've been broken. You know, the thing about clay—and actually glass is similar, textiles is similar—the material has a memory. It sort of has a sense of... it carries with it what's been done.

11 - Amelia Briggs—Avoiding Symmetry, Thrifting Materials & Finding her own Voice as an Artist / December 27, 2017 by Vivian Liddell

Amelia Briggs on Connecting with Viewers without Using Narrative:

These are simply very formal paintings. I have finally gotten to a point where I've just been able to own that in interviews or in conversations about my work. I used to try to like hide that or I would make up things that weren't necessarily true (laughs) because I would feel defensive about it. But I was finally just like, I need to be honest about that. Like these to me in a lot of ways are very formal; I'm not thinking about heavy issues necessarily when I'm making these. However, I will say then when you brought up narrative... I do think about that in my work. What am I trying to achieve with these paintings?

I really like to think of these objects that I'm making as something similar to like, you know, when you're shopping in a vintage store or something and you come across an old toy, or like baby blanket or something—maybe stained, it's like a beautiful object, it's just like kind of worn, it has all this history behind it—and this weird feeling of this connection to it, because maybe you recognize something about it from your own childhood. Or the color. Or it sparks this kind of nostalgia. But you don't know what that history is, and there's nothing clearly spelled out there. You know, there's not like a story with it...

I like to think of these as sparking some kind of recognition in the viewer.