FOTOGRAFIA/PHOTOGRAPHY - LENSCULTURE: "Interview Clay Feet ... Photographs by Rebecca Horne Interview by Sophie Wright"

Interview Clay Feet Blending self-portraiture, still life, and mythic gesture, Rebecca Horne’s “Clay Feet” charts the unstable terrain of transformation as an embodied act of making, unmaking, and reclaiming the female image. Photographs by Rebecca Horne Interview by Sophie Wright The encyclopedic collection of images that make up Rebecca Horne’s Clay Feet explore what it is to create a new self. Slipping in-between different materials, still lifes and self-portraits, old images excavated from the past and new ones crafted by the artist, she maps out a world where meaning is unstable. Embracing contradiction, the project grapples with finding a way to navigate uncertain waters and capture the process of “aging and growing at the same time.” Inspired by the German art historian Aby Warburg’s mammoth work the Bilderatlas Mnemosyne—an unfinished, ever-changing cluster of printed matter pinned onto wooden panels, tracing gestures and themes across images throughout history—Clay Feet inserts the artist’s own body into the mix. Horne’s embodied inquiry takes place against the backdrop of art history; an act of resistance against the way women’s bodies have been represented across time. In this interview for LensCulture, Horne speaks to Sophie Wright about the themes enveloped in her personal atlas, using photography to process change and her first encounter with Warburg’s work. Sophie Wright: There’s a beautiful anecdote you mention in your statement about archeology digs you visited with your father. Can you tell me more about what has shaped your approach to photography? RH: My dad was an archeologist. I remember, at least once, being the only one to find an artifact on a dig—I think it was partly because I was closer to the ground, but also because I was so into it. The part that captivated me wasn’t just the finding of things; it was the idea that there was an entire culture with a whole system that was now invisible but existed in that space and time. And the stories that these little fragments could tell—a piece of a vase could show us what people were eating and how they made their food as well as what kind of technologies they used. But it was always a flawed, incomplete picture, or an echo. SW: What were your first subjects, and how has that changed up until now in your most recent work? RH: During my BFA at San Francisco Art Institute I experimented and tried my hand at everything from metalworking to printmaking and film. Sometimes I would dress in drag and take self portraits, but I would also just go about my daily business dressed as a man. I would wear vintage suits, slick my hair back and apply makeup called beard stipple to make a five o’clock shadow. I noticed how I took up more space and held my body differently. And when I think about this and the work I’m making now I do see a connection—I’m still asking questions about masculinity. The SFAI photo department had a big landscape tradition that I rejected. There was an emphasis on process and antique technologies. I learned that I’m interested in ideas and not so much the delivery. I don’t really care whether what I’m using is digital or analog. I just want it to be a simple delivery system for the picture I’m interested in making. SW: You started with self-portraiture early on, then became more interested in the everyday and the objects that populate it—but in this project you’re coming back where you started. RH: Maybe I am embracing some of the themes that were resonating at the time—in a more sophisticated way, I hope. I haven’t made any self portraiture for well over 20 years, so this was a big shift and a really different space, to be doing it again in my fifties. SW: Can you tell me about the seed of your latest project Clay Feet? How did it start? Would you say it grew from something you’ve done before or does it mark a step in a different direction? RH: I always wanted to make a very rich encyclopedic book with lots of categories and subcategories. Clay Feet includes works which are more engaged with still life and have their own ideas attached to them. But the envelope is art history—and the idea of transformation and metamorphosis, myths, gestures, combined with the styles in which the images are made. I’m not just riffing on Renaissance imagery, but also modern traditions like cubism, surrealism and minimalism. The project is a container that holds all of those things, which is convenient because I’m prolific—or at least that is what my friends say. The very first spark or inkling to Clay Feet was a photobook, Men Untitled by Carolyn Drake. There was something in it that connected with the rage that I felt. I think I drew on those feelings last summer when I was in a state of extreme liberation. I had ended a long relationship with a controlling man and my son moved off to college. The person who I had made breakfast, lunch and dinner for every day for 17 years had left home. I had more time and that was really profound to me—it became an explosively creative period. I was also more than a little angry about how much time had been taken from me, as an artist, while I had tried to fulfill the roles that were expected of me. I just started exploring this really raw, visceral space, asking who I was outside of motherhood, stepping into a new time of life and fully embracing it. I played at embodying various anti-maternal figures in my pictures and in my life. Physically I was becoming stronger. I could swim, train, I could test my endurance, I could make and perform art. I could have younger men as muses. So this personal shift combined with a lot of other ideas.

