I felt affirmed in my desire to do work with the body. It occurred to me then that the body might be different from the figure. To me, the body is that which is happening, alive, mutable, unfixed. A figure is, just as it sounds, a thing, a graphic.
Figurative artist Ghislaine Fremaux talks about the constant learning it takes to be a better teacher, her process of finding expression through the human figure, and her upcoming work with digital media.
Take us to the beginning of your story. How did your tryst with art begin?
Like a lot of people, I drew and sculpted frequently as a child. I remember taking deep pleasure in both. Clay was a means of world-building and invention. Drawing was cerebral and took labor. I used it as my mirror. I remember going through a very difficult puberty and making so many drawings of my changing face.
I was able to practice art because of the support of my family. I was first taught and mentored by my aunt, a painter and illustrator, who reified the possibilities of choosing art. My cousin and I grew up together under her tutelage, spending whole weekends drawing at the dining room table.
What is the primary role of an artist? How do you describe yourself in the context of challenging people’s perspectives via your teaching work and art?
I’ll speak only of my own responsibilities and actions as a maker of things. I feel that I inherited a very faulty perceptual program for reckoning embodiment, consent, nudity, and desire. I feel that this program is a common inheritance, and works to maintain a culture of shame, bigotry, binarism, and coercion. My work seeks to depose and recast long-established, harmful ways of making, accessing, and understanding sexual images of people.
As a teacher, I am trying to lead students to their own voice. I am trying to help them make honest statements that are effectively communicated. That word, “honesty” should not be understood as something beholden to truth or illusionism. Only the student can know what is honest. My duty is to equip them with methods for finding, testing, extending, and articulating it.
Tell us about the challenges of your teaching job. How do you deal with the conceptual difficulty and uncertainty of creating new work?
For me, teaching requires adaptability, spontaneity, sincerity, and vigilant art historical, cultural, and sociopolitical study. One should often update their intellectual and technical software, as it were, in order to serve student needs, interests, and learning styles. Each student asserts themselves in an idiosyncratic language; I must become conversant with that language, such that I can individualize my instruction. I will never stop learning how to be a better teacher. Of course, teaching is only one dimension of my university job. Research is valued as highly by my institution, and service demands sizable investments of time and focus. Regarding new work, risk-taking does not come so easily to me nowadays. As a faculty member, the need to amass a consistent record of achievement can inhibit experimentation in the studio. My studio time is limited, and I lose much of it to cogitating and writing about new ideas, rather than materializing them. When the new work comes, it follows from long gestational periods.
Lets talk about the evolution of your practice over the years. Tell us about your commitment to your current medium.
“Commitment” is the proper word. I am ardently committed to drawing. It is a means of interrogating and excavating the matter of the world. It takes place at the interfacing of two pressures: my hand that lays the chalk, and the resistance of the wall behind the paper. It is the flesh of the world (Merleau-Ponty) folding up onto itself, touching itself. It is intimate and physical, and it engages the very skin of the fingers. I cannot use a paintbrush. It feels like working under a restraining order.
I have experimented considerably with other media, but drawing holds me. I sculpted a great deal in college, which for some reason felt more like drawing than painting did – assembling, attaching, making a thing that had ‘bones’, an armature, structural integrity. I never came at painting that way. Paint seemed to surrender itself too easily, spilling across and bleeding out everywhere, too pliable and too easy to pave over. Drawing exposes itself differently. And a drawing on paper is a very exposed thing. Unframed, it [pro]claims its own vulnerability and humility.
Lets talk about your career. What were your biggest learnings and hiccups along the way?
With regard to practical efforts, I’ve continually re-strategized the shipping, handling, and installation of my work. Because I do not frame it, I’ve learned to communicate with gallerists and curators who may be discomfited by its material fragility or unpolished display. I’ve had a lot of work severely damaged in transit or in hanging, and have endeavored to correct for such risk.
I’ve also experienced the hardship of letting important professional relationships lapse. When I relocated from the northeast to the Texas panhandle, I really struggled to nourish those relationships, especially those which were new at the time. I wish that transition had been easier, and that my network had better survived it.
What is your experience of the power of formative collaborations? Which residency, curator or gallery helped you along on your artistic journey?
When I participated in the Nicaraguan Biennial in 2014, Omar Lopez-Chahoud organized a collaboration between Milena Garcia (Managua, Nicaragua) and me. It was one of the most powerful experiences of my life. As a collaborator, Milena received me with such openness. Our work together redefined drawing for me, shifting it fully into process, independent of product, and as a means of witnessing, giving testimony, and performance.
Lets talk about your frameworks, references and process. What inspires you?
Certainly personal experiences and relationships are the wellspring of my work. I consume a lot of continental philosophy and critical theory, which act as clarifying and magnifying eyeglasses as I parse the thing of interest.
Most of my work is instigated by other people, when they invite me to draw them. Typically, I do not select and approach people to make work with, and prefer instead to be approached by them. Typically, when artists ask people to “model” for them, they are seeking to ‘make use’ of that person, on account of the beauty they possess or the demographic they represent. I do not want to do that. I want the other person to enter into the work volitionally, actively, with trust and with a will to be seen. The work is about the very intersubjective encounter between us, and is principally a relational event of beholding and holding space for one another.
