I had the pleasure of interviewing artist Lena Wolff at the Sarah Shepard Gallery in November, 2019. We discussed the relationship between art and activism (such as works like her now iconic “United Against Hate” poster), Lena’s creative process, inspirations, and more. The transcript, which includes photos of Lena’s work, is below (edited and condensed from the conversation).
TRANSCRIPT:
Sarah Shepard:
Welcome everyone and thanks so much for coming out. Today, Lena is joined with Lauren Schiller, the creator and host of Inflection Point, a nationally syndicated public radio show and podcast from KALW and PRX that focuses on how women rise up and their quest for equality.
Lauren Schiller:
All right, thanks you guys, you gals for all coming out and being part of this conversation. So why don't we start by hearing more about what we’re looking at in the room. I mean, usually when I go to a gallery, I have to figure it all out for myself and we now have this opportunity to actually sit with the artist to hear directly from you about how you came up with this show. And I’d like to know more about the meaning of the show title, ‘Patterns & Spells.’
Lena Wolff:
Hi everyone.
Audience:
Hey Lena.
Lena Wolff:
Hi! First, I just want to say, I'm so happy to be talking to you Lauren. I'm such a fan of your podcast. It's on KALW and the show is great – and if you haven’t heard it already, go ahead and listen!
Lauren Schiller:
Thank you.
Lena Wolff:
I love it. There are so many fascinating interviews with women who are doing all kinds of amazing work in all different areas, really all areas.
Lauren Schiller:
Yeah. Including Miriam [Klein Stahl].
Lena Wolff:
Yeah, Miriam was interviewed on the podcast! That was great.
Well – about this show, I’m working with a lot of different mediums here. All the pieces are talking to each other but still it was hard to come up with a title for the grouping of work as a collection at first - to pin down a few words that summed up the intersecting themes.
I’ve been working with quilt patterns and repetition of these patterns across different mediums for a long time. This began with a very intentional desire to tap into this legacy of quilt making and a lexicon of shared patterns that have been passed down and adapted for generations in our country. I wanted to walk in the footsteps of these makers who came before me and make work that felt less individual and more part of a collective body of iconography.
When I first got into this, it wasn’t easy for me to understand the patterns because I'm not naturally inclined towards geometry. (I actually got a D in geometry in middle school!) Part of what led to the drawings here is having to draft the eight-pointed star over and over again to get to this pattern, the Golden Dalia, to understand how it worked. Then, I began to manipulate the drawing after I understood it. Now I've been working with variations of the eight-pointed star for almost seven years, but I didn't actually turn the drawings into anything I exhibited until this last, I don't know, a couple years ago maybe. They were initially just a means to get to where I was going in other mediums, in collage and sculpture. And then I started falling in love with the drawings by themselves.
Lauren Schiller:
How does the title of the show tie in to this?
Lena Wolff:
The word ‘spells’ came up when thinking about how patterns captivate and mesmerize us. How you can, you know, feel hypnotized when looking at patterns. It’s connected to our attraction toward patterns in nature. Pattern recognition was really essential to our evolution as humans, so we’re naturally attracted to them. And so, I was thinking about how we get thrown into this spellbound state through patterns, but then I was also thinking about feminists and women and ideas about ‘witchiness,’ and how we can participate in these actions that change politics and culture, which we can claim as a witchy thing for fun but really it's more practical.
This artist Nathaniel Russell made a drawing after the election of Trump that said ... Miriam do you remember exactly? It was like, "Calling All Witches, Hex on White Supremacy, Curse on Trump." And then Kate Sweeney [of the bands Magic Magic Roses and July] a member of Future Chorus later wrote a song for us ‘Calling All Witches.’
So this idea of casting spells to change culture, and patterns as having spellbinding potential, those two words together represented most accurately what the work is about.
Lauren Schiller: Patterns and Spells
Lena Wolff: Yeah
Sarah Shepard:
Do the 8 points in the star have special significance?
Lena Wolff:
Well I kind of came upon it accidentally because it’s the basis of the Golden Dahlia pattern. The 8-pointed star was the way to get there. But then I also think, just the star in general, it can be read as a symbol of American democracy – a symbol of our ideal of democracy.
But what I love about the quilt patterns, or any geometric pattern really, is that infinite variations can be adapted from a single pattern, which is what happens in nature all the time. I think I just ended up getting caught in that pattern. It’s the one that just keeps on giving, it's just keeps on going.
