S/PLI/T: Tell us about your background as an artist.
Cassandra Holden: I grew up in Queens, NY and went to FIT (Fashion Institute of Technology) in Chelsea. I was influenced by the fashion industry around me, even though I was in the Fine Arts program. I started working with fibers in my last two years of college, sewing into canvas and taking textiles classes. Most of my professors had backgrounds in abstract painting, but they were very supportive of my explorations in soft materials. I was interning for a wig maker and I became interested in how people represent themselves, how they adorn, how they dress their hair and their bodies, and what that says about how we relate to each other and express ourselves in society. I interned at Anderson Ranch in Colorado after I graduated from college and was exposed to artists working in a much wider range of media. After Colorado I moved to Portland for a while and now I’m in New York City.
S/: How does material play into your process? Is it symbolic for you?
CH: I always think of cloth as a second skin, something that is very familiar to everyone. It’s used to conceal our bodies and has an element of touch, so fibers is the material I identify most with. We use fibers as symbolism, on our bodies, whether it be freeing or constricting. Fibers has to explain itself in the art world in a way painting doesn’t have to, as it’s considered a craft-based practice. I think it has to do with a relationship to function. Sometimes when I say I’m a fiber artist people think I spend my day knitting scarves. I think great art can’t exist without craft. Craft comes first as an understanding of material. Painting is a craft too but isn’t seen that way. I approach my weavings and deconstructed cloth as paintings. My first hand is a drawing hand and a painting hand – I started oil painting when I was 12 or 13 years old, continued painting through college, and drawing is still a significant part of my practice. So that way of thinking is always present in my approach. When I weave on a loom or deconstruct linen I think of it as making painting or drawing marks on a surface.
S/: How do you make decisions about the specific materials to use? Do they play into your work conceptually or are they a result of how the aesthetic will be impacted?
How it looks is part of it, there is aesthetic impetus, but lately I’ve been attracted to linen as a painter’s material. I use it as a way to bridge the world of fibers and the world of painting.
S/: Have you gotten to know linen in new ways? Has it surprised you as a material?
I definitely have. I’ve been thinking about the way it responds to gravity, the way it pulls apart. I’ve never been sure of an idea before I started making it, so I didn’t really know what was going to happen, but I do see it as a way of exposing the material for what it is. Originally paint and canvas and linen were used as a portal into another world – a French countryside or a battle scene. Painters started using paint as paint with impressionism – it’s the same approach of exposing material. I’m using canvas as canvas and linen as linen. My work is showing linen as a fibrous material, and I get to know it as I expose it.
S/: Tell us a little bit about your process of deconstructing fabric.
C: When I deconstruct the linen, I’m literally pulling out each thread, one by one. I use a bookbinding tool, called an awl. It has the same kind of repetitive, rhythmic, meticulous process as weaving, the opposite of building up a fabric but through a very similar process. I do think of shapes and forms because some of them are curvilinear, but some are responding to the structure of weaving, of the linen, which is always right angles. It’s harder to get a curved form with weaving whether you’re building it up or pulling it apart. Doing something geometric lends itself more to the material. So I do think about the forms before I start pulling the threads out but it changes as I respond to the structure of the fabric.
S/: Do you see narrative or time playing into your work or process?
C: I think about weaving and knitting and these traditional processes that are rooted in a historical context. I think of them as an action and as a performance. I’ve never shown the performative aspect of my process, but at Arts Letters & Numbers, the residency I just returned from, performance was a big part of our discussions. For me, making art is a way of showing myself without actually being seen. I do think of it as a performative act, and the pieces are a record of that time.
Time is obviously a part of any repetitive process, but I don’t know how much that comes across to the viewer. Showing work can be brutal in that way, where what you did to get to that point doesn’t matter as much as what it looks like. You could work on something forever, and there is a vulnerability in that. A viewer can say ‘that’s great’ or say ‘that’s total garbage’ and the more time an artist invests in their process and work, the riskier that showing of the work becomes. I try to leave the process evident in my work, but I don’t know if the time present in the work extends past the process and into the reception of the work.
