By NANCI PRICE SCOULAR, second year student in the Creative Inquiry, Interdisciplinary Arts MFA program
This post was written for Cindy Shearer's CIA 7712: MFA Project. In these blogs, students are sharing their discoveries, reflections and learning as they enter the process of creating a body of art work and culminate their degrees.
I am currently reading Mark Doty’s "Heaven’s Coast," his memoir on losing his beloved partner to HIV/Aids in the mid-1990s. Ever-tuned to “insight(s) from the seemingly commonplace," Doty’s coast is a uniquely interstitial space and a metaphor for Life as a whole. “Any shore is a meeting place of continuous activity, of constant negotiation between earth and water, relations shifting by the hour and season. What is land at noon may be sea at three."
Doty goes on to comment that “(T)his shape-shifting makes the forms and aspects of things mercurial, inconstant – as if this conjunction of elements, life on the boundary, made things themselves restless”.
I began to look for other artists exploring interstitial spaces. Two in particular captured my attention, based on the diversity of their respective approach, medium and artwork.
C Dougherty, a video artist, writer, photographer, and blogger, photographed “unintentional art emerge(ing) in the interstitial space that occurs between one advertisement and the next” in the subways of New York. He caught the moments after one poster has been torn down and before the next one replaced it.
Painter Roger Chavez takes a different approach in his current show at Ursinus College outside Philadelphia. Titled, "Interstitial Spaces: Void and Object, Recent Works by Roger Chavez," the paintings live in the space between portraiture and still life, creating a very atmospheric and dreamy sense of interstitial space.
They are in sharp contrast to the jagged edges and ruined images that define Dougherty’s photographs. Chavez’s paintings feel as though they are changing in front of our eyes, despite the fact that the brain registers dry paint.
In my own work, I am drawn to where the sea and the sand ebb and flow. It’s a no-man’s land, constantly in flux. Conquered by the invading ocean, then reclaimed as sand when the tide recedes, only to be invaded again by gentle eddies until the waves regain their strength. The constant give and take is not in vain however—it erases the boundaries between two forces of nature, creating an interstitial space of watery sand that constantly shapes and reshapes the contours of the shoreline itself. A space that is rich in its diversity—strands of seaweed, thousands of broken bits of shell, small pebbles, bird’s feathers and tiny crabs.
What would my interstitial space look like? Could I weave together different elements of myself to create such diversity and richness? Would that comfort the immigrant’s longing for a deep sense of home? Align more fully the responsible full-time corporate persona with the joyously creative part-time artist? Integrate the spirit of the woman on the land with the selkie in the sea?
As a start, I am weaving together the seawater and sea sand as homage to "Heaven’s Coast." This is a very simple response to the question above, and I will see where the journey takes me.