Interview with Mercury Twenty Artist Anna Vaughan

You work in a lot of media: you draw, paint, you do ceramics and ceramic sculpture, also murals. How did that evolve? Did you start with one medium when you were younger and just branch out over time? Did you always do multiple media?

I think I always did everything. My grandparents on my mother’s side grew up during the Depression, so they were true do-it-yourselfers. My grandpa made a lot of my toys. My grandma and I made dolls. My mom and I made all of our Christmas tree ornaments. That’s just the way our family was.

There’s a lot of craft apparent in your work, even today. How did you grow into being an artist from your craftwork beginnings?

I lived in Indianapolis, Indiana and when I got out of high school I didn’t know what I wanted to do, but I had a pretty good job waiting tables three nights a week and apartments were cheap. I had lots of free time. What more does an 18 year old need? I didn’t like school much but I did like making art. I had an apartment near a junior college and I took a ceramics class there. The professor said I was in the studio more than most majors and he encouraged me to go to art school. He helped me put together a portfolio and I applied at the Kansas City Art Institute.

Did you throw pots? What was your focus in ceramics then?

When I first started I thought I would do pottery but I also really liked making sculpture. I think pottery is great formal training, though. When you learn to make functional pottery you also learn a lot about form. I learned that pottery has a beautiful relationship to the human body, as well. I ended up liking sculpture and figurative work so I kept doing that.

When I got out of school, I didn’t want to go directly to grad school. I ended up doing set design for a while. I worked with the designer to fabricate the sets; painting, building. I worked for theater companies and also for places that designed restaurants and museums.

After a while I did have lots of ideas that were building up and I wanted to focus in on my own work again, so I went back to grad school at Mills College in Oakland.

From Kansas City how did you find Mills? What drew you to their program?

Oh, I had already moved out here. (Laughs) I loved the Bay Area. My mom and I came out here once when I was eleven years old and I fell in love with the place then. I always had it in my mind that was where I wanted to live.

After deciding to go to grad school, I applied to the schools in the area. I did get into a couple of other schools but I picked Mills because it had a great program with professors from three different disciplines on your committee. They have very nice studio spaces and offer more financial aid with a teaching assistantship in your second year. I wanted to teach so I really wanted some experience.

Tell me about the teachers you had at Mills and how they guided your work.

The person I worked with the most was Anna Valentina Murch, the sculptor. I found her to be very smart, and critical with a great formal sensibility. She helped me to understand what I was doing and to connect a voice with that. I was her teaching assistant and I learned a lot from how good she was with critiques and guiding students with feedback.

I also learned a lot from Hung Lui who teaches painting at Mills. She’s just a great painter, and an avid drawer. She’s working all the time, filling sketchbooks with drawings about her life’s experience and then creating paintings from that. With students she was very honest, nurturing and open (laughs) so working with her was so enjoyable. She was inspiring as an artist and as a person, too.

I’ve seen the work of both artists. Anna Valentina Murch’s work is very abstract and she uses many diverse natural materials. Hung Lui’s paintings play with the socialist realist style of China and go into a lot of figurtative, narrative, and layered imagery.

I think they both helped me find ways to get into my personal history. My MFA show at Mills was related to my grandmother and experiences my family and I had with her suffering from Alzheimers; issues about memory. My grandmother actually died the day the show opened.

The works in the show all related to the landscape of the Midwest. I made a fence that was built like a box kite, with the idea that it could fly up and land in another configuration anywhere else. Like your home or your sense of place could do that. I also made three windmills like you see all over the Midwest on farms. The three were different sizes and positioned very close together. The idea was that they were like man/woman/child, or maybe three stages of growth. They were placed so close together that they couldn’t really move or turn. It related to the idea of the mind working on top of itself, or when families are too close and they bind, or stop progress.

I did sculpture of spinning tops. Instead of being colorful like the toy tops they were based on, they were made out of white ceramic; they kind of looked like shells. Again, they related to a movement stopped or a memory caught in a loop. Like my grandmother with Alzheimers, she would tell a story and come to the end then she would repeat it.

How did you come up with the spinning top as an object to relate to those concepts?

I’m just a visual thinker and the image just came to me as I contemplated the situation and my experiences.