S/: So in your work there is a lot of indigo. Can you talk about your decision to use it and tell us about the dyes or pigments you use?
C: The most recent linen paintings are with indigo. Indigo for me has been a real obsession. I’m totally seduced by that color, and so I’ve been doing a lot of research on the history of it. I had no idea, and I think a lot of people don’t know how indigo is so ingrained in the history of this country. It was a huge export from the south, it was involved in the slave trade, the first American flag was died with indigo and in the Revolutionary War it was used as money because paper currency had no value. So, it ties together the foundation of this country in a very complex way. Indigo can grow in any sub-tropical climate and it has a very bloody history in terms of colonialism and trading. In the late 1800’s a scientist came up with a synthetic indigo, which is what we use on our jeans, and the indigo industry dropped off in ten years by 80%. Natural indigo isn’t really used in industry because it’s not cost-effective.
Some of my recent fiber pieces have a synthetic dye, and when I made those I don’t think I knew what I really wanted. It turns out I wanted indigo! With these pieces there is a juxtaposition between the synthetic blue dye and the natural indigo. They are very different colors.
And I’ve also had this huge obsession with the color blue in general. It’s the last color to be identified in various ancient languages. There is a lot of speculation about how humans couldn’t see blue until modern times. I find it interesting that when we don’t have a name for something we don’t really see it, but with a name we are able to process it. I have this theory that the world’s fascination with indigo is because once we were able to see blue we became obsessed.
S/: We just learned so much about indigo in this one minute of talking about it!
C: There’s so much! With indigo it’s easy to do these resist dye techniques. That’s when I started making grids and tying up fabric with wood and string and rubber bands to create grid patterns, and indigo holds those resist patterns in a way other dyes can’t. A lot of cultures have used this method but most famously Japan with Shibori indigo dying.
S/: Do you see your work as using indigo for the formal qualities and the color or more for the context and the history of it?
C: Originally I didn’t know about that history, and researched more about indigo as I was using it. This kind of time-intensive, material-based process lends itself to learning about materials – Just as I expose and learn about linen as a material in itself, and its historical context, I expose and learn about indigo in the same way. My initial decision to use indigo was aesthetic but also had to do with my interest in using dyes as a paint, bringing that relationship back to the history of fibers.
S/: What artists influence your practice? And what have you been reading lately?
C: Sheila Hicks, I love her work and just saw her show in Chelsea. I love the boldness of her weaving work, and how she brought weaving into that “fine art” realm. I also really like Eva Hesse, and I’ve been reading her letters to Sol Lewitt and his letters to her. What I appreciate about her letters is her insecurity. Every artist goes through those moments where it’s like ‘I don’t know what I just made. I don’t know if it’s good or bad. It just came from my brain and I have no idea what it means or what it should mean or how people are going to see it.’ And then I appreciate Sol Lewitt’s response back to her which is ‘stop worrying about all that and just make stuff. Just do.’ And I love Ann Hamilton’s installation work.
S/: Do you know her installation with the piles of Denim, Indigo Blue?
C: Yes! That is really connected to this. Those blue shirts were speaking about the fibers industry in, I think, South Carolina. “The Event of a Thread” at the Park Avenue Armory in New York was the most beautiful viewing experience I’ve ever had. That had a performance aspect too, every night.
S/: You’ve done a few residencies lately. How those have affected your work and your practice?
C: I went to the Banff Centre last fall, and to be in that environment, in the Rocky Mountains was an incredibly inspiring but also distracting place to be. I always wanted to go on hikes and be outside. But it’s this huge culture center and there was so much creativity around – musicians and writers as well as visual artists. I got to see Salman Rushdie speak and Tanya Tagak perform. The studio spaces were huge and beautiful. That’s when I started deconstructing the linen. There were a lot of painters around me, I think that influenced some initial decisions about my work and what kind of material I was going to use. That was really my first true residency where I didn’t have any other responsibilities beyond my own practice.
S/: Did you do a residency before that at Anderson Ranch?
