Interview with Mercury Twenty's Laura van Duren

Pittsburgh is a good town for art, isn’t it?

It’s an incredible town for art! Carnegie provided a lot of venues for art; libraries, museums. I used to take art classes at the Pittsburgh Center for the Arts, which used to be Mellon’s mansion. I also went to the Carnegie Institute to draw the historical artifacts and see the art.

So the cultural climate definitely did influence me, but even more the steel industry and the industrial landscape was a big influence. It’s a very blue collar town and I grew up around the trains. My mother was a train dispatcher, and because she was a single mom I’d have to go to work with her. I remember sleeping while she worked and that the trains would wake us up when they rumbled by. Messages came in to my mom on the wire in Morse code, and she would type them out on an old Underwood typewriter and then put it on a stick and hold it out for the train to catch as it went by. So I really grew up with trains.

Did you go to Carnegie Mellon specifically to study art?

Yes, I did. My mother pushed me to go into the design field because she wanted me to be able to get a job. I started out in design, but I knew in my heart that it just wasn’t for me. The only way I could switch to the fine arts department with her OK was to go into illustration. I started taking a lot of painting along with the illustration courses.

And that did get me a job, because I was able to work in the design industry for many years after that. I worked for the May Co. doing direct mail and advertising. Way back when we were using the lucygraph, counting picas, doing paste-up by hand. I made great money but the pressure was intense. We had to stay all night to finish things, and the decisions that were made by the higher ups were not always based on aesthetics. It got too frustrating for me. I was so sick of pushing fur coats and blenders!

At that point I married my husband and we decided to go off and work in Africa. We worked in the highlands of Kenya with a mission agency. I was the public health artist and my husband worked in the hospital. I drew instructions for their nursing school and graphics to instruct the people on hygienic practices. The sad part is that all the massacres going on now are right in the area where I was working, in El Doret.

When you guys came back you came to the West Coast?

My husband had a job out here, so we came out and I started going to New College in Berkeley. It was connected to the Graduate Theological Seminary. Then I got pregnant, had a baby and things changed!

You have 3 kids, were they all born close together? Did you have many years of doing the mother and baby thing?

Yes, but I was still making my work. I never stopped but it just slowed a bit for a while. My kids are 20, 18 and 14 now.

When did you start working with clay?
Interestingly, I got into it because of my children. I was so frustrated trying to paint. One time I got turpentine in the Christmas cookies and almost poisoned my husband. (laughs)

(Laughs) Were you trying to paint and cook on the kitchen table at the same time?

I don’t know how it got in there! He was eating them and he said I smell turpentine. And I said I do, too. We figured out it was in the cookies. He called poison control and said I have a friend who got turpentine in the Christmas cookies and they said, Are you the “friend”? (Laughs)

So after that I realized I was mixing it all up too close. I looked around for a medium that I could do around the kids and even give them some of it to work with. That’s what led me to clay even though it didn’t solve the problem because I still couldn’t work with my kids in the studio. But I fell in love with clay. I started taking classes in the little local ceramics studio in Walnut Creek. I ran into some really awesome artists teaching there. Lisa Clague and Andree Thompson were my first big influences.

At that time, I had to search my heart--should I do a Master’s degree? But with kids it just wasn’t going to blend. I really wanted to be there for my kids, and having grown up with a single parent, I wanted to give them the time and attention I felt I didn’t have.

A friend of mine who had graduated from Alfred which is a big clay school, advised me to start doing workshops--Anderson Ranch, Penland, Haystack are some of them. I got a babysitter and I went off for 2 weeks to Anderson Ranch in Colorado to study with Peter vandenBurg, an artist whose work I really loved.

Workshops are a great option because you can get away for a short period and immerse yourself in your work without interruption, which you just weren’t able to do under the circumstances.

I loved it! I would just work my tail off and what ended up happening was that it would take me a year to digest everything I’d learned in those couple of weeks. Over time my work changed drastically in such good ways. I could see my work blossoming by leaps and bounds.

Were you always drawn to working with the figure in clay?

I think so. When I was a painter I was always working with the figure. In Pittsburg I loved to paint the people on the buses that I rode. The female figure is what I know best and it’s important to me. And I wanted to tell a story. That’s why I didn’t go towards the functional side of clay. For me, a pot is not enough for me to tell my story.

Storywise, how do you develop your bodies of work? What is your process like?

I do a lot of drawing in my visual journal. I don’t know if you’ve seen these. I usually make a copy of a current one and put it out whenever I show.