Lauren Schiller:
Well, can you tell us a bit about the process of your craft in terms of, I mean, it's so interesting because you've got three dimensional pieces and then you've got these flat pieces. And I mean, clearly meticulous attention to the details. So, take us inside your studio. What happens when you sit down with the paper or the wood?
Lena Wolff:
The thing I've be doing the longest out of all the work here are the collages. To make these, I paint the papers with gouache, watercolor or acrylic, and then each foreground element is cut and glued down individually to the surface of the paper.
That piece right there [points to ‘Quilt for the Future’], is made up 42 squares, made individually and then assembled together like a quilt when mounted for framing. This process actually makes for kind of awkward studio visits because I usually just have piles of cut and painted paper everywhere. Painters have their beautiful canvases on the wall, and all their cans of alluring paint. With me, all you see are these scraps of paper everywhere. I just have paper, everywhere! I mean, even when Sarah [Shepard} saw this piece progress I remember she looked at it and was like, "Oh." [everyone laughs]. And part of it... Seriously, no, no it's not even that, you didn't even mean to! But part of it was that she just saw these unconnected squares taped to the wall that were probably kind of starting to fall off and very flimsy looking. So….it's hard to see what's going on until they're actually complete and assembled.
Lauren Schiller:
Yeah. Which is actually probably ... I mean, does anyone in this room quilt? So, it seems to me, I mean I don't quilt, but I have someone in my family who does. And so you do see fabric scattered everywhere-
Lena Wolff:
Right. You see a mess.
Lauren Schiller:
and then the composition comes in and out of focus as the design comes together. So, I imagine it's similar. Do you quilt?
Lena Wolff:
No. Well, actually I have, but I'm not an expert at it. I was once invited to be in this quilt show with all these quilters who I love, the project is called Piecework Collective and they put on an independent quilt show every year. I was invited and I had a total panic attack because I actually don't know how to quilt. I was like, "Okay, I'm going to try." And so, I tried to make this quilt and then I knew that technically it was not going to compare to what they were doing, because they're SO good. I ended up sending a wood star piece to New York for the show.
Audience Member:
Can you talk a bit about how historically, women have done the practical arts, the applied arts - quilting and embroidery and decorative arts as a way to channel their creativity.
Lena Wolff:
Oh, for sure.
Audience Member:
In a way that was safe, because the more direct kind of art processes were more for men. I always feel a little ambiguous about it because I love and admire so much craft made by women, but it seems there was a limit to how much personal expression could go into it.
Lena Wolff:
Well, I think that women really actually did end up putting their personal self into it. So many unique and idiosyncratic quilts have been made - really so much quilt work is phenomenally bizarre and unique! People really put themselves into it. And then so many quilts were made that address history - quilts made during the Civil War with pictorial images of specific battles, and then quilts made as fundraisers during the war, and also autobiographical quilts that trace a person's life. So, I definitely think women have always been artists through textiles when they weren’t allowed to participate in other art forms.
I always want to uphold that tradition rather than ever putting it on a different level with all the other, you know, art forms. I love being a part of the tradition of quilt making and claiming it absolutely as art. It's absolutely art.
Audience Member:
I think there’s a documentary called Anonymous Woman that talked about a lot of these quilt pieces.
Lena Wolff:
It’s true that women may not have always been given credit for what they made. There might not be a name on a quilt the way a painter would sign their painting. That’s true of women stories throughout history unfortunately, we don't have as much attribution to specific women for their work.
Lauren Schiller:
Do you want to tell us the story of one of the pieces that we're sitting here looking at?
Lena Wolff:
Sure, I’d love to talk about Quilt for the Future. I started working on that one in January 2019, so I worked on it for close to a year. It probably wouldn't have taken take me that long if I'd known all the symbols and images I wanted to use from the start. Part of what took time was figuring out what I wanted to include. Also, I'm like a crazy person when it comes to color, and I think I spent a month working on the color for the background.
Miriam Klein Stahl:
She had about 40 shades that to me looked exactly like that, but to her, she would look at them and see a difference, but to me it's like, "Is that not all the same blue?"
