Artist Interview with Sierra Slentz (Marking Time) and LeiAnn Huddleston

MARKING TIME AUDIO INTERVIEW WITH ARTIST SIERRA SLENTZ AND LEIANN HUDDLESTON July 1, 2021 | Marjorie Barrick Museum of Art

SIERRA It’s kind of yellowy…citron…glaze. It still surprises me. It’s actually an old glaze.

Do you remember, at the Cosmo, the P3 studios? That’s an old glaze from when I did my residency there. It’s a pop of bright colors. I hadn’t used this in a really long time.

LEIANN Right.

SIERRA So, I did. I had a couple test pieces that were left over from my old project. And so, I tested and was like, “Ooh! I wanna work with the hot pink.“ I wasn’t sure if I was going to use the hot pink and the teal because I used those in my last series. I got rid of a couple colors, and then I replaced it with the citron.

LEIANN When you said you used it in the last series, was that the Landscape series?

SIERRA Yeah, the Landscape series. I wasn’t sure if I was going to completely change the colors, but I kept those two and I got rid of the purple. It was called “Mojave dusk,” it was a purpley brown. I got rid of that color and started using the citron. I came in and—Poof! I like that color!

LEIANN Do you have that experience often? Not only with this color, but you see one and you’re like, “Oh I really like that one!”

SIERRA Yeah. When you’re posting things on Instagram, I’m like, “That’s cool!“ There was a video you guys posted the other day. It was a real intense close up, and I was like, “Oh! I really like that,” and then I was like, oh, “That’s my piece!” It was this weird thing! Then, I had a student message me like, “I saw your work at the museum.” And I was like, “Yeah, I told you guys I had a big show.”

LEIANN They came down and saw it right?

SIERRA They came in and saw it. Then my neighbor came in and saw it. And my mom, she came in, she was like, “So that art - did I miss the art opening?” And I’m like, “No! We’re not going to have an art opening. I think there’s gonna be an art closing.” She was like, ‘When is that?” And I’m like, “When I’m in Lake Tahoe.”

LEIANN I know you said that you used some of these glazes from your previous series with the Landscapes. You view them as completely separate, right?

SIERRA Each one was representing a memory of going through the desert. Or a time MARKING TIME Interview with artist Sierra Slentz and LeiAnn Huddleston 1

when I was going out. There was a year or so when I was trying to get out into the desert.

Every weekend. I was doing a lot of driving back and forth from Goldwell. Being on the board for the museum and trying to get some shows and stuff out there. So doing that drive back and forth and stopping halfway. There was a lot of places I liked to stop and take a break, stretch my legs, collecting rocks, taking pictures of plants, and documenting that time.

Thinking that later, oh yeah, I’ll use these pictures to make pieces. I’ve been collecting these pictures and these little rocks and these little trinkets for so long. That’s the desert series that I did every day. I have this little drawer full of rocks and broken tiles and pieces of metal and little handfuls of sand, or just different things that have caught my eye. Seeds that I collected off plants in the desert and you know, it’s kind of like a little plastic sorting container that I have in my studio. I have all these pictures and I was like, I’m going to try to remember that sensation of going into the desert. And the colors and the texture, the experience. Then once we were isolated in our home and we weren’t going anywhere, I started doing that same type of activity but with my backyard, my family, the things we were eating, and cooking and trying to find inspiration in our daily life.

LEIANN Using that same kind of archeological kind of method, but interior.

SIERRA The emotions are different. At first, I was excited. You know, we all thought that we were getting a two-week vacation. We thought, “Oh this is gonna be a long Spring Break!

I’m kinda stoked about it!” Then I started getting a little nervous and then trying to not be scared in front of my kids. Just like, “It’ll be fine! We’re not gonna run out of toilet paper. We have resources.” I remember thinking, “Oh shit! You know what if we do run out of food?”

That’s when we added more chickens to our flock. We ripped out a whole bunch of weeds from the side of our house. We started planting seeds and vegetables on the side of our house. And we still have all that. We still have all our chickens.

