Fruit of the loom

The second floor of the Art Building has become the temporary home of Master of Fine Arts candidate Jessica Hickey’s graduate exhibition curiously titled >.

No, that’s not a typo. From Monday, April 30, through Wednesday, May 9, > will be on view in the Autzen Gallery. Hickey’s work, which has been in development for over a year, focuses on guardian weaving and what she calls “material propositions,” which include pieces made of cement, flour and other substances.

In this interview, Hickey discusses her life as an artist and > as a culmination of her creative and spiritual endeavors.

Vanguard: Why is your exhibition named >?
Jessica Hickey: I chose the name because I see a lot of innovate spirituality and ways that people try to solve problems that they can’t do on their own as a superposition of mysticism and ontology and science. I also wanted it to be short and all-encompassing because the actual title pieces are long with the material lists they include.

VG: Can you tell me about how events in your life brought you to where you are now?
JH: I have actually lived my whole life in the Northwest. I was raised near Tacoma, Wash. I started making art and really finding [the Northwest] to be an interesting place to study toward the end of high school. I moved to Eugene where I did undergraduate school, and I received my BA in ceramics and fibers. That was in 2008.

After that, I stayed in Eugene, where I continued working as a technician for the fibers departments, and I taught ceramics for the city of Eugene for about four years. I also directed day camps and taught mixed media classes to all ages.

After taking a few years off, I really found myself loving teaching, but I knew that I wanted to go back to graduate school, and also that I wanted to go into a program that wasn’t media-based. I wanted to see what would happen in a completely interdisciplinary program.

VG: Did you have a different goal in life as a youth than you do now?
JH: I never viewed art as something that I could make a lifestyle or a career out of. I’d always been really fascinated with psychology and biology and all kinds of sciences. Neither of my parents works in technical arts fields, but both are very skilled as far as making things go.

I didn’t know, and was told by a lot of people, that it was something that I was going to get out of school with and find myself working in a different field. Just through getting to know a lot of people, so far I have found really interesting jobs teaching and sharing art as well as making it. So no, I didn’t know as a child that this is what I’d end up doing.

VG: Did you receive support from your loved ones in your aspirations?
JH: Yes and no. I don’t think that at first my family was really excited when I was 19 and I changed over to an art major in my second year in college. And there was a process of me thinking I could do it once I got out and started finding teaching jobs, because you always hear these horror stories about what you might end up doing. Even if I had worked in a different profession, I would be very happy to have the education that I decided on. Nobody in my immediate family had ever decided to take on the subject of art as a serious endeavor.

VG: Can you tell me more about the type of work you create and the style of work in your exhibition?
JH: I started making this series of guardian weavings. Each one is an abstract portrait of an individual because all people, I’ve found, had interesting and inspiring personal narratives. The imagery that ends up in each one, and also the objects, are based on a psychic defense and practice. It really depends on what sort of struggles they’re going through.

It’s more about empathy than just pity. It’s people that I think might have more protection. In my exhibition, there will be weavings and material propositions, which are sort of “what ifs.” All of them are relate back to that idea of synthesizing different spiritual systems and picking from history really fascinating ideas.

A lot of these relate to this idea that forms that are perfect geometrically are sort of superhuman and represent ideas of perfection. There is also an idea of abstraction and inscription in my work. Sometimes they’re real objects and sometimes they’re just images in cloth. In the cement pieces and flour pieces, there are actual objects that are said to hold the power embedded within.

That block of cement next to you has 29.53 items people think of as being good luck. Everything from a prayers flag to rabbit’s feet and a baby’s shoe. The number 29.53 represents the length of the astrological month, and finding an object that was not whole but measured .53 was difficult, but I finally found it. It is the longer half of a wishbone.

VG: Where do you go to find inspiration for your pieces?
JH: That can really be anywhere. One place is the library. Another is eavesdropping on people’s conversations. Also, I spend a lot of time at thrift stores getting yarn and scrap. I like that these materials already have somebody else’s narrative embedded in them. It’s something that’s already been in somebody’s hands, and allowing that process of the narrative to be able to control the work is nice. It’s like berry picking for ideas.

VG: What direction do you see your art going in?
JH: I think that it’s been really exciting to return to craft media as a vehicle for conceptual works after not doing it for years, and I’m still excited about that. It’s been really rewarding. I am going to keep going with that. I had only done ceramics to make functional work, but now that I’ve gone through grad school my view on making things has changed. I’m really interested in seeing what happens if I started working with clay again. In some ways I have. All of the mold-making cast pieces are made out of clay originals, but I haven’t done fired ceramics for about six or seven years.

VG: What sets you apart from other artists?
JH: If anything, coming here has made me think a lot about how similarly a lot of us generate our ideas. The actual product and research might be very different, but it’s really sort of amazing when you talk to people, and if you all have something due, then we’re having the same sort of feelings when heading into a critique or trying to find something to read or share. The things that set me apart from other artists are all kind of fluid.

VG: Can you tell me about one of the weavings that’s hanging on the wall?
JH: I made this weaving for Whitney Houston’s daughter. Before this, I had been making these mostly for people that I had been having conversations with. Close family or friends or people that I physically ran into here in Portland but that started to seem kind of boring and formulaic. I hadn’t made one in like a month, and I read about Whitney Houston’s death. All of a sudden her daughter is showing up in the tabloids who hadn’t really been famous, and gossip of her was showing up during a difficult time in her life.

So I made a weaving. It has a background of the color yellow all over, and that’s to protect children from the evil eye. There’s water to fight negative energy and put out fires gently. A white candle represents Saint Clare of Assisi, and that protects against psychic invaders and alcoholics. There’s a ruby in there to help dispel feelings of self-doubt and elm bark, which eliminates slander, gossip, criticism and bad thought forms.

VG: Do you have any advice for anyone aspiring to do great things with their artwork or in their life?
JH: Learn from as many interesting people as you can, and don’t get discouraged. Also, record things. Take notes in your life outside of your studio. When I’m teaching I always tell people to bring in photographs, even if they’re just on their phones.

When you sit down and try and create something, if you don’t have anything generated in your head, it turns into something boring. Make sure to keep recording the things that are interesting and that are going on around you because that’s where you’re going to generate meaningful things. It’s hard to just pull things out of nowhere. Thin air is not a good subject matter, at least not for me.