Lena Wolff:
They were really different! In the end the color is made from maybe 2-3 layers of watercolor with a bit of gouache, so there’s some nuance and it’s not totally flat. The piece originated from looking at American sampler quilts from the 18 and 1900’s. These sampler quilts were basically block quilts with different images appliqued into each block. Many were put together around a theme, some with all nature imagery and sometimes they were thematic in other ways. In this piece, I’ve combined images from a historic sampler quilt with my own.
To me, the stars generally represent the idea of American democracy, although the way they can have a patriotic connotation makes me feel uncomfortable – so to me I’d rather think of the starts as symbols of democracy. The plant images reference the natural world. The radio tower was one of the last images I added. I was so glad that I’d waited eight months to finish the piece because I didn’t land on that until the very end! The radio tower symbolizes free speech and I love public radio, I listen to it all day long. The triangles are for queer culture, the hand is for generosity, open borders and hospitality. There’s the more modern symbol for equality, a justice scale, and a square with an arrow pointing to justice, like emphasizing justice.
The vases are for gay culture, the bee for sustainable agriculture, the pitcher for water, a harp for music, the scissors for craft. This square here is a simplified form of a quilt pattern called ‘housetop.’ The little five-patch cross is for healthcare, and then there's just the kind of galactic—the cosmic images, which I'm working with in different pieces throughout the show. To me these universe images are this overarching reminder to keep things in perspective, like remembering we're on a single planet in a larger solar system, in a galaxy, in a universe that is one of many potential universes. Especially during these hard political times, I want to think about the bigger context of our place in the wider scheme of things. And I like reading up on physics for lay people -it’s comforting compared to politics.
Lauren Schiller:
So some of the things that you referred to in there, for example pointing to justice, you’re reminding everyone what we’ve got to focus our attention on. We actually first met through activism and then I was introduced to your art, I think it was like months later. And you told me that you had actually separated those things out mentally at one point, like when you were really thinking about what you needed to do as an activist, art took a back seat. But then you brought them together.
Lena Wolff:
Well, what happened immediately after the election of Trump is that I felt I could only make work that was directly responding to what was going on. This article came out by Chimamanda Adichie, an essay she wrote after the election called ‘Now is the Time to Talk About What We Were Actually Talking About’ and the point of it was really that we can't be obscure right now about what we stand for. It's critically important to name what is wrong and what we're going to do about it.
The first piece I made in 2017 was my banner for the Women's March. It’s the only thing I made that January and I love it so much. It was really big and I had this big heavy stick that was way too heavy to carry around and then-
Miriam Klein Stahl:
I carried it.
Lena Wolff:
[laughs]. Yes…but ha - you know, I felt like I absolutely had to respond to what was going on in no uncertain terms. So, a lot of my work after the election focused on this. Then in 2017 I formed Future Chorus for my de Young residency. We sang songs for the political moment. Not the usual protest songs from the past, but punk and pop songs with a poetic relationship to the moment we're living in. I spent a long time organizing that and didn't make as much studio work for a while.
Lauren Schiller:
Miriam has been our third guest!
Lena Wolff:
Yeah. She's a good third guest!
Lauren Schiller:
I mean, do you want to talk about how you work together as artists? Miriam is also an artist and an activist, and you're a couple.
Lena Wolff:
We’ve started more parallel work since the election also. We've shared the studio now for over a decade. We work side by side.
Last year Kimberly Johansson of Johansson Projects asked us to be in a two person show. We'd never shown our work side by side like that. And it was so weird how there were so many overlaps that I hadn’t actually noticed before! Even how we cut paper. Miriam makes beautiful paper cuts, silhouette paper cuts and there's such a connection to my process there. Anyway, it's been really nice in the last year to have more overlap with what we're doing and to be recognized together for what we do -for our life together, not just our work individually, that's been really new.
Lauren Schiller:
Yeah. Well, and this proclamation was for the two of you in Berkeley and for your work.
Lena Wolff:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Lauren Schiller:
Yeah. Do you ever steal each other's scissors?
Lena Wolff:
Yes, and our Exact-o-knives!
Miriam Klein Stahl:
“Don’t use the fabric scissors on paper!” [everyone laughs]
Lena Wolff:
Yeah, exactly.
Miriam Klein Stahl:
But I need a workspace that's about this big [gestures to a small space], and so I can really work anywhere. When Lena was creating the show, I just stayed out of the studio because she needs a big space to think and work because like she said, she has paper everywhere! I'm happy to be on the floor, on the kitchen table, anywhere.