To offer a different scenario regarding ideation and process: Skin of Years originated in a conversation with my mother, in which she spoke about her cousin, a man of almost 70 years living with Parkinson’s disease, who had begun practicing social nudism. This gave me real cause to ask, what does nudity ‘mean’, what is its value for people who are older and who are sick in visible, physical ways? I began researching gymnosophy and gerontology, identified a brilliant collaborator, and secured funding for the project.
What are you looking for when you review artists’ work? Who are your maestros?
Into Me/Out of Me (at MoMA PS1, 2006) changed my life. I was 19. I saw Mona Hatoum, the Viennese Actionists, and Tony Matelli for the first time there. The show was organized around three registers of embodied experience – metabolism, reproduction, and violence – and was terrifying, sensual, and exhilarating. I felt affirmed in my desire to do work with the body. It occurred to me then that the body might be different from the figure. To me, the body is that which is happening, alive, mutable, unfixed. A figure is, just as it sounds, a thing, a graphic.
Right now I am following the work of Simone Yvette Leigh, Dalton Gata, and Marie Lou Desmueles. My friends Devin Shimoyama and Danny Ferrell are luminaries, and the heavy, beautiful books that will be written about them will be wonders to read.
More than anything, I guess I appreciate any work that is brave.
How do you balance art and life?
I’m not sure that I have found a balance between these. I work constantly and feel guilty when I don’t. I take rest in time with my partner, Lando. He is an artist, too, so we often run parallel to each other in both work and the bits of leisure we eke out of our days. He is an emotional and physical tonic, and an intellectual and artistic stimulant.
What was your first sale? Do you handle the commercials yourself or is it outsourced to a gallery/agents?
My first notable sale was from a juried show. The work was entitled “Take”. It was a chalk drawing on a soft collage comprised of a shower curtain, bed sheets, and clothing. It was about pleasure, kink, the ugliness and the eruption, of orgasm.
Sales of this sort happen periodically. Otherwise, I am at the wheel of my own commercial enterprise.
The Duality. Artists often experience contradicting motivations (commercial v/s creative). How do you strike a balance?
I am a less commercially-oriented artist. I want to do good research and have it seen and responded to, but am not as concerned with selling. My professorship enables me to develop interdisciplinary projects, apply for funding, and exhibit regularly, which are my primary objectives. But along these lines, I can offer that while at work in the studio, I am attuned to those tasting notes of “salability” as they emerge. Indulging thoughts of salability gives me anxiety and hampers my creative decision-making. When I set out to devise a project based on expected marketability, rather than on earnest intent, I waste my own time.
This makes me think of Quincy Jones saying, “When you chase music for money, God walks out of the room.”
How does your interaction with a curator, gallery or client evolve from the (brief) initial interface, to the working-involvement-relationship?
Follow-up is everything. I reach out promptly and try to engender an ongoing dialogue between us. I keep them apprised of upcoming shows and related achievements, and whenever possible, ensure that we keep one another in our sights via social media.
Are you more of a studio artist or naturally collaborative by nature? How do you feel about commissions?
I used to take on a lot of private commissions, but nowadays I am very selective on this front, due to my overrun schedule.
I would not characterize myself as ‘collaborative by nature’, but I have built up that muscle over time. I began doing interdisciplinary work around 2013, and have collaborated with academics and professionals in social science, psychology, and medicine. I now belong to a freshly established feminist art collective, Deep Dish, with Emma Quintana and Kerri O’Neill. Even in our separate art practices, we have long engaged each other’s bodies, from which we’ve pulled molds, made drawings, and taken photos. A great deal of my own work has been shaped by, and sometimes directly addresses, our intimate partnership and the emotional, intellectual, and sexual exchanges between us. We look forward to building new work together and expanding the collective’s membership.
How does your audience interact and react to the work you put out into the world? What is that one thing you wished people would ask you but never do?
I am fortunate to receive a lot of heartening and appreciative feedback from viewers. Skin of Years brought many poignant responses, for which I am very grateful. One older man, who was a person of faith and also a nudist himself, spoke of his enduring effort to unlearn all that he’d been taught about the body, all of the shame and the fear of his own nudity.
Some people laugh at the work, and I know why. Sometimes they make rude remarks about the bodies of the people in my drawings. I try to steel myself for this. I try to start conversations.
I wish people asked me if there were death or mourning in my work. There is.
What are you working on now? What’s coming next season?
Right now, I am preparing to undertake some new material and conceptual investigations. The work will examine the societal effects and enablement of “revenge porn”, more aptly termed image-based sexual abuse. I’ve come to recognize my own work as an effort to protest the power relations and culture of shame surrounding image-based sexual abuse. This new work will inaugurate my experimentation with digital media, and will be developed in collaboration with my partner, Lando Valdez. I am also making new drawings about grief. It is challenging so far.
I’ve organized a Painting Symposium at Texas Tech University, entitled Is Texas Painting?. The symposium invites all professionals, practitioners, and students who do the work of ‘painting’ in Texas, from the disciplines of Studio Art, Art History, and Art Theory and Criticism. I’m delighted to have the involvement of Joseph M. Bravo, Chad Dawkins, Christie Blizard, and Joe Peña, among others. Exhibitions, panel discussions, and papers will be presented from April 2 – 4, 2020, in Lubbock, TX.
A few shows are being firmed up now, and will be reported on my website soon.
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