C: No, I was there during the residency program and only had to work 20 hours per week and had this huge studio so I treated it like a residency. After helping out in the printmaking and painting studios, I was working in my own studio but it wasn’t an official residency.
My recent residency was at Arts, Letters, and Numbers, which is in a really authentic, raw space in upstate New York. I was working in an old reclaimed textile mill. There are all these mills around there that are just empty. The industry is totally gone – they are vessels of a lost history. I started thinking about the loss of industry and the history of labor in that area, so I was very aware of the material I was using and the space I was using it in. I met this couple – Diane and Robert – who collect ephemera, all these pamphlets and advertisements and papers that aren’t really meant to last. They keep and give value to them by preserving them. I sat with them and they told me about the history of the mills in that area, most of the workers were Irish-American women who were sewing, knitting, ironing, working on these big looms and knitting machines and assembly lines. They showed me imagery of these people working in the factories. I was working in that space with fibers material, and that became a significant connection for me. There were also wheat fields in the area, and the wheat was used to make paper. The river would run with whichever color they were dyeing the wool in the factory up river, which would make the paper being made down river different colors. I would like to go back to Arts Letters and Numbers to do a project that makes that history more visible.
At Arts Letters & Numbers I also began putting the linen pieces in the middle of a space, instead of on the wall. I was inspired by the architecture of the space, the big wooden beams. Originally when I began making them I conceived of them as panels that people could weave between, but as I started relating them more to paintings I had this idea that they had to be on the wall, to function as paintings. But, as I put them in the space they become this whole other thing. One of the windows fell out of the mill while I was there and there was this wind coming in and the panels were swaying. You can see through them when light hits them and they will respond as you walk past them, from the wind of your body.
S/: I really love the idea of bodies of the viewers weaving among the pieces, and how that mirrors the material itself.
C: Yes. Sometimes you have to listen to what the work wants. Some of these pieces demand to be away from the wall. These planes, these two-dimensional objects become three-dimensional when they’re off the wall and become involved in the architecture of their setting.
Cassandra Holden: I grew up in Queens, NY and went to FIT (Fashion Institute of Technology) in Chelsea. I was influenced by the fashion industry around me, even though I was in the Fine Arts program. I started working with fibers in my last two years of college, sewing into canvas and taking textiles classes. Most of my professors had backgrounds in abstract painting, but they were very supportive of my explorations in soft materials. I was interning for a wig maker and I became interested in how people represent themselves, how they adorn, how they dress their hair and their bodies, and what that says about how we relate to each other and express ourselves in society. I interned at Anderson Ranch in Colorado after I graduated from college and was exposed to artists working in a much wider range of media. After Colorado I moved to Portland for a while and now I’m in New York City.
S/: How does material play into your process? Is it symbolic for you?
CH: I always think of cloth as a second skin, something that is very familiar to everyone. It’s used to conceal our bodies and has an element of touch, so fibers is the material I identify most with. We use fibers as symbolism, on our bodies, whether it be freeing or constricting. Fibers has to explain itself in the art world in a way painting doesn’t have to, as it’s considered a craft-based practice. I think it has to do with a relationship to function. Sometimes when I say I’m a fiber artist people think I spend my day knitting scarves. I think great art can’t exist without craft. Craft comes first as an understanding of material. Painting is a craft too but isn’t seen that way. I approach my weavings and deconstructed cloth as paintings. My first hand is a drawing hand and a painting hand – I started oil painting when I was 12 or 13 years old, continued painting through college, and drawing is still a significant part of my practice. So that way of thinking is always present in my approach. When I weave on a loom or deconstruct linen I think of it as making painting or drawing marks on a surface.
S/: How do you make decisions about the specific materials to use? Do they play into your work conceptually or are they a result of how the aesthetic will be impacted?
How it looks is part of it, there is aesthetic impetus, but lately I’ve been attracted to linen as a painter’s material. I use it as a way to bridge the world of fibers and the world of painting.
S/: Have you gotten to know linen in new ways? Has it surprised you as a material?
