JULIA KUNIN with Maria Elena González

On the occasion of her exhibition at Greenberg Van Doren Gallery, Julia Kunin: Nightwood (February 23 – April 21, 2012), Maria Elena González met with Julia to converse about her current work.

 

Maria Elena González (Rail): You and I have known each other for a long time. We are both sculptors, though we come from very different backgrounds, geographically and educationally. I came to the U.S. from Cuba with my parents in 1968. I went to school in Miami and received a B.F.A. from Florida International University in 1979 and an M.A. from San Francisco State University in 1983, where clay was king. But I never worked with it then. For me still, Pérez, the local carpenter in my hometown, had a lasting impact. What was your trajectory like?

 

Julia Kunin: I grew up in Vermont. I was a teenager in the ’70s, which marked a revival of the studio potter. Hideo Okino, head of ceramics at University of Vermont, took me under his wing when I was in high school and let me work in the clay studio. I learned ceramics by being in the pottery shop, not through formal training. I studied with ceramicist Ed Eberle at Carnegie Mellon for one year in 1982. Then I received a B.A. from Wellesley College in 1984 and my M.F.A. from Mason Gross at Rutgers University in 1993. It was a very exciting time in the early ’90s.

 

Rail: It’s interesting the effect direct experience rather than formal training had on both of us early on! Your current exhibition title is taken from the novel by— —

 

Kunin: Djuna Barnes. Yes.

 

Rail: The exhibition features 18 pieces created between 2010 and 2011. Where were they made?

 

Kunin: Some of them were made in Brooklyn, and some of them in Eastern Europe. I have a kiln in my studio, and I do a lot of the work there.

 

Rail: So you had to deal with the logistics of creating sculptures in Brooklyn, shipping them to Eastern Europe, finishing them there, creating some new ones there, and then glazing and firing all of the work there and shipping it back here.

 

Kunin: Absolutely right. A lot of logistics, it was really an adventure.

 

Rail: Going through the exhibit and knowing a little bit about your influences—Palissy, 16th century gardens, scholar’s rocks, etc.—I wonder if you could you speak about some of these?

 

Kunin: I’ll start with Palissy. I have a background in clay, and then I left it in the early ’80s, and took it up again because I was trying to solve a sculpture problem. I was working with octopus imagery, because I loved the grotesque aspect of it, as well as the sexuality implied in the form, both its female and male erotic qualities. I had been working in glass and it wasn’t working for me, so I finally decided to use clay because I had seen some amazing ceramic sculpture at the Asia Society in 2002 by Ah Xian. I just walked right into this pottery shop in Williamsburg and said, “Can anybody teach me how to make a mold of an octopus?” And one of the potters there, Chris Russell, told me he would teach me how to make press molds, just the way that you press tiles into a plaster shape. He told me to look up the work of Bernard Palissy, who worked in 16th century France, creating platters that resembled ponds. Palissy would take direct casts from animals, and make platters covered with lizards, snails, and other elements from nature. He also figured out how fossils were made, and experimented with taking casts of animals and using them in his work. I just fell in love with his ceramics. There was this sort of over-the-top quality to them, and the glazes gave his ceramics a fantastical quality.

 

Rail: Who would want to eat from a plate full of lizards?

 

Kunin: [Laughs.] Exactly. There was a real eccentricity about it. His style was copied by many generations afterwards, and is called Palissyware. His work had a big influence on me because, yes, I had been planning to make these sculptures just out of octopi, but then I decided to try snails and other animals. The animals were a vehicle for making an abstract form that had these sort of other worldly qualities, so that when you approach the work, up close, you can discover things. The sculptures started to look like miniature landscapes. In addition, I have a great love of design and the decorative arts. I’d been looking at and reading about 18th century European porcelain as well as early Chinese porcelain. I’m interested in decorative objects that are used in daily life.

 

Rail: That’s very present in the work.

 

Kunin: The piece “Hanging Gardens” has snail shells on the bottom that were cast from real snail shells, and it has butterflies and snakes that were cast from toys. It’s basically a kind of rock formation that becomes a miniature world unto itself. I also put a lot of texture on my work because the glazes bring out all these unexpected colors in every little spot—you can even see lines on the butterfly wings. Turquoise comes out here, gold comes out there. I intentionally drip lots of liquid clay called slip to create a cascade-like feeling. Movement is very important to me. I think it’s just the way I work as a sculptor. But the thing about this process is that sometimes you don’t know when to stop! You could keep piling and piling and piling. And that’s something that you just sort of figure out as you go along. Sometimes I just want the plain rock surface to be evident.

 

Rail: Now, in your previous exhibition at Greenberg Van Doren, Julia Kunin/Emi Avora: Against Nature (2007), you had a piece called “Smoke” that had snails as well, didn’t you?

 

Kunin: Close. It was actually covered with Black-Eyed Susans. It had the quality of a shag rug texture because of all of the petals. You see the texture from a distance, then you come up close and you see the flowers. The other thing about “Smoke” is that the color of the glaze and the content of the work create a kind of tension. Sometimes the content of the work is not so pretty, you know? But the color kind of fuses it together. You see the beauty and then move in closer and say, “Oh yeah, that’s a snake there, those are drips, looks a little scatological, a little sexual, I’m not really sure what it is.”

 

Rail: How do the titles of your pieces come about? Are they related to the ideas in or content of the work? Do they come along as you’re working on the piece?

 

Kunin: I will say, with this body of work, the titles came later, because I was so involved in the pieces I couldn’t quite analyze them. I worked intuitively, not analytically. I did a lot of reading and I’d make a piece, it would remind me of something, and I’d research that source. When I went to my references and sources, titles came to mind. The pieces is titled “Pantagruel,” and that’s “Gargantua,” are called that because, to me, they started to feel like creatures. Those works are about the grotesque. The monster, the creature, the freak.

 

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