Lauren Schiller:
And that's how you stay married.
Lena Wolff:
That's how we stay married.
Lauren Schiller:
Keep it up.
Lena Wolff:
We know how to share space!
Lauren Schiller:
How are you feeling about art and activism connecting now? I mean, is there room to be a little more obscure or did we still need to be more direct.
Lena Wolff:
Well I mean, with abstraction or something - you’d never want to say to a musician ‘you can't make music without words now, that’s too irrelevant!’ In the same way, there is a place for abstraction in visual art. It’s important to celebrate the world that we live in and everything we can see with our eyes and what we’re able to hear. That's really important too. But I couldn't only do that right now. I would feel irresponsible if I was only working with abstraction. Even, you know, I think there's room to be totally abstract in your artwork, but then maybe you're doing activism in another way. I think we just have to participate right now, and there's lots of different ways to do that, there's no one way to do it.
Audience Member:
What motivates you to make art? What is your driving force?
Lena Wolff:
That's my mom!
Lauren Schiller:
Wait, this is your mom?
Lena Wolff:
Yeah.
Lena’s Mom:
Lena made art as soon as she could get her hands on paper and a pen. I mean, she was always drawing, always putting blocks together in certain forms, or she would look through slides…we had slides back then.. and she'd look through them and compare…I don’t think it was really a choice.
Lauren Schiller:
Do you agree with that?
Lena Wolff:
Yeah, definitely. Yeah. I mean, I think making art has always been healing for me. It’s how I channel everything that I take in, and the world around me.
Lauren Schiller:
You’ve mentioned in other conversations the difference between patriotism and democracy, but what’s your thinking around the connection between art and freedom?
Lena Wolff:
One of the great privileges we have as artists or makers is that we can work with any materials we want to within reason and we get to work with whatever subjects we’re interested in. We have this freedom, and even in countries without freedom of expression there can still be ways around that artistically. In any case, we have this great privilege. I’m able to enjoy my freedom as an artist and affirm my humanity through art. Knowing this makes me concerned for the freedom and the humanity of other people. Knowing that there are people who can't assert their freedom or their humanity through art, either because of oppression or just because they don't have what they need, that concerns me. My draw towards art making and how I care about the state of the world, it’s all connected, these two things are part of the same feeling.
Lauren Schiller:
What did you mean when you talk about the difference between patriotism and democracy?
Lena Wolff:
Ooh, I mean, I just don't really believe in nationalism. Nationalism is so dangerous. Patriotism is dangerous, but democracy is what we need. I mean, it’s something we haven't really seen yet, something we say we believe in as a country, or that we are, but we're not, not yet anyway.
Lauren Schiller:
And I mean, does anyone have conflicting feelings when they see the American flag? I mean, is that kind of what you're referring to -
Lena Wolff:
Oh yeah. Especially right now. I mean, probably always
Lauren Schiller:
You were telling me also about this new exhibit happening in Amsterdam. I mean, you should tell the story and it will make sense about why I'm bringing it up. Just be vague, go ahead. But it's about symbolism and the influence of symbols on culture.
Lena Wolff:
Right. So, it was just after I finished ‘Quilt for the Future’ with all of these symbols. I was in the car listening to NPR and heard a story about an exhibition that just opened in Amsterdam that focused on Nazi iconography. And just to begin with, there's a question like, is that a good idea? Is this problematic by itself? All of a sudden, I was just thinking about that image of the swastika and how much weight it carries. How it symbolizes one of the most horrific things we can possibly think of, and how powerful the image is, in an awful way.
And it made me wonder if we could we ever create an image or a set of images that are the opposite of that, like would that be? Can we make or contribute to creating symbols and visual culture that is the opposite of the swastika, but also as powerful. So just that idea of the power of visual symbols was really resonating with me.
Lauren Schiller:
Yeah. Which I mean, so some might say, "Well, that is the American flag." Right? And then you're ending up with this one symbol that represents one thing for all people that represents different things.
Lena Wolff:
Yeah, no. That's not what I'm thinking.
Lauren Schiller:
I'm not trying to put you in a corner, I'm just like wow, what are the implications of one symbol?
