Toronto Craft Alert

Interview with Beside Herself: Carolyn Self and Alda Escareño
By Amy Borkwood

Can you tell me first about your backgrounds as individual artists, and what brought you together to work as Beside Herself?

Carolyn: I have three brothers and come from a small town, which means I had to entertain myself while growing up. I spent a lot of time on my own filling sketchbooks and sewing. In high school I taught myself to screen-print so that I could make my own fabrics, and became obsessed with my new potential for making multiples. I even started a printmaking club that, while definitely cool, was not a complete success.

Alda: I was born in Mexico and I feel that a lot of my draw towards art and crafts comes from being surrounded by traditional Mexican crafts when I was young. I discovered printmaking for the first time when I discovered the revolution time woodcuts of José Guadalupe Posada. Inspired by his day of the dead prints, I taught myself relief printing in high school. I haven’t stopped printing since. We both attended the Print Media program at York University where we met. Having worked side by side for a couple of years it was natural to continue working together and eventually collaborate. Beside Herself is the form that this collaboration has taken.

I like how you incorporate so many different printmaking techniques into your work: letterpress, screen-printing, linocut. Do different projects call for different methods, or are you just furthering your exploration of printmaking? Do you think you’ll continue working with so many different techniques?

We try to use printmaking techniques that suit the particular project that we are working on. Different print media have very different effects and we make our decision depending on the final result we have in mind. We are interested in all forms of printmaking and would like to explore new techniques, but are sometimes directed by what we can do in our studio. Printmaking is a laborious medium that requires a wide range of equipment. While this is actually attractive to us, it can also be limiting. Until we have our dream studio, it helps to be resourceful.

Can you tell me a bit about the process of your work? Do you have a studio, do you always work as a team?

Our creative process begins with an idea. One of us will come up with something and throw it out for discussion. If the idea passes this test, we scribble it on a big white board on one of our studio walls and continue talking about it until we have time to begin a new project. Often, these ideas are somehow related to or inspired by work one of us has done. We build off of our own work in this way. Through discussions, we move into an exploration of materials and the more practical brainstorming of logistics. From here things can go in different directions. Both of us are capable to doing all aspects of the work we make so pieces develop intuitively.

Our studio is a tiny spare room in Carolyn’s apt. We’ve never set hours. Alda just shows up in the morning and we work until we’re too tired. The weeks go on like this — presumably until we run out of ideas, which we can’t imagine happening (our white board is covered). We’ve adapted our small working space to meet our needs as much as possible. Works in progress are hung up on lines and on walls in our studio. We’ve got three tables for mixing ink, ripping paper and screen-printing/ drawing/ sewing/ everything else. We don’t have a dark room, but we do have a linen closet. We expose our screens under one of the tables with an old windowpane to hold the images in place. We wash them out in a bathroom shower stall that has a 25 ft garden hose and nozzle installed in place of a showerhead. As for working together, we defiantly team up as much as we can. Even when we’re living in different cities we find ways to collaborate.

I want to know more about the teeth: they seem to permeate so much of your work.

Teeth are a reoccurring theme for us, we are interested in all their possible meanings. Primarily, motifs of lost teeth figure as symbols of anxiety or fear of change in our work. In one of our screen-prints, inspired by reoccurring dreams of tooth loss, the teeth fall from a mouth and are lost while plants grow upward from the bottom of the print. In this work we are exploring the potential for growth during periods of loss. In our button cards we are playing with the desire to buy and replace something as intimate and unique as adult teeth, with the same ease as you would a button. We’re so enthralled with teeth that we’re actually going to be participating in a group show called Loosing Teeth in the New Year. We’ll post details about this on our blog shortly.

You make both art prints and wearable art objects, like scarves and buttons. Do you notice a different response, or a different value assigned to your work based on whether it falls under “art” or “craft”?

While we use craft techniques and are interested in the tensions between “art” and “crafts”, we approach all our work as our artwork. For the most part, whether it is our buttons or our prints, we feel that people do read into the work as they would any other work of art. We notice viewer recognition of the questions we are raising and an appreciation for the piece’s materiality. We are aware that we aren’t exactly what people expect when they think “art,” but we’re comfortable with this.

What are your ideas for the future, as a collaborative duo, as well as individually?

We always have a lot of ideas in various stages of development. At the moment, we’re working on a series of shadowboxes based on some working prototypes we have on our website. These interactive shadowboxes have a “pull-tab,” like in children’s pop-up books. The tab allows the viewer, or controller, to literally “toy” with the figure who is inside the box. We’re also in the process of designing and printing a new series of dolls based on a set that made earlier in the year. You can see this original set at this year’s Hard Twist show at the Gladstone.

While most of the works we have been making are of relatively small scale, we have big ideas. In the future, we’d love to work in installation and create more conceptually complete bodies of work through series.

What influences your work, art-related and otherwise? What artists/makers are inspiring you lately?

Our print-media mentors from York University, Barbara Balfour and David Scott Armstrong have had a massive influence on both our conceptual and technical understanding of print. It has been a while since we were in their classes but we still think of them often.

In a nerdy and self-reflexive way, our works are greatly influenced by certain inherent qualities found in print media. We are inspired by the reproducibility of printmaking and greatly influenced by both cultural traditions of handcrafting and mass production. Not only do we produce work in multiples but we often make work about multiples or twins etc.

Beyond this, countless things we come across in our everyday lives inspire us: things happening in the city, the work of other young artists, colloquial language and printed ephemera.

I just noticed on your new site that you had your fabric doilies around town on Nuit Blanche — can you tell me how that project came about, and the idea behind it?  What ended up happening with the doilies — were there any left in the morning?

This project came about when we finally had to admit to ourselves that the original project we had been planning for Nuit Blanche was far too ambitious to put together in time. Still wanting to participate in the festivities of the night, we had to start from scratch on a something new the afternoon before the event. This idea of adorning public spaces with decorative clusters of multi-coloured, hand screen-printed doilies came naturally. We had been working with imitation doilies in a few different projects and had been living surrounded by doilies for a few weeks. We are fascinated by the tradition of doilies and antimacassars and appreciate them for their beauty, fine craftsmanship, resourcefulness and charming ridiculousness.

Doilies are meant to beautify and elevate an interior by both decorating the space, and covering-up stains or imperfections. In one sense, we can relate to the ambition behind their creation. Our art practice too begins with limited and simplistic materials, much like thread, that we must transform into a works that, while remaining grounded in their materiality, must allude to something beyond themselves. We knew we did not want to create true crocheted doilies though, we wanted to create flat printed versions in mass quantity to reach far beyond our private space, to decorate space and objects otherwise unembellished. 

With only an afternoon to get the project done, we set to printing as many doilies as we could. After 6 hours, we had printed, cut and stamped more than 600 doilies, just the two of us.

Near the end of which we found ourselves performing on physical memory alone without a wasted movement, sitting on the floor in our studio amidst piles of doilies. We were machines on a mission, and as soon as we finished making them we hopped on our bikes and set out to decorate the city. Strategically arranging small groupings of printed doilies, we adorned ATMs, doorways, staircases, newsstands, hallways and lost objects.

We can’t be sure of what happened to each of the doilies, but when we happened to double back on a space we had already decorated we found groups of people touching and collecting them as we had hoped.