We’ve always done a little bit of gardening and a little bit of homesteading, but it kicked into overdrive when the whole pandemic started. Just a lot of different emotions going day-byday like everybody had. “Is this going to be a two-week vacation or is this gonna be what ended up being like, over a year, so…?”

LEIANN When we initially went in there was no end date. It was just, “Go home! Stay home! We’ll see you when we see you.”

SIERRA Yeah, “…and we’ll get back to you.” Then, the teachers—“Try to contact your students,” you know, “and see how they’re doing. Don’t overload them with work but they have to be doing some work!” Everything was like, mixed messages from everywhere. From your employers, from the news, from— LEIANN No one knew what was happening.

SIERRA I kept thinking, “Gosh! Are my paychecks going to stop being directly deposited?”

We were spending a lot of money on extra food and trying to buy seeds and trying to prepare a pantry of different things. I went and bought a whole bunch of clay right when they said that things were closing down. I was like, “I don’t wanna run out!” I had a project that I had just signed a contract for. I was going to do it over Spring Break, and I needed to get the clay prepared for this project. I was like, “Ooh I should probably get the clay…now.” I ended 2 MARKING TIME Interview with artist Sierra Slentz and LeiAnn Huddleston

up having my friend go pick it up for me because I was doing too many things. But I was really glad that I had that clay!

LEIANN When everyone was going in to— SIERRA —to buy toilet paper, I was buying clay. That mural project that I just finished? That was already supposed to be done. We had to extend the deadline because I couldn’t get clay. Like, I ran out of clay. As soon as they said that project’s on hold, I started using that clay for this.

LEIANN When you were working on just this project, what was the scarcity of materials?

SIERRA We were running out, for sure. I stopped making tiles for the mural project. But then it ended up becoming hard to get certain types of clay and certain types of glazes. I think the Laguna Clay Company that’s in California, they shut down for a while. Clay Arts Vegas, they shut down for a while, but they were able to give me clay. I had to reuse scraps and uhm, normally things I would throw away. In my desert series, if a piece didn’t work out or it cracked, or the firing didn’t turn out good I would—I don’t want to say throw away but— LEIANN Get rid of it.

SIERRA I have some in my yard, they’re just lawn ornaments basically. It’s faster to remake one than it is to try to fix them. But I had more time on my hands and less supplies on hand so there’s not one that was thrown away. Every single one was used, even the ones that had bad glazes. I refired them and put new glazes on them. Ironically. the first one I made broke and I’m like, okay, I’m not digging this. I had to epoxy that together. And then the thread is holding that together. That’s an ode to the Japanese technique of [kintsugi]. Everything happens for a reason. Just go with it. You know, that’s part of its life and that’s part of its story.

There’s a few of them that are broken. There’s a couple of them that have cracks in them that normally I would’ve broken or destroyed but we used every single piece. Some of this stuff is hiding blemishes in different parts of the clay. This one was so ugly. It’s one of those ones where I would’ve just thrown it, you know? If you look, you can see all the different layers of different colors of glaze and it would not be pretty. It just would not. After a while I was like, “I gotta get rid of this! That one’s done.” That one was one that I worked on over and over and over again because I hated the way it looked. I just couldn’t!

LEIANN Were there techniques that you always wanted to try but hadn’t done before? I was thinking these—they look like rock!