Lena Wolff:
Right. Yeah! Making the show I really was working with a collection of symbols, and then this idea about how can we use symbols to generate what we want to see in the world
Lauren Schiller:
Yeah. I mean, that comes back to this idea of how art can change society and how it can spark cultural imagination. And I mean, what is your point of view on how your art might ... I mean, your wish for how art, your art, all art, can play that role in terms of pushing for social change or creating ripple effect of social change for the better?
Lena Wolff:
I mean, I think we can definitely influence culture through the images that we generate. I brought the posters series that I worked on today - the United Against Hate posters that we made during the fifth white supremacist rally that was going to come through Berkeley.
Ahead of this, I’d had the chance to talk to the Mayor [Jesse Arreguin] about the idea of enlisting artists to make banners for the city about what we stand for right and what we stand against. He was like, "Great idea!" Then, he called me maybe two weeks before the rally maybe, in June 2017 and said, "Lena, do you think you could make a poster for us?" So, I called my friend who's a graphic designer, Lexi Visco, because I’m actually not a graphic designer. We sat down and we busted these out in a few hours together. Then, It was so amazing to see them everywhere at the rally a few weeks later. 20,000 were printed for Berkeley before the rally, and another 20,000 were printed for Oakland, along with huge banners of the image that hung from city hall. The posters were in almost every window I could see, and then almost every other person was carrying one the day of the counter-protest. That was incredible. That felt incredible.
Media organizations wanted to interview us at the time, but we made them anonymously. Miriam was actually getting death threats because she had worked on these pro -choice license plates. So, she was being trolled and I also just felt like it also wasn't important for us to put our name on them. It just wasn't important. Like, they were public service announcements. Now 200,000 of them have been printed for various cities combined in the Bay Area and they’re still visible in windows all over the place.
Then Lexi and I made the VOTE! for Democracy poster series (these are also for the taking afterward!) We did this series in English and Spanish ahead of the 2018 of the midterms and printed 20,000 of them. Then we got funding and shipped them to over 15 States and they were all over the place.
Using nice colors and a good image helps. People really want them! Having this collaborative relationship with Lexi who a really strong designer too, that made it possible
Lauren Schiller:
Tell us about the All For One For All piece.
Lena Wolff:
Okay. So this is based on the embroidery piece on the wall. The text has a double meaning. All For One For All is about how endless variation can be found within a single pattern, like in nature, but then it’s also is about a social philosophy of desiring more equality. It’s a call for more equality in the world. And then the embroidery piece was made into a polymer letterpress edition for this show and they’re being sold as a fundraiser for Spread the Vote. I had an edition of 40 printed, and Sarah [Shepard] was like, "Of course we'll do that." So it's so nice, we're doing this through the exhibition, the fundraiser for Spread the Vote.
Lauren Schiller:
They could be yours.
Lena Wolff:
Oh yeah, 100% of the sales go to the organization.
Miriam Klein Stahl:
What is Spread the Vote?
Lena Wolff:
They work to give IDs to voters in States that require an ID to cast a ballot. They’re also doing a lot of other work on the ground, but that's kind of their main thing.
Voting rights and voter engagement is where I'm putting my energy with activism this year. Because really, the more people that we enfranchise to vote, we're going to win. He [Trump] didn't win the popular vote. We're going to be able to vote him out if we can get more people involved. And guess what? Then we can vote people in who actually represent us. And there's so many cool people out there. It's such an opportunity. But we are up against centuries of voter suppression, especially within communities of color. That's really serious, and so to me, that's the battle right now.
Lauren Schiller:
Well, there are six States that I think need these posters. From what I understand.
Lena Wolff:
There's so many good organizations too, Spread the Vote is just one of them. There’s also Vote.org, Reclaim Our Vote, Fair Fight, Mi Familia Vota, Four Directions and Woke Vote – they’re all totally great. There's just, there's a ton of them.
Lauren Schiller:
Well let's learn a little bit more about you, you and your backstory. I mean, we have your mother here, so I guess we can just ask her all the questions. [Laughs]
Well, I'm trying to think about the best way to ask this question. As I’ve built my podcast I've had to find my own voice, which obviously I need to have conversations with people every day. But when I'm trying to think about how I want to express myself or get a point across, there's something weird about sitting in front of a microphone and suddenly having to do that, like not just in a conversation one on one. I don't know why that is, it just is. So, I'm wondering if in terms of finding your voice in your art, whether there was ever a time when it was like Lena over here, and then Lena, the artist, or trying to connect those two people together, or have they always been the same person?