SW: There’s a performative element to the work that is definitely in your previous projects but perhaps never as intimate. Does it feel therapeutic? RH: That word therapeutic is key because there was a kind of emotional intensity to what I was doing and it was so demanding. Each day before I went into the studio I would think, “Can I really do this?” Now some of the pictures have moved outside. It started with these private performances and then evolved into public ones that are still somewhat intimate. It’s been somewhat vulnerable now that I’m showing the work to people too, because when I’m making these pictures, I’m really in it. The making is a part of the process that I really care about—the moment of performance, whether I’m working with a model, myself, or someone’s helping me, or I’m alone, is important. Maybe it is some kind of proto-drama therapy. Sometimes it feels that way. That was the cauldron from which Clay Feet emerged. I was training for an open-water race while working on the project. I felt physically powerful and proud of my body for what it could do. Becoming stronger let me explore the world in new ways, to face challenges in a different way than in the studio.

SW: Tell me about the materiality of clay and what it means to you in the context of the project? RH: Well, clay is the primordial mud, right? It’s the origin of everything, what we evolved from. It’s difficult to work with. I found it immovable, almost impossible compared to paper, which is another material I use a lot. It was a good metaphor for the effort involved in transitions and change. And I was working with this incredibly awkward moment of trying to make clay feet for myself—to take control and make a new way to move in the world. It’s absurd, but it’s also somehow profound. To imagine something really different, outside of daily life. It’s difficult and messy but it’s something that’s really happening. Clay feels like some kind of analog for the human body—it starts out malleable, but then becomes static, fixed.

SW: There’s a sense of agency there, of moulding your own image. You also mention Aby Warburg and his Mnemosyne Atlas as an influence which is almost the polar opposite of making your own image—these huge collections of archetypal images. Can you tell me more about your encounter with his work? What drew you there and how would you describe your interventions? RH: The agency part is important. One of the figures that I adopted from the Atlas is Fortuna. She’s the goddess of fortune, often seen standing on a globe or navigating a boat with her dress doubling up as a sail. I like the idea that she’s taken the veil that her body has been covered with and she’s using it to move through the world. I adopted her as a figure of charting your own course. I first discovered Aby Warburg’s Atlas online when I was about halfway through this project and I was electrified. The hair on the back of my neck stood up. I couldn’t even believe what I was seeing—it connected with what I’m doing in such a profound way. Warburg also worked in collections of images, always changing them, working with categories, iterations and a universe of associations. He photographed on black panels, with his bookshelves showing at the edges, just as I had done. He left the project unfinished, which captivated me and made me feel like I had permission to enter the work. To me, he seems more of an artist than a historian. I think it’s also really interesting how he has baffled so many scholars. Sometimes it’s pretty obvious what the connections are between the images, but often they are not at all clear. And that’s mysterious. It’s a space that I just love stepping into.

SW: Tell me more about working with the female body, and specifically, your body in these images. RH: It was this moment of literally, physically moving my pictures into this echoing stream of imagery and art history. It felt provocative, like I was doing something that was perhaps not allowed. It was definitely an act of resistance, but also saying: “I’m part of this and I’m not going to be ignored.” In much of art history, you don’t see female artists—instead you see women’s bodies represented by men. In photography traditions, it’s the same. Even now we are supposed to congratulate men that are making tiresome nudes of women and regurgitating those traditions.