Yes, I liked checking that out at your last show. It really gives insight into your source material.

I carry a book with me everywhere I go--when I travel, even when I go to church! I can think better when I draw and I’ll draw anything I’m attracted to. It doesn’t matter whether it’s just a bottle of nail polish or something, I will draw it. Somehow it does formulate and percolate up to become a body of work. My latest body of work is all about the dress form. I was in a craft store and I found these papier mache dress forms made in China. I don’t know why but I was so attracted to them that I bought them, took them home and started drawing them. Now a year later, it’s become a major source for my work.

You’ve translated the forms from drawing into clay and have added some of the elements that you have worked with before. You use a lot of symbols: ladders, water, boats. I love the ladder as a symbol. It’s very spiritual, makes me think of heaven and earth. I feel very strongly connected to it and I guess you do too.

I do. I love that a ladder is something you can ascend or descend, there’s a great hope in it.

I just cast a thousand pound mold of a life sized ladder in aluminum. It’s about 5 feet high actually. I think it will be in my show and it’s very exciting. The sides of the ladders look like sticks and the rungs of the ladder are dress forms.

Let’s talk about metal. How long did you work in clay and then when did you start to bring in the metals?

I’ve been working in clay for about twenty years. I’ve always been attracted to rusty metal things. When my kids were little and they wanted to get me a present, they would collect a bunch of rusty nails, and I loved it. About 3 years ago I knew I wanted to get bigger with my clay pieces and I realized I needed some sort of armature. I knew that Lisa Clague was using metal in her work and she was teaching at Penland. I took a class where she taught us how to work with clay and metal together, to actually fire them together.

From there I got hungry to learn more about working with metal. I enrolled at Diablo Valley College where I learned how to weld and pour bronze from Hopi Breton. I really got into mold making; sand molds, shell molds. I’m casting bronze and iron. We do some iron pours at DVC, it’s a 12 hour process and it’s so much fun. It’s really sweaty and dangerous and I love fire.

They must have a really good shop out there to work in?

Oh, it’s so beautiful. I could never afford my own shop but more than that, when you’re doing metal, you need a community. So it’s just amazing. I work there about 3 days a week and the other 2 days I work in my studio.

I know you’re going to New York next week to see the galleries and the Whitney Biennial. What other artists’ work do you follow and who inspires you?

Arthur Gonzales. I’ve taken a couple of workshops with him. He incorporates found objects into his sculpture and he’s really amazing. As I’ve mentioned Lisa Clague is a favorite. I’m starting to be interested in more conceptual work like Ann Hamilton. Richard Serra’s metal pieces of course. I hope to see the work of Cai Guo-Qiang at the Guggenheim.

Oh, I love his fireworks projects; I love explosions of any kind.

I’ve read some of his statements and I love that he doesn’t talk in artistic jargon, he just speaks in normal language about the reality of life and what he does.

I also really like Lawrence La Bianca’s work. I love the whole idea of trees under tension that he works with. I’ve incorporated trees into my work lately as well. In my last show I made figures that had bronze tree legs.

They were metal or wood legs under the ceramic bodies. I think the way you mix the metal with the ceramic is a really beautiful combination.

Thank you. It feels like a natural progression in my work. I’m certain that it just needs to get bigger.

This is your second show at Mercury 20. How did you put together this one?

Again it naturally flowed out of the last show. I’m still using the ceramic figures and the bronze.

But, I’m really into the community aspect of working with another artist in the 2-person format. I’m so delighted to work with Mary Marsh, she’s just so much fun to be with and I think our work will play off each other in a very complementary way.

I am also doing some new things this time around. I cast 3 frilly little baby dresses in 3 different metals—one bronze, one iron, one aluminum. I’m mounting them on the wall on a very beautiful, detailed white wedding fabric. The contrast and tension among the materials is what I’m playing with there.

One of your subjects has been the strength of women with your use of the female figure and strong materials.

Well, I will be turning 50 next year and I’ve been thinking a lot about change; what’s ahead, what’s behind. It’s a turning point and it just feels so weird. One of my friends was just diagnosed with MS so I’m feeling the fragility of life right now. And I refuse to listen to the media and their constant images of female perfection. I mean none of us is perfect. We’re all broken.

When you’re a woman over 50, you pretty much disappear from the media, they totally ignore you. But that’s why it’s great that as an artist you are putting out your own reality in contrast to the mass culture.

I agree, there’s more to life than what’s on TV and what the media is trying to convince us that we need.