Lena Wolff:
I think the same person.
Lauren Schiller:
Yeah
Lena Wolff:
I don't know. I really found a home in San Francisco. I just have to say that it felt really comfortable when I came here as a young person and that made it easier for me to find my way as an artist.
Lauren Schiller:
Yeah. What does that mean? What's the environment that someone should look for if they want to feel confident?
Lena Wolff:
Well it was a really gay culture and filled with just a lot of people who were really stepping out of constraints. Like making art in the street and working from folk art, and illustration so kind of less confined by older ideas of what art is supposed to be. And I was surrounded by people who were breaking out and making whatever they wanted to make. And so, I had a lot of peers who were inspiring and totally great.
Lauren Schiller:
What has your experience been in terms of being a woman and being in the ‘art world?’ I'll put that in quotes.
Lena Wolff:
Well, I guess you could just say I've been really ..[pause]…I have been supported by other women as an artist. Women have held me up.
Lauren Schiller:
Yeah
Lena Wolff:
For the most part. A few rare men have exhibited my work, but not that many. [shout out to Andrew Berg of Smallworks!]
Lauren Schiller:
Yeah. So held you up like—
Lena Wolff:
Just exhibited my work and wanted to work with me.
Lauren Schiller:
Where's the men?
Lena Wolff:
I mean, that's the truth.
Lauren Schiller:
So, you're not alone with that.
Lena Wolff:
Mm-hmm.
Lauren Schiller:
We actually—Miriam and I have talked about this too, but if you look around at museums—although you're going to be in the Oakland Museum, Miriam, so congratulations to you! But the percentage of women who are exhibiting in museums is much lower than those of men.
Lena Wolff:
You know those statistics that the Guerilla Girls put out there in the 80s with their text pieces, it's basically the same right now. I mean, I think since Trump, there's been more of a concerted effort amongst curators and arts professionals to be more inclusive with the LGBTQ community, with people of color. I think there really is, but it kind of took this biggest asshole in the entire world being a president for that to happen, which is sort of like, really? But it is, I think that there is a shift happening.
Lauren Schiller:
Yeah. Well, I think, I mean, Sarah Shepherd here. Thank you for opening this gallery.
Sarah Shepard:
Yeah.
Lauren Schiller:
So how do you measure success as an artist? How do you decide ... Well, I mean I guess there's so many ways I could ask that question. How do you decide when a piece is done? How do you decide that you are feeling fulfilled by your work? How do you decide that this is how you want to make a living? I mean, there are all different ways of measuring success. How do you think about it?
Lena Wolff:
Well about when a piece is done I just know it, then sometimes I push things too far and other times I really know when something needs more work. The hardest part is when you go too far and ruin things.
Miriam Klein Stahl:
I pick them up out of the trashcan and use the pieces.
Lena Wolff:
I throw away a lot of work! Yeah, but actually when we were driving over here I was going over things with Miriam for the talk because I'm not always so comfortable with public speaking. But we were talking about this question about when we feel successful and Miriam said, "Well, when I’m in that flow place when I'm working and I forget about time and place, that's such a good feeling." But I do feel like maybe the work I'm most proud of is just the more anonymous work, like the United Against Hate posters and the VOTE! posters. Like the work that maybe helped, I don't know, gave voice to our outrage and drive as a community to address what’s happening politically. And then, a lot of of my work from the earlier days with plants and animals are in hospitals around the country. Sometimes I get emails from people, usually relatives of patients saying, "I just sat by your piece today. My brother's here and he's dying. Your work helped me find a moment of solace today and I wanted to thank you." And that just makes me feel..[pause].. well, it feels great. It feels like, okay, if I can make work that makes people feel a little better sometimes, or somehow makes our cities feel a little better, that's what I want to do.
Lauren Schiller:
Great. Thank you.
Audience Member:
I was just looking at those geometric pieces up there and I noticed that they're kind of beautifully perfect, with this perfect symmetry. But then just maybe a line missing in a few of the pieces and I wondered why?
Lena Wolff:
Well I love working with repetitions of certain patterns, but I also like to create slight imperfections in the pattern, especially when working with something more linear. I'm always trying to play around with that a little bit, seeing where adding a line or leaving out a line makes the piece more interesting. I've made plenty of things where I’ve added too many lines and they look horrible. Even weirder, sometimes even a single added line can throw something off and the feeling is wrong. I mean there's only--I can't even count, six up there. I think I went through at least 25, and then selected the six and threw out the other ones, because I had just done something that didn't work to my mind.