SW: While your previous work revolved around the slow changes of daily life, some projects taking an interest in a scientific approach of observation, Clay Feet looks at transformation through a more mythological lens. What did this new framework give you? RH: Last July, as a part of my job as an art director, I went to the International Neuroscience conference at the Paris Brain Institute, the Pitié-Salpêtrière which has been there since the 1600s. It is considered by many as the birthplace of neurology and neuroscience. There are a few images from the Pitié-Salpêtrière in Warburg’s Atlas. Jean-Martin Charcot had a photography studio and artists working there, producing a huge amount of imagery of women that were essentially held captive there. I think the myth-making and the science happened at the same time. The idea of uncovering women, possessing them, uncovering the secrets of the reproductive system and cutting into it—all of these things were connected to the process of obtaining knowledge. The female body is used to to personify ideas, such as nature, truth, justice, and often in contradictory ways. Naked or draped female bodies in public places are invested with cultural values in a way male bodies are not. This summer I made a set of images where a female figure is completely covered by a veil or draped in fabric. Ludmilla Jordanova’s book Sexual Visions talks about the hierarchies of medicine, biology and cutting into the tissue of the body layer by layer and the blending of scientific methods of observation with earlier Greek and Roman ideas of physiognomy and truth. In these classical sculptures, there’s always draped fabric that reveals and conceals at the same time. SW: In mythology we get all of these ambivalent physical transformations that have these kinds of impossible entanglements with the environment, like the way that Daphne turns into the tree. RH: The Daphne story feels complicated. Is she escaping a rapist? Is Apollo a lover? What’s happening? There’s a lot of violence in those images of her turning into a tree that I find really difficult to look at. I thought about the physical feeling of becoming a tree when planning the shoots. Is there movement, rigidity, pain, pleasure, relief? I think this idea of becoming—becoming a monster, becoming nature—or extending and transforming the body is interesting. I love the German artist Rebecca Horn and Joan Jonas’ early work which explores changing the shapes of the body in space—that really resonates with me. In Clay Feet, for example, you see a woman drawing with a cone attached to her head—it’s this idea of creating something that is very difficult to do, barely possible. It’s like being a female artist in some ways. Are you a unicorn? Are you a dunce? A lot of the images are exploring that instability of meaning.

SW: Images that allow for contradictions, not fixing something down into one reading. And as Aby Warburg never actually ‘ended’ the Atlas, constantly moving them around on these big panels, how are you thinking of the end point of your own collection? RH: That’s what I’m grappling with right now. I’m a little afraid to end Clay Feet the book version—I have so many pictures, and too many ideas so I have to make hard decisions. I don’t think I’m done with the project overall. It keeps evolving. I’m still completely fascinated with it. Sometimes magic happens: I will make a picture and then later discover an Atlas image I hadn’t seen yet, with striking similarities. Where did these images come from? Dreams? Art? Are they part of a collective unconscious? The subconscious? Warburg was asking these questions, too, I think. Throughout this project, I saved readings for myself until I was done with large groups of the images. I didn’t want anything to interrupt the vibrations I was receiving from the Atlas. I didn’t want to learn too much about Warburg and discover things I didn’t like—but so far, it has had the opposite effect. Turns out that Warburg’s mental illness was a rare disorder that led him to think he was becoming a werewolf. He was fascinated with Fortuna, and had a medallion of her that he prized and hid… maybe she was a kind of talisman. Learning these things made me feel differently about the creatures in the atlas, and putting myself in amongst them. My plan at the moment is to keep pulling on these threads until I’ve explored them all, or until my interests lead me elsewhere.

Rebecca Horne Rebecca Horne United States http://rebeccahornephotography.com/ View Profile https://www.lensculture.com/rebecca-horne