I definitely have. I’ve been thinking about the way it responds to gravity, the way it pulls apart. I’ve never been sure of an idea before I started making it, so I didn’t really know what was going to happen, but I do see it as a way of exposing the material for what it is. Originally paint and canvas and linen were used as a portal into another world – a French countryside or a battle scene. Painters started using paint as paint with impressionism – it’s the same approach of exposing material. I’m using canvas as canvas and linen as linen. My work is showing linen as a fibrous material, and I get to know it as I expose it.
S/: Tell us a little bit about your process of deconstructing fabric.
C: When I deconstruct the linen, I’m literally pulling out each thread, one by one. I use a bookbinding tool, called an awl. It has the same kind of repetitive, rhythmic, meticulous process as weaving, the opposite of building up a fabric but through a very similar process. I do think of shapes and forms because some of them are curvilinear, but some are responding to the structure of weaving, of the linen, which is always right angles. It’s harder to get a curved form with weaving whether you’re building it up or pulling it apart. Doing something geometric lends itself more to the material. So I do think about the forms before I start pulling the threads out but it changes as I respond to the structure of the fabric.
S/: Do you see narrative or time playing into your work or process?
C: I think about weaving and knitting and these traditional processes that are rooted in a historical context. I think of them as an action and as a performance. I’ve never shown the performative aspect of my process, but at Arts Letters & Numbers, the residency I just returned from, performance was a big part of our discussions. For me, making art is a way of showing myself without actually being seen. I do think of it as a performative act, and the pieces are a record of that time.
Time is obviously a part of any repetitive process, but I don’t know how much that comes across to the viewer. Showing work can be brutal in that way, where what you did to get to that point doesn’t matter as much as what it looks like. You could work on something forever, and there is a vulnerability in that. A viewer can say ‘that’s great’ or say ‘that’s total garbage’ and the more time an artist invests in their process and work, the riskier that showing of the work becomes. I try to leave the process evident in my work, but I don’t know if the time present in the work extends past the process and into the reception of the work.
S/: So in your work there is a lot of indigo. Can you talk about your decision to use it and tell us about the dyes or pigments you use?
C: The most recent linen paintings are with indigo. Indigo for me has been a real obsession. I’m totally seduced by that color, and so I’ve been doing a lot of research on the history of it. I had no idea, and I think a lot of people don’t know how indigo is so ingrained in the history of this country. It was a huge export from the south, it was involved in the slave trade, the first American flag was died with indigo and in the Revolutionary War it was used as money because paper currency had no value. So, it ties together the foundation of this country in a very complex way. Indigo can grow in any sub-tropical climate and it has a very bloody history in terms of colonialism and trading. In the late 1800’s a scientist came up with a synthetic indigo, which is what we use on our jeans, and the indigo industry dropped off in ten years by 80%. Natural indigo isn’t really used in industry because it’s not cost-effective.
Some of my recent fiber pieces have a synthetic dye, and when I made those I don’t think I knew what I really wanted. It turns out I wanted indigo! With these pieces there is a juxtaposition between the synthetic blue dye and the natural indigo. They are very different colors.
And I’ve also had this huge obsession with the color blue in general. It’s the last color to be identified in various ancient languages. There is a lot of speculation about how humans couldn’t see blue until modern times. I find it interesting that when we don’t have a name for something we don’t really see it, but with a name we are able to process it. I have this theory that the world’s fascination with indigo is because once we were able to see blue we became obsessed.
S/: We just learned so much about indigo in this one minute of talking about it!
C: There’s so much! With indigo it’s easy to do these resist dye techniques. That’s when I started making grids and tying up fabric with wood and string and rubber bands to create grid patterns, and indigo holds those resist patterns in a way other dyes can’t. A lot of cultures have used this method but most famously Japan with Shibori indigo dying.
S/: Do you see your work as using indigo for the formal qualities and the color or more for the context and the history of it?