Audience Member:
Sometimes patterns can be so perfect, it feels confining.
Lena Wolff:
Yeah.
Audience Member:
But then you leave that line out and there's a little escape.
Lena Wolff:
I definitely struggle with it because you can tell I do actually like symmetry. I feel relaxed by symmetry, and so having moments where there's asymmetry, it's important that I can play with that a bit. Because I can err on the side of being a little bit of like a perfectionist or something or get a little, I don't know what. I'm not going to use any word. I'm not going to pathologize myself.
Audience Member:
Do you use a ruler?
Lena Wolff:
I do, with the quilt pattern drawings. I want the points to connect!
Lauren Schiller:
I was actually curious about this star piece with the lines [points to Expanding Star]
Lena Wolff:
Even with that piece, all the strips are different widths. They’re milled that way, so they’re not the same. I could have made them the same and evenly spaced them out. That's something that my brain would maybe want to do--but they're purposefully a little wonky – a little imperfection in the pattern that is overall symmetrical.
Lauren Schiller:
Do other folks have questions?
Audience Member:
Well, two things. One's a statement, one's a question. I was in LA last weekend and I went to see Pattern and Decoration in American Art at MOCA.
Lena Wolff:
Oh yeah. I'm dying to see that show.
Audience Member:
I think you would love it. But I'm wondering, I mean, I feel so lucky to both to admire your work and I also love that I also admire your values. But I often come across artists where I don't honestly like their values or their personal story. So, I'm wondering how you deal with that because for me, it's very conflicting, whether it's a musician or a visual artist, it's hard because I have real feelings about it.
Lena Wolff:
Miriam and I talk about that a lot, like the Picasso problem. [Audience laughs] Yeah. It's, I don't know. It’s hard, what do you do with it? Miriam and I have been saying lately, I think we're over it.
Miriam Klein Stahl:
I don't have a problem with just being over it. Like I don't need to ever see a Woody Allen film again.
Lena Wolff:
Yeah. Morrisey too, has gone totally crazy,
Miriam Klein Stahl:
Oh, that was just painful. I loved the Smiths growing up, but Morrisey is such a jerk now.
Lena Wolff:
All of a sudden, he’s a racist Brexiteer, it's so weird. All of a sudden, he's gone crazy.
Miriam Klein Stahl:
At some point you just have to say no.
Lena Wolff:
Yeah. Especially when there's so many artists where you can take in the whole package and feel like, "I love this. This is great."
Audience Member:
Can you talk about Patterns & Spells and how your work in this show speaks to politics, as well as just your values or place on the planet? Do you think there's also some underlying message around technology or craft and the very handmade quality of your work? I'm curious about that-
Lena Wolff:
Maybe it's just, technology is absent.
Audience Member:
Absolutely.
Lauren Schiller:
Well, you are using a ruler. [Audience laughs]
Lena Wolff:
I am using ruler sometimes!
Lauren Schiller:
That's a great question. I mean, it is sort of like an activist act in and of itself. This work can exist in any world, with or without technology. I don't know if that's the nature of your question, but-
Audience Member:
I think so. I mean, we're so steeped in technology now and there's this calmness and anonymity of what you're saying around craft and quilting and heritage. I feel that in these pieces. It’s really a very different experience then some of the art—some of the visuals that we see today, that have become more and more technologically advanced
Lena Wolff:
Yeah, I definitely want to maintain an intimacy with materials and to work with my hands. That's an important part of it. It's so relaxing. And it just feels really human. I like cooking a lot too. I like to garden.
Lena’s mom:
This is part of the culture we need to create to deal with climate change. I keep thinking about how my father lived over a hundred years ago and how much more simple it was, how much better for the planet.
Lena Wolff:
I definitely like working with natural materials, humble materials - paper and wood and thread and cloth. These natural materials that are all interrelated -the way the wood pieces are cut for marquetry is so similar to how the paper is cut for the collages, they're so connected.
Audience Member: There’s something age-old and timeless about it.
[conversation moves to info about current fundraisers for important campaigns]
Sarah Shepard:
Yes, thank you all for coming. It’s great to see all your faces and get to talk to you Lena, thank you. Enjoy the work, enjoy your day.
