Keeping in Touch

Simone Kearney’s richly textured ceramic works straddle abstraction and figuration to visualize emotional worlds, evoking a sympathetic response in the viewer. As a visual artist and poet, she is equally attuned to materiality of language and clay in her explorations of the body’s affective states. In this Q&A, we ask Simone to expand on the ways her practice is guided by touch, the surprising ways materials and words are in relation with one another, and how emotions touch us from the inside out, in ways seen and unseen.

A Q&A with SIMONE KEARNEY

Kate Blair: One of the central concerns of this issue is the idea of “feeling something out” or using touch as a means of deepening understanding. This seems especially true for your practice, which also has a focus on “feeling” in an emotional sense. How is your practice guided by feel for where the materials take you? How does emotion guide or show up in  your work? Is there a relationship between the two?

Simone Kearney: I think a lot about the pace of thoughts and images in the mind. “Feeling out” with material in my practice is very important in that it is a way for the speed of image or thought in the mind to get weighted, like a balloon, to a ground of some sort, a ground that has a different pace, a pace of matter. I think for this reason, the hand is crucial to my practice. 

I like touching as a way of thinking and feeling. I’m going to say feeling from now on, but really I don’t know the distinction between feeling and thinking most of the time — sometimes the difference is great, and sometimes they seem almost the same. 

Working with clay consumes the hand in a particular way. It is the ground the body moves over all day long. It is what is below the body. I think the hand knows this and responds to it. Clay makes an emphatic and very simple demand on the hand. While I like to work in many different mediums, and I also write poetry, I have gravitated at times most especially towards working in clay as it is related to emotion because of this. Also because of its relative passivity as a material. It is very responsive. And for that reason it’s conducive to recording the immediacy of felt experience. It is a generous archivist and seems as though it wouldn’t interfere so much with what is being expressed through it. It can be a good ventriloquist. It is like a copyist. But then it refuses in its own way. And most certainly has a voice of its own.

Kate: Do you find the textures of the different materials (clay, words, paint) speak to one another? How do they teach you different things when working with them?

Simone: I love to think about each medium’s texture and how they speak to one another. In my new book of poetry, DAYS (Belladonna Press, 2021), I write a lot about language and its gauziness. In fact, in many ways I see the book of text as a textile — language is a mesh — and in that sense I might, in another project, turn to woven fabrics or literal textile as a way to further my thinking about language. 

But language can also be brittle, or sludgy, in which case I might turn to clay as a way to more fully explore feeling out the consequences of understanding this. In the same way, the way that clay might collapse under its own weight when the structure gets stretched too thin — its waterlogged or too-thin texture — might serve as a metaphor for words, or images in the mind. What happens when the sentence gets too stretched out? What happens if the image in the mind is water-damaged?

I find that working with actual material helps me understand the materiality of language, and vice versa. But also, the brittleness of, say, dried clay, can teach us about the brittleness of a particular stance towards the world. The malleability of it when wet might tell us about the malleability of the human spirit.

Kate: I loved reading your collage of notes on touch for your piece, Metaxu. One of the things that stuck with me was the idea of the porous surface, the veil or screen as a metaphor for the ways people relate to one another. How do you think about the surfaces in your works? What kind of decision-making process goes into whether you leave finger marks behind, whether you choose to glaze or not?

Simone: Yes, I often think about the surfaces and qualities of surface that could serve as metaphor for spaces and experiences of subjectivity and intersubjectivity. I didn’t glaze my ceramic sculptures of crying heads which were on display in a show at Olympia Gallery in New York City recently, because the rawness of the emotion — grief — that was expressed, demanded a kind of porous, vulnerable, unglazed, and pure-earth surface. They were not yet ready to stiffen into glass (which is what glaze becomes), whereas I did glaze some of the ceramic sculptures in my show Amok, at Artshack Gallery in Brooklyn this spring. 

I was thinking that there is something interesting that happens, for instance, if I glaze a figure of a sad and abject-looking figure who is in a semi-complete state, full of dents made by my fingers, only somewhat emerging clearly as a figure, or barely clear. To glaze that amorphousness, that state of being in the process, was appealing to me, because it could serve as a metaphor for how we put on a show, how we wear our personas, and how what we present to the world, becomes a kind of glaze. Or maybe the glaze serves to protect some of these sculptures who are at times a little emotionally fragile. All these surfaces are metaphors, in a sense. To gloss over, to be sealed, to be porous, rough-hewn.