C: Originally I didn’t know about that history, and researched more about indigo as I was using it. This kind of time-intensive, material-based process lends itself to learning about materials – Just as I expose and learn about linen as a material in itself, and its historical context, I expose and learn about indigo in the same way. My initial decision to use indigo was aesthetic but also had to do with my interest in using dyes as a paint, bringing that relationship back to the history of fibers.
S/: What artists influence your practice? And what have you been reading lately?
C: Sheila Hicks, I love her work and just saw her show in Chelsea. I love the boldness of her weaving work, and how she brought weaving into that “fine art” realm. I also really like Eva Hesse, and I’ve been reading her letters to Sol Lewitt and his letters to her. What I appreciate about her letters is her insecurity. Every artist goes through those moments where it’s like ‘I don’t know what I just made. I don’t know if it’s good or bad. It just came from my brain and I have no idea what it means or what it should mean or how people are going to see it.’ And then I appreciate Sol Lewitt’s response back to her which is ‘stop worrying about all that and just make stuff. Just do.’ And I love Ann Hamilton’s installation work.
S/: Do you know her installation with the piles of Denim, Indigo Blue?
C: Yes! That is really connected to this. Those blue shirts were speaking about the fibers industry in, I think, South Carolina. “The Event of a Thread” at the Park Avenue Armory in New York was the most beautiful viewing experience I’ve ever had. That had a performance aspect too, every night.
S/: You’ve done a few residencies lately. How those have affected your work and your practice?
C: I went to the Banff Centre last fall, and to be in that environment, in the Rocky Mountains was an incredibly inspiring but also distracting place to be. I always wanted to go on hikes and be outside. But it’s this huge culture center and there was so much creativity around – musicians and writers as well as visual artists. I got to see Salman Rushdie speak and Tanya Tagak perform. The studio spaces were huge and beautiful. That’s when I started deconstructing the linen. There were a lot of painters around me, I think that influenced some initial decisions about my work and what kind of material I was going to use. That was really my first true residency where I didn’t have any other responsibilities beyond my own practice.
S/: Did you do a residency before that at Anderson Ranch?
C: No, I was there during the residency program and only had to work 20 hours per week and had this huge studio so I treated it like a residency. After helping out in the printmaking and painting studios, I was working in my own studio but it wasn’t an official residency.
My recent residency was at Arts, Letters, and Numbers, which is in a really authentic, raw space in upstate New York. I was working in an old reclaimed textile mill. There are all these mills around there that are just empty. The industry is totally gone – they are vessels of a lost history. I started thinking about the loss of industry and the history of labor in that area, so I was very aware of the material I was using and the space I was using it in. I met this couple – Diane and Robert – who collect ephemera, all these pamphlets and advertisements and papers that aren’t really meant to last. They keep and give value to them by preserving them. I sat with them and they told me about the history of the mills in that area, most of the workers were Irish-American women who were sewing, knitting, ironing, working on these big looms and knitting machines and assembly lines. They showed me imagery of these people working in the factories. I was working in that space with fibers material, and that became a significant connection for me. There were also wheat fields in the area, and the wheat was used to make paper. The river would run with whichever color they were dyeing the wool in the factory up river, which would make the paper being made down river different colors. I would like to go back to Arts Letters and Numbers to do a project that makes that history more visible.
At Arts Letters & Numbers I also began putting the linen pieces in the middle of a space, instead of on the wall. I was inspired by the architecture of the space, the big wooden beams. Originally when I began making them I conceived of them as panels that people could weave between, but as I started relating them more to paintings I had this idea that they had to be on the wall, to function as paintings. But, as I put them in the space they become this whole other thing. One of the windows fell out of the mill while I was there and there was this wind coming in and the panels were swaying. You can see through them when light hits them and they will respond as you walk past them, from the wind of your body.
S/: I really love the idea of bodies of the viewers weaving among the pieces, and how that mirrors the material itself.
C: Yes. Sometimes you have to listen to what the work wants. Some of these pieces demand to be away from the wall. These planes, these two-dimensional objects become three-dimensional when they’re off the wall and become involved in the architecture of their setting.