When I teach I do a project with the students. I give them a word and they have two minutes to make a clay sculpture that’s related to that. With one student, all the sculptures she made were spirals. The group was critiquing them and bringing in ideas about snails, and the golden mean, and the spirituality of the spiral symbol. She listened to everyone and finally she said, I think it comes from the fact that my family has a cinnamon bun company. (Laughs) Which doesn’t mean all the sacred symbols and stuff weren’t there, but for her it’s an image implanted in her mind from everyday life. I don’t know. Where does stuff come from?

Like the windmill, which is an image you would have seen many times in your childhood and in your mind probably associated with your grandmother. Not only were you unconsciously drawn to it, but you saw the connection and the confluence of meaning there. So, how long has it been since you graduated from school and how has your work progressed since then?

I graduated in 2000. I’ve been teaching ceramics, so I got back into making functional pottery. I’m continuing with the ceramic sculpture. I’m able to work in the ceramic studio where I teach, but I do all my drawing and painting in my apartment. I always have a sketchbook and small paintings I’m working on all the time.

Tell me about the series of small paintings, I’ve seen the portfolio online and in the gallery.

Instead of traditional sketchbooks, I started to get interested in using books made of different kinds of papers that I’d find at flea markets—like accounting pads, or lined paper. I began to incorporate the book object into my sketchbook. I also collected photocopied images in the sketchbooks, just things that interested me that I would use as references for drawings.

For the animal series, that’s the one that’s online, I was in Chinatown one day and I found a black and white book with illustrations of animals from around the world. The text was in Chinese. The book is supposed to be factual or somewhat scientific, I think, though I can’t read it. (Laughs) But the illustrations seem out of context, and somewhat dramatic and even human-like. I got into playing off the designs and compositions. I began to paint on top of the pages, and I’d also paint out parts of it.

I work on my sketchbooks for a couple of years at a time, just going back and forth with them, working out ideas, color palettes.

You also do something that I think is unusual, you paint on your ceramic sculpture. Can you tell me about that and some of the technique involved?

Because I paint in such a small space I need to use non-toxic materials like gouache, watercolor or acrylic. That’s also why I do papier mache.

Papier mache. (Laughs) That’s another media you work in, I forgot about that one!

If it’s non-toxic and not terribly messy I can do them at home. With ceramics, you can glaze them, or use underglazes and fire them, but it’s not as immediate as painting. With glazing, you really don’t know how they will come out. I love painting the ceramics because I can immediately react to the color.

I love the way it looks. So you can paint directly onto a fired clay sculpture with the water-based media?

That’s what I do. You can also use oil paints. If I had a studio I would try that.

Can you give us a little preview of what you will show at Mercury 20 in November?

I’m doing another piece about my grandmother’s house. It’s a very large painting for me but I wanted to try that size and scale. I’ve become interested in the bee colony collapse that’s happening worldwide. There’s a documentary about it now. It really shocked me because my grandparents kept their own bees; they had an orchard and garden. They had just gallons of honey all the time…

You lived with your grandparents in the summer when you were a child?

Right. After my grandmother died, a few years later we finally ran out of honey. I remember the first time I went to the store and bought honey. I couldn’t believe how expensive it was! (Laughs) I guess I really took it for granted. The idea that someday we might not have bees, or honey, has really shocked me.

I’ve been thinking of the times I was stung by the bees, as a kid. I remembered one particular time that I stepped on a honeybee. I pulled the stinger out of my foot and it hurt and I was shocked by the pain, but I also felt really guilty about killing the bee. It made me think about what amazing creatures bees are. The way they maintain their society; how they work together; how much good their pollinating does for the whole planet; how hard they work. They really inspired me! And now with this recent population decline and colony collapse, it’s another opportunity to think about how remarkable and important bees are. So, I’ve done this large painting related to that experience of stepping on the bee and the larger resonance of the environmental issue.

Another piece I’ve done is about frogs, which we also had out on the farm. I always loved the toads belly; when you pick them up they have such a soft, squishy belly. I had a dream once where I was sleeping on the soft, cool belly of a big frog. (Laughs) I’m making a piece about that. It’s a large ceramic frog lying on its back. It could be dead; could be in ecstasy. I think it will relate to the fragility of the environment and animals at this point in time. You know, you can just pick them up, they are so defenseless. Well, the only thing they’ll do if they’re scared is pee. (Laughs)

(Laughs) The changes that are happening within animal species are so profound and you have these personal experiences with animals, so you’re connecting your experience and a larger social and political awareness through the pieces you’re making.

I think it’s difficult to make work about larger issues unless you figure out where it hits you personally, and why it affects you there.