An Interview with Featured Artist, Emma Anna, by Michelle Quick, Art Editor
Your biography mentions working on a book about mushrooms. Tell us a bit about this project.
I recently worked as a producer on a mushroom project in Australia that combined various art, degustation, and mushroom education offshoots. It was through this project that I realised there were lots of correlations between the act of foraging and that of making collage. For example, both require a hunt for ‘treasure’. Similarly, digging through the various bits in my collage materials box often reminds me of the process of pushing through leaf litter in the forest while searching for mushrooms. I now run an annual collage event called ‘Collage Forage’ that celebrates these points of connection.
The mushroom book that I’m currently working on includes a collection of collages that incorporate mushrooms into various domestic and landscape scenarios. These work to create strange and unexpected visions of a future world in which mushrooms have taken over the reins of power from humans (which is certainly preferable to AI and many of the other evil forces at work in contemporary society!).
How has place, space, and culture informed your art and/or your creative process as a whole?
I was born in Australia but am now based in Barranquilla, on the Colombian Caribbean
coast. I’ve been living between these two countries and two worlds since 2011. Living in a culture such as Colombia’s makes a deep impression. It’s paradoxically a very beautiful and delightful place yet fucked up in many ways. Consequently, many Colombians try to leave the country and make their life overseas. It’s unusual for me as a foreigner to make the decision to set up home-base in a city like Barranquilla, but I’ve also been doing things in a different, upside-down kind of way ever since I was a recalcitrant breech baby.
I definitely have days when life here is a tough slog, and I feel like a fish out of water, but this must be true of most immigrant experiences. The impact of this upon my creative practice has been fundamental. My entire sense of self and identity have been challenged, mainly through the demands and constraints of communication. In English I pride myself on my eloquence – words and humor are essential elements in my work. In Spanish my communication is rustic, and language learning is a constant work-in-progress. My Australian humor can also be very hard – at times, impossible – to translate. Consequently, I am a very different version of myself in Colombia. I have had to find new ways to express myself and to make myself understood.
Living between these two worlds and identities, my work has taken on motifs and metaphors such as mirroring, two-sided works, and a new type of wordplay that often references etymology, or the differences evoked by intonation and accent. Everything I make has become quite absurd, but that also speaks to the truth of my existence. Collage is about making some kind of sense out of chaos, and that remains the primary focus of my work, and my life!
Talk a bit about the process of bringing Highly Strung to life.
A few years ago, I was visiting Miami while completing a public art project in Florida, and I found a bunch of vintage National Geographic magazines in a thrift store. The textures and typography of National Geographic’s from the 1960s and 1970s are really beautiful and use offset printing technologies, unlike contemporary digitally printed magazines. I knew I wanted to do something special with this treasure.
I flipped through the collection I’d acquired, cutting out images, words and phrases that
resonated with me somehow. I divided them into two piles – one pile of words and phrases, another, a pile of images. I then set about matching images to the words in ways that evoked some kind of humor or new meaning through juxtaposition. Nothing about Highly Strung was predetermined, which is how I tend to approach the majority of my collage making. Collage is a process in which the outcomes are largely impossible to predict, and that is also part of the genre’s magic and appeal.
The embroidered aspects of these works represent a secondary stage and involve the slow act of sewing individual stitches. Adding this element to the works was a kind of meditation. During this time, I was pondering the phrase and the image and using the embroidered lines to attract the viewers eye to a particular word, letter or aspect of the image to emphasize meaning or somehow direct their reading of the work. As I meditated/obsessed over these pieces, many of the resulting works became like mantras.
You’ve created on small and much larger, public scales. How do you navigate sizes, mediums, materials, etc. for these kinds of art projects? How do you find the creative process similar and/or different?
All of my work -whether it’s an intimate visual poem or a large-scale public art project- begins with making collage. The act of cutting, juxtaposing and forming strange images helps unlock my subconscious and deepest imaginings.
I always relate my creative process to that of pregnancy. While I am not a mother myself, I can clearly distinguish stages that evolve in this process that pass through conception (the idea/s), gestation (research, sketches, experiments), nurturing (funding, testing) and birth (installation / exhibition / publication). There’s sometimes even a post-natal depression phase with some projects too! Obviously, the intensity of these phases is different when comparing small-scale paper collages made in the studio vs. large-scale public art works.
Consequently, I am making less public artwork these days – it’s simply become too
demanding emotionally and physically. Due to the inevitable compromises that need to be made between original concept and actual realization, public art practice can be extremely stressful and, in many ways, soul-destroying. It takes a particular type of ego and energy to succeed in this sector. Also, a lot of what is labeled public art these days is simply colorful architecture (produced by frustrated architects) and for me lacks conceptual depth.
These days I am much happier being kind to myself, focusing on studio practice, and working at a kitchen table scale to communicate ideas and concepts that I hope will resonate with a broad audience.
Your artist statement mentions an interest in psychoanalysis. How has the role of self-discovery—or discovery in general—affected your creativity?
An interest in psychoanalysis is fundamental to my work. It’s certainly a key part of my collage practice, which is very much about allowing time and scope for the inner to be revealed through choice, chance and juxtaposition. Collage is an intensely intuitive technique, which is why it is often used as a modality in art therapy.
I’m constantly intrigued to discover more about myself and other people – our passions and our motivations. I originally studied to be a news journalist. I have a deep sense of curiosity about people, personality, emotion and how environment and place impact upon these.
I’m also intrigued to explore how creativity can be used as a healing modality for my own life, and how I can unlock the benefits of creativity for others through the sharing of my work or facilitating creative activities such as collage workshops. I use my art making as a form of therapy, and it has been immensely beneficial in terms of me maintaining good mental health. When I experience a downswing in my life, I know it’s time to book myself in for some dedicated time in the studio!
Share a few artists whose creations inspire or excite you.
Pretty much all the artists I look to for inspiration are contemporary women, generally creative writers who also an expansive practice and explore other mediums such as music, performance, film making or dance – basically Miranda July’s entire friendship group.
I’m a longtime fan of Ms July, and her latest novel All Fours resonates with me and my recent lived experiences as a multi-layered and menopausal creative woman! It’s no wonder that she is a finalist in the National Book Awards this year. I love Miranda’s ‘clever weird’ vibe, and the fact that she is so confidently oddball and talented at many things. Yoko Ono is an art goddess – clever, witty, odd, poetic. She’s just always been so good, and so resilient. I also love Australian artist Deborah Kelly’s animated collage work. It inspires me to think of new and strange directions for my own collage narratives.
Sean Mackaoui is an exception to the all-girl vibe here, and I adore the simplicity of his illustrative work. These often combine two simple yet random images to make a visual pun or some other kind of intelligent observation. This, for me, represents a kind of creative alchemy – poetry and power that can be realised through the simplicity of juxtaposing just two perfectly matched elements, words or images. This is what I was trying to achieve with my Highly Strung series.
