WHEN GRACELEE WATCHED

Tell us a bit about yourself.

I grew up on a small tobacco farm in rural North Carolina in the same house as my great grandmothers, two sisters who adopted my grandfather. I am a lifelong horsewoman and as a teenager placed nationally in Eventing with my capricious chestnut ex-racehorse Tigger. He and I have been together 15 years (he is now 23 years old) and he is as sassy as ever. The story written on the back wall on the third floor of the gallery is about my relationship with him and his attitude towards my past boyfriends. I’m pretty deep into food and started an artisan bagel business, Bagel Babes, in Chiang Mai last year with my dear friend Isa.

When and why did you get into art?

I am so fortunate to come from a family of artists and creatives: my mother is a musician and visual artist; my father an expert maker and amateur engineer; my father’s mother a painter and interior designer; my uncle a woodworker; my mother’s mother and sister seamstresses and my cousin a photographer. I have been making art my whole life, encouraged by all of my family and many others. As a child on any given day my father would teach me how to use power tools or how to fish and then I’d go learn to sew with my mother and grandmother. This dichotomy, or perhaps multiplicity, is at the root of my work. These experiences helped to form early questions around gender, ability and identity that have followed me throughout my life.

When and why did you decide to make art your profession?

During my sophomore year as an undergraduate I made the decision to focus on art rather than horses as my profession. I declared sculpture as my major because of the expanded nature of the field — I have long been besotted with the incredible possibilities of objects. After I made that decision, I wondered why it took so long! Art making had clearly been my calling since childhood and in particular three-dimensional work. Since I took off down this path I haven’t looked back or even stopped for very long to catch my breath.

You make sculptures digitally. Please walk us through this process. What is it that you like about it?

The overall process is a translation of information from physical to digital space and then back to physical reality using a 3D printer and continued analogue manipulation. I collect digital objects in three different ways: sculpting objects in physical reality and then 3D scanning them, building them completely in digital space using the software Rhino 3D, and finding or buying 3D models made by others online. These raw objects are morphed, cut, smashed, pulled and recombined in digital space and formed into the compositions that make up the floor and wall sculptures. Once I have placed the objects in the digital composition, I split the final sculpture into cubes that will fit onto my 27cm² 3D printer. Each wall sculpture is made up of eight to 12 3D printed chunks that are recombined into a whole as the skeleton of the final object. The 3D print is then mummified with many layers of sanded acrylic putty, epoxy putty and resin, and finally painted. This process is appealing to me because of the ability to accurately translate, recombine and digitally skew objects as images. I feel that this process also parallels the translations and psychological travel that takes place between digital and physical reality. I am interested in the space between the screen and the earth, the complicated extractions that happen in order to transport our brains between these two places.

What is it that you don’t like about this process? Why?

While the process allows me to deal with image and digital manipulation in ways that wouldn’t be possible otherwise, so much time spent in the digital space can be frustrating as a tactile person. There is the constant hovering question about the value of analogue versus digital sculpting because of the seeming reliance on digital processes, yet the translation of analogue sculpting to digital space and then back again to physical is a key conceptual and practical aspect of the work. This way of working allows me to use both methods and then combine them into the hybrid form needed in order to fully wrestle with the ideas behind my work.

Tell us more about your intentions for your current exhibition “When Watched”.

“When Watched” is primarily focused on the idea of the gaze, the act of seeing and being seen, and the power that it holds in different sociocultural contexts. The melting/drooling/crying/hydrating facemask ( The Thing the Mirror Cannot Reflect,

2017) on the façade of the building and the four-metre surgical facemask ( Strangers for Each Other, 2017) on the ground level are dealing with objects of protection on the face: the hydrating mask provides the protection of beauty while the surgical mask is a shield of health or to obscure one’s face. Both of these objects are pervasive and deal with the gaze or proximity of others to our bodies. The drawings on the ground floor are spatial maps of interactions between people, either real or from dreams. The drawings are urgent expulsions of colour and form, mostly created without looking at the paper. I want to take my eyes away, remove my gaze and focus on gesture and the translation of interaction from brain to paper. This is the opposite of the wall sculptures on the third floor, objects that have been carefully designed under my eye. These solid, heavy things are meant to soak up the gaze, to hold it in the fragmentary whole that is the object. The floor sculptures on the other hand are like little morsels, meant to quickly bite and chew, each surrounded by a short poem. All of the videos are also dealing with translations between digital and physical space, particularly the ways in which bodies are qualified and quantified depending on context. The poems on the stairs and the story on the back wall of the gallery have all been pushed between Thai and English on Google translate, a negotiation between language and the technologies that (attempt to) keep us connected.

Tell us more about your time with art in Chiang Mai.

My time as a visiting artist in the Multidisciplinary Department of Art at Chiang Mai University has been absolutely wonderful. Over the past year I have formed close relationships with faculty and students in the department. My students, primarily the current fourth years, have taught me so much. While I introduced to them new techniques of making and thinking, they helped me to better understand Thailand and taught me bits of Thai whilst we all learned how to communicate in ways less reliant on spoken language. Working with the incredible Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook, who so kindly invited me to Chiang Mai, has been an invaluable experience. Working with her, both at Chiang Mai University and on her own work, has stretched and pulled my edges in ways that I could have never foreseen. I can’t even explain how powerfully her work and person, has affected my own work and perspective.