SIERRA Yeah. So, these ones and those are a new type of glaze, and they had to be refired as well. I hadn’t tested it before. Normally I would do a test tile but I didn’t really do any test tiles. I did it on there and hoped for the best, and if they didn’t turn out then I would like reglaze them, refire. Y’know, put different layers so this one was fired probably three or four times. This one definitely was refired probably four times, probably five times. My kiln broke partway through the pandemic as well, so instead of doing an eight-hour fire I had to do a fifteen-hour fire to get it hot enough. That changes the textures of certain glazes too. I was finally able to get a kiln repair guy—Bill, the kiln guy, he came out and rewired my kiln, so I was able to continue. I had a whole bunch that were piling up because you make them MARKING TIME Interview with artist Sierra Slentz and LeiAnn Huddleston 3

and then they had to dry before you fire them. I was keeping them in these plastic crates that were starting to pile up. Because originally my show was going to be in the hallway over here. It was going to be a different arrangement. We were going to try to do a performance piece that went with it, and those were going to be the Desert pieces. And the Desert series was going to be rehung here in a different configuration that talked about the landscape and taking things from the landscape and then having it start to disappear. So, it was going to be holes in the patterning. If you take one off, then there’s this void and this random nail that’s there and there was going to be some type of interaction. We hadn’t figured it out yet.

But originally that was supposed to be in August or September. Then you guys contacted me, and I was like, “I started making a new series.” And she [Marjorie Barrick Museum of Art Executive Director, Alisha Kerlin] was like, “Really, what?” I told her what I was doing, and I still wasn’t sure if it was done or not at the time and she said, “That sounds really interesting, you should do it. Keep doing it.”

LEIANN It turned into a pretty emotional project.

SIERRA The timing was right on too. It was kind of scary. It was one year to the day where we were told to stay home to the day that we were told to report back to school. To the day. So like, Ugh. It’s like someone’s been planning it or something you know?

Like, “Oh! Can’t do more than a year! We gotta do it now!”

LEIANN I don’t know if this is going to be a resonating point with a lot of people, but I know it is for me. That pinpoint of when you found out, this is it, we have to stay home. We can’t go back to work. Things like that. When it all kicked off.

SIERRA It’s funny because I have one that’s the day before and I was sick that day so I stayed home from work. It was my friend’s birthday. I had already wrapped up the other project, and I was cleaning my studio and figuring out what I was going to do. I made one for her for her birthday. I scratched in “Happy Birthday, Natalie” with the date and all of that in there. As I was doing it I was like, I wished I had done that with all the Desert ones. Like the name of the places in the desert. I wish that that would’ve been less abstract and more definite. So, the act of me writing the date and “happy birthday” in it to her, in the clay—‘cause you know it’s physically in there, it’s baked in there, it’s a part of the piece now. I kept thinking about that the next day… I think it was that night that we were told to stay home. The next morning I woke up and I was like, “Something about me writing happy birthday and the date on that one makes me want to do that again.” I was like, “You know what? I’m just gonna write.” I started keeping track on sticky notes. So I’ve marked it in the clay and after a couple days I was like, “Is this the third day we’ve stayed home? Is this the 4 MARKING TIME Interview with artist Sierra Slentz and LeiAnn Huddleston

fourth day? Like? What?!” I went back to the clay and I had the calendar out. I was getting disoriented with what day it was. So I had to go back and make sure that they were all in order. I felt I was going crazy. I was like, “Okay, has this been a week?” I kept checking my pieces. I kept checking my calendar. And I kept checking Facebook. I was like, “Okay wait!

No! That was the day that I did this!” I had started writing on Facebook. “This is day one of us staying at home.” “This is day two of family time…” and I kept doing that every single day.

So, I had it on the pieces, I had it on the sticky notes, and then I had it on Facebook. That was a way for me to keep things organized and not lose track of time. The headlines too. I started keeping track of the headlines. Every day I would read a headline, and after a while I was like, “Wait a minute. Didn’t we just see this headline? Was it a hundred people a day or was it a thousand people that died?” I couldn’t keep it straight. So I kept a log of a headline from each day. It was interesting how things cycled through. Where they would say, “You know if the numbers keep going up, then by February we’ll have this many deaths.” Then I was like, “Oh! I’m going to mark that! And I wanna see if in February do we have that many deaths.”

And everything was spot on. Everything just kept cycling back. I thought it was interesting, it gave me something to do, it helped me feel like I wasn’t going crazy. I think it gave me a cycle to keep track of.

When I did the Desert thing my goal was to do a year. I had started making a few of these and I wasn’t sure where it was going. I was like, “I’m gonna make 360 of them for that window.” Originally, it wasn’t going to be that many. It was going to be some paint with maybe some paint stripes. Maybe some sculptures hanging down. It was going to be more like an installation. I was like, “Well there’s already twenty of them. Kinda wanna see if I can make one every day…” That how the original series started, the 360 Desert series. I’m drawn to that form. I’ve always liked making small hand-held things. I’ve never made huge- even though this looks and feels huge. Each one is little and individual. I like making small, handheld items that can be arranged, put together, stacked, or piled, or hung to create something larger. I’m not trying to make a macho sculpture. I think the biggest sculpture I’ve ever made was that bear at the Cosmopolitan. I like lots of little things.

LEIANN Right and this is definitely a culmination of moments and events.

SIERRA I also do mosaics. This feels like a mosaic. Like putting little pieces together to tell a story. Now I’m looking at that citron color and thinking about that bear. I haven’t thought about that bear in years. If you squint your eyes that’s what the bear looks like. Those are the colors and those are the little tiles.

LEIANN I know when we were installing, you had [the grid] marked out with the color coordinates on which month and day. Were you already pre-planning this when you were doing it?

SIERRA Yeah. I went back and forth on whether it was going to be a timeline. I had also played around with putting them in charts and spike lines and different things. But then that would have had to take up the entire— LEIANN The whole gallery!

SIERRA The whole entire thing. It’d be one little thing moving. I kept going back to the MARKING TIME Interview with artist Sierra Slentz and LeiAnn Huddleston 5

calendar because I was using the calendar on my iPhone, and I was marking each day off. I was taking screenshots of my calendar and then using the little “edit picture.” I even bought a stylus so that I could write little notes on the calendar. I played around with, like, “Well if this one’s gonna be pink then this one’s gonna be blue…” I remember when I was hanging the work in the windows at the city. They weren’t in any order. I made them randomly and then I displayed them so they were aesthetically pleasing. I knew that I obviously wanted this to be aesthetically pleasing too. But, you can’t just paint them any color and then hope that there’s not two blues next to each other, two greens. I wanted it to flow. I wanted it to be easy to look at and not be awkward. I guess? I didn’t want there to be too many pauses or spaces. I wanted it to feel like it was continual.

LEIANN I love the way you planned it. Because of these pops! Especially with the hot pinks and the teals. I love the way they move you through the month. These loud moments with the quiet moments.

SIERRA I tried to go back through the headlines and figure out like, “Okay at the time I was feeling this but now I’m feeling this.” They were made one day at a time but they were glazed one month at a time. Because you had to have a whole kiln load. Each one was made individually, one day at a time. At the end of the month I would put them in to be bisque fired. When they came out I would have to glaze them. I put off glazing them for a long time because I didn’t know what color and originally I was going to leave them natural. Then it got to a point where I want them to have some color and I want some of them to be vibrant and some of them- I don’t know. Some focal points. I wanted them to have more feeling to them. The natural white and cream of the clay was beautiful but it almost felt institutional or sad when there was that many. At first, I was like, “Oh! They’re really beautiful! I love them!” But that was the first eighty, you know? I was like, “Oh! They’re really beautiful just in their natural state.” Then after a while I was like, “Ugh! Gosh! They’re kinda depressing.” I had it in my calendar that if I’m going to glaze these and get them all fired on time then I’m going to have to make a decision. I was playing around with how I was going to organize them and I finally decided that I wanted them to be hung in order and not random. Each one is a moment, then each grouping is—the whole thing tells a story—each one is like a page. I decided, “Oh! I’d been planning this all out on my calendar.” I can see just by looking at my iPhone calendar what it’s going to look like. We decided that’s the way that they were going to go.

LEIANN You might’ve said this before but what kind of clay did you use?

SIERRA There’s a couple different types of clay because I ran out of one. Most of them are stoneware, some of them are porcelain. Stoneware, porcelain, and a lot of different types of glazes. Some of them are raku fired.

LEIANN Are there any techniques that you used in one of the domes that you hadn’t done before?

SIERRA [silence; walking] Uhm these glazes are new. I hadn’t used those before. I also experimented putting a low-fire glaze on top of a high-fired glaze. Just to see what it would do and then layering a colored glaze on top of one of these textured glazes and it does a weird… thing. There’s this one that is special to me. I wonder if it’s this one. Is this one Father’s 6 MARKING TIME Interview with artist Sierra Slentz and LeiAnn Huddleston

Day? Yeah, this one you can still smell it! So this one, it’s black on the inside, it’s been raku fired so it smells like campfire. These ones were made near Death Creek at Lake Navajo. This part right here is the normal clay, but then there’s this reddish-brown clay and this is mud from the lake. When it was fired it was all crumbly and gross, and then I put some satin glaze over it to lock it in and then I fired it at high temperature, and it melted. So that’s actually part of the lake. You know when you go it’s kind of gritty, it looks like sand and then it’s like quicksand when you step in it? And then these are the, I don’t know what they’re called, they’re like prepine cones or like pine cone flowers.

LEIANN That are kind of pressed in.

SIERRA We didn’t leave the house very much, but when we did leave it was to go to the mountains or some place where it was cooler. We went camping a lot. That was the only vacations we took because they were outdoors. Three other families, we all agreed to be mask wearers and get our groceries delivered and not interact with other people and so we could all still hang out and have some type of, I guess, socialization or entertainment. We all took turns hosting in our backyards, making fire pits in the winter, fans in the summer, then we went camping. Which was good for our kids because we all have kids about the same age so we were able to not be so isolated. But my quarantine crew, they really helped out. They would ask me like, “What day is it today Slentz?” And I’d be like, “Oh! Today is day 162!” and like, “How many people died?”

LEIANN Was there a certain point where it all became data or was this contextualized?

SIERRA The end of October is when it started becoming a chore. It was exciting, keeping me sane, and then, I don’t know if it’s because it was that many months and that’s when I was like, “Okay I can’t do this anymore.” It was also right after we started going back to work, and I had to start teaching online and it was really super frustrating, not having a plan. They were just like, “Here you’re gonna use this. You can’t come back to the classroom to get all your stuff but here, teach! We got you this computer program.” Okay well that computer program is not going to help me teach. It’s just a place for me to put lesson plans.

LEIANN It’s just a tool.

SIERRA Yeah. That nobody looked at! October is when my husband was like, “You have a major piece tonight, you gotta go,”—you know, where I started to not want to do it anymore.

LEIANN If you don’t mind me asking, how did you manage to get through that? How did you overcome that point?

SIERRA I just kept looking at it like—Well if I stop now then the whole thing was for nothing.

Trying to motivate yourself like, “Well you’ve made it this far, you’ve gone through worse.”

Like, “If you stop now then you don’t really have peace. If you stop now, why did you even start.” And then I kept: “Well maybe they’ll call us back to work.” Then I can legitimately say, “I have a piece!” When I got to the end, I was excited. I think that’s also when I knew I needed to start glazing those ones and that also helped me keep going. But then I was glazing and making at the same time, and it was overwhelming trying to teach online.

MARKING TIME Interview with artist Sierra Slentz and LeiAnn Huddleston 7

LEIANN There’s a lot of pinching moments. Like up here, these pinch, and squish, and squirts and things; was that an expression of the day?

SIERRA Definitely. You know, reading headlines, thinking about, “Are we going to do this again? Is there hope?” A lot of them are repetition, a lot of them are about breaking through.

Like these ones, where they’re pushing through and something’s growing out. I had a lot of similar ones in my Desert series. They symbolize pushing up out of the soil, renewal, regrowth.

How can these little seeds survive in the desert with no water and still push through into these plants? I revisited some of those ideas as us humans who’d been locked in our houses for so long. We’re pushing through and we’re finding new ways to teach, new ways to solving a lot of problems. And that, at the end of each day, is like, “Wow! I’ve talked a lot today and I had to solve a lot of problems for other people.”

LEIANN I did want to ask you about the transferring of images onto ceramic, have you done that before?

SIERRA It’s like making a transfer. It’s a print that is like a temporary tattoo, basically.

The ink is thermal, it can withstand heat, it melts into an already glazed item. You put it on something that’s already finished and then you refire it and then it melts. So its not super, super bright but all the pictures are from our daily life. I think that’s a pizza. That’s a beet that we picked from our garden. This is our uhm- I call it our “white dinner,” my husband is British so he sometimes just wants I guess like, British. Have you ever been to England? It’s like, the food is white and it doesn’t taste like anything and it’s like, yeah. So sometimes I make him like his white British dinner. It’s uhm, fish sticks, either mashed potatoes or French fries, or something. And then that generic mixed vegetables or sometimes it’s peas if this was a fancy night. But yeah, it’s his favorite.

LEIANN The image pairing with some of these headlines, they become very comedic.

SIERRA A lot of the headlines were just insane. Like, “Are you fuckin’ kidding me? This has gotta be a joke! Like, is this The Onion?!” So I wanted there to be, every month, a little something different. Like, yes this was serious but also yeah, a little break to laugh and reflect on how dumb some of the stuff was that we went through.

LEIANN How did you end up picking the headlines that you did?

SIERRA The headlines were from that day. Every night when I would go to my studio I would make the form and then while it was hardening up, I would go through the headlines.

I’d read all the top articles from the day, and then I would copy and paste the top three into this long file folder. So each one is the day, and then the total number of Covid cases, and then the total numbers of deaths that day with the headline. When I wasn’t feeling very inspirational on a day I would leave one blank and know that I’d come back- I’d go through all the headlines that I’d copied and pasted and I’d go through my photo album and match up a picture that was juxtaposed with the headline. This was another day that I was feeling uninspired and I was going to put a decal on this one but I think there wasn’t a good headline that day. There was a few days where I was like, “Eh. That’s kind of a dumb headline.” I didn’t have a good picture, or it was too close.

8 MARKING TIME Interview with artist Sierra Slentz and LeiAnn Huddleston

LEIANN So it all did go into the planning.

SIERRA I knew I was going to do something with the headlines and I at one point was going to have something missing here. I haven’t made them lately but I had these ceramic polaroids. They’re made out of clay, they look exactly like a polaroid, and the decal is cut in a little square that makes it look like a photo. Originally, I was going to remove a couple of these and instead of being on here, it was going to be on a little square, like a snap. It’s a funny thing because also, at the time, polaroids were considered an instant gratification and now it’s like I have to wait two fuckin’ minutes!

LEIANN When you can have it instantly!

SIERRA There’s the new instant. So the idea of making a polaroid - I was like, “No! That’s a whole other series!” It talks about the history of arts and crafts and how nomadic people, when they started to settle down, that’s when they had time in art history to start doing more intricate designs in their clay pots and to have more filigree. They weren’t packing everything up to move. They had more time to sit and hone their craft. I was thinking that, “Oh this is the perfect time. We’re sitting down more, we have more time on our hands during this pandemic that we’re gonna make all this art.” That’s what I was thinking about the polaroids but I have all of the pictures. I was going to do a series with these polaroids that take an insanely long time to make for this one little four-inch polaroid. But then I decided, yeah that’s good, it’s a different seriesLEIANN ­—different concept.

SIERRA I sometimes try to overthink things or try to make them more complicated.

LEIANN I sit at this desk a lot when we’re open and I’ll have visitors come in and typically we let them explore the shows at their own pace and then if they have questions, or we notice they’re questioning something, we’ll go up and talk to them. But whenever visitors come in, as soon as it clicks with them that these are months— SIERRA Do they try to count?

LEIANN Well, they immediately try to find their birