Micah Salkind interviews
Karen Harris
Micah Salkind is Special Projects Manager for the City of Providence Department of Art, Culture + Tourism.
Micah: One of the first things we did when I came to visit your studio, was see your garden, and the banana tree. Tell me a bit about how you came to have it in your life?
Karen: My husband bought me this banana tree because we had just finished our 25th anniversary. We went to Jamaica and visited my grandfather's parents’ home, where they had lots of banana trees … We came back and bought a little banana tree. We had a really hard winter for one year. It might have been five years ago, where every Monday it snowed. I like snow days but I couldn’t get my work done. That winter … I was watching the tree … it was making amazing shapes and shadows against the yellow wall. That room [where it lives] is a tangerine color to orange color. [The tree] was shadowing, making great shapes, and it was just such a memory to be there on a cold day. It reminded me of when I was younger. The quietness. The sound. It was something that lay really deep.
You were called to it … and you began this conversation between you and the plant.
Yes, that’s kind of like how it started and then I just started collecting the leaves. The largest leaf I’ve ever had is probably about three feet off that tree, but the leaves shrink as they dry. You can’t exactly paint on the leaf right away because it’s water-repellent.
One of the interesting things about the show is you have different kinds of papers and textures you print on using the leaves, but then you also have the leaves themselves as paper texture and sculptural elements. Every different version of the leaf is a different experiment.
Oh yeah. A different feeling and highlight of what the characteristics are of the tree. When trying to make the leaf skeleton, I had the leaf in this bucket of water/salt solution for the longest time. I had to give up on it because when it goes to the skeleton, it becomes … like really fine silk. The fibers are just so beautiful there, but very subtle. It doesn’t just hit you with “skeleton,” it gives a real layering [effect] and it gets really light-colored.
But you couldn’t use it ultimately because it was too fragile?
Too fragile to use it the way I had planned. I think my next round would be putting it on rice paper because rice paper is also forgiving and you can still have some transparency.
That’s just one experiment that you’ve incorporated into this body of work and it has this whole story behind it. Then there are the leaves in the mobiles … the falling leaves.
The suspended ones with the shadows. If you ever get a chance, you are traveling somewhere where there are banana trees, and you actually walk amongst them, [the tree] there’s a sound and a smell. Look around and you may experience how the sunlight hits through the leaves.
Image of banana tree from Karen’s childhood home in Jamaica
When I think about the sensual dimensions of the show, clearly it has these visual elements at play, but there is also this potential to smell or to hear the papery leaves rustling against each other. There are so many different ways that the plant and you are in dialogue. Can you talk about the rice paper experiments and how those emerged?
The first ones I did at my residency [at I-Park]. I had a friend, Donna Bruton, who passed away. She was a RISD professor and a great friend. She died of cancer really young — 56 or 57 — and I just remember spending the time with her in her last days, and that paper was actually given to me by her … I have some of her brushes. She had a brush that was almost like a Sumi-brush and I started painting with that and the paper she gave me.
It’s sort of like a collaboration?
In a way, with a person that you love who’s not here anymore. So I started to experiment with rice/mulberry paper scrolls. I placed the scrolls on the floor and painted standing over them. With a glass of wine and some good music, I was able to dance with the brush strokes.
Just going in with the paper.
Yes. There’s something about letting the blood rush to your head and just stepping away, and knowing that no one can stop the stroke. But there’s also that Japanese artist, Tomoko Kawao, and she does calligraphy, but she puts her whole body in it, her hair … but she has her brush, her Sumi brush is about a foot around and her pot of ink. Her brush is huge and you can see the spla ering of the ink because she spla ers it. Then she might roll and dance to the other side of the paper. I was so inspired by seeing her do that because at first when I first started doing it on rice paper, it was a bit more controlled, and then I was like, ‘ah, this feels really good to kind of be free.’ The shapes of the leaves, I study them. All of the paintings there are real leaves that I’m looking at and painting while I’m holding [one] up and watching it swirl.
There is a way in which you are dancing with the plant in those moments. I think the work, when you see it in space, has a flow to it, and it’s draped; there’s a lyrical dancerly quality to it that translates the movement and motion and sense of freedom. It is also an archive of your feelings about the plant … We also have the two larger ones with your mother and the smaller diptych. Talk a little bit about how she figures into the show.
It’s been a long year with my mom. She’s a cancer survivor and cancer came back about two years ago. The last two years have not been easy. She’s still surviving. The nickname my sisters and I gave my mom is Janie-Baby. Being a single mom, and an immigrant who came to this country without knowing anyone, she used to work in the hotels. She just got a job as a maid and then she immigrated us. She left us with our grandparents in JA and it took about seven years before she was able to bring us to the USA. So the time in the banana fields was without my mom. With my mom going through this time [with her illness] and [me] realizing [I’m] going to lose her … because we had that separation … it’s all about separation anxiety. A sense of place is also about where you belong. America has always been a weird experience for me too. So it ties into my mom. What place do I belong in? My birth order, in caring for my mom became an issue too. Any time we have with her is a blessing. So I’m very practical. I want to plan everything. That’s why I’m a pain in the butt. I always ask a lot of questions and I always have to plan. First, she said she wanted to be cremated, and then she changed her mind and said: ‘I want to be buried.’ And my mom used to model. She’s a person who loves dressing up and looking good. She wanted to choose her own cotton. The Funeral Director brings us into this room and he’s showing us the conservative versions and my mom says: ‘Do you have anything with gold?’ She wanted something that shined. So he took us into this other room, and it had this one casket that was called “Silver Rose” and it was just like she lit up. And I was like, ‘That’s it.’ And he was like: ‘Well, that’s expensive.’ And I was like: ‘Don’t talk to her about the expense because she doesn’t live in that realm. She lives in the realm of living fully.’ The portraits started coming from that.
So in a lot of ways, those pieces are part of you dealing with this impending life event that you have on the horizon. Which is about your connection to her and your memories together and the memory of that distance. Then we’re going to also be looking at this whole other series of work, which is the cotton.
I have some new cotton trees growing on my deck.
Cotton was one of the earlier experiments and plant-human relationships you were exploring?
Actually, the banana was first, and then the cotton kind of interjected. But I didn’t finish that. So for me, this show is helping me move to the next thing.
Is the cotton part of the next thing?
Yes. The cotton is the next thing.
I love that we get to walk into the gallery space and see the really bold colors you use. We’ll get to see these objects in that grid, and get to experience them as the tools, but also the artistic collaborators! They’re part of your collaborative process. They’re in this with you.
It’s very rare you can have a show where you can explain why you got there. If someone was to take the time to walk through … they’d get it. They’d kind of be in [my] head. They won’t know the emotional aspect, and it is that color and light and sunlight, and my culture … sense of place is really important. The colors I have in the house - they’re very Caribbean. You come into a lemon, and you go into a tangerine and walk through an orange. You go into sea foam; you go into a teal. But it’s funny when you think about where you belong in life. In my fifties now … I think about where I belong; my sense of place.
In some ways working on this body of work has helped you get closer to understanding that deeper connection that you have to Jamaica and maybe to process how you want to relate to that connection.
It’s the process … like the separation from my mother from a young age, and that time of being alone, and not knowing what to do with that time, or feeling, or how it resonates inside of you. Like my name. You’ll see sometimes I sign my paintings or I talk about my name being “Donna.” Just to know that you’re coming to another country and all of a sudden you’re told, you’re nearly 8 and you’re told: your name isn’t Donna, it’s Karen (Kah-rin) that’s how it’s said.
Art has always been a way to find your position.
Find my position and relax and calm me. It felt [like it made me] whole. I could feel like my senses were alive. When I’m doing my art I see colors even more. You know how when you look at something you say, ‘Oh this is just so brown?’ If I started painting it, I might paint the purple cast that I see.
I think you see that in the work too. This study of this one object, very many objects that look similar, you bring out so many different hues. There are purples, there are pinks, and they are part of seeing this thing again and again and meditating on it. And communing with these different chemical processes; testing your subject. In some ways, it sounds like you were testing yourself too.
I learned a lot about myself during this process. I learned how to be me in my space. I’m not apologizing for being me, and I’m not trying to adjust to anyone’s expectations. This is it.