Blindspot, 2020, Silkscreen on rag paper, gouache and watercolor, 22”x 24’
JEAN BLACKBURN Interview by Harryet Candee
I see your artwork being playful and imaginative. My eyes move around the parameters of each piece, perusing your paintings, sculptures and drawing at a slow pace, though I feel compelled to use my imagination and quickly fill in parts of objects that have disappeared from view. Am I on track with my reactions? Can you fill me in on what I am missing? I think play is one of the best things we do as creative beings. It is such a complex intelligent activity, involving experience, expectation, humor, and imaginative projection. It is one of the best ways we create new ideas. If my work has a sense of physical impermanence, it is because that was underlined for me when I had cancer in my mid-twenties. Happily, I am considered cured, but it forever changed my relationship to my body and my sense of certainty about the physical world. Though trained as a painter, I began making 34 • MARCH 2022 THE ARTFUL MIND
sculpture because I needed to contemplate, and at times, undercut the physicality of things. The home fascinates me because it is where we start. I work with existing domestic objects because they are already loaded with so many associations. Our early experiences act as templates that substantially shape future interactions and understandings. But this structure of understandings that we build as children is constantly tested and adjusted in dialogue with experience. Many of my works involve broken, subtracted, erased or repaired elements. I remove parts for a variety of reasons. It might be to suggest fragility and push the object to the brink of its physical integrity. It could be to mine material that can be used to make something else. Sometimes that thing is a model of the original object. Or removed material might be used in a repair. A recent piece called Flotsam deals with this quite directly. In response to the instability of
our contemporary moment, I broke a canoe paddle into fragments. The wood grain was very straight so it broke into long splinters. After removing as much as possible from the paddle and mapping the various fragments, I made small wooden splines from the scrap to pin the paddle back together. The boundaries or slippage of an object’s definition are particularly interesting. I often manipulate my objects to position them on the verge of multiple possibilities that reveal embedded assumptions, associations and deep poetic resonances in the mundane. I agree, that as we grow, the things we surround ourselves with in our homes are deeply engrained in us, as you have mentioned. Our past, our home life, the furniture the objects within our familiar space and embedded in our mind’s eye is a very powerful thing. How do you go about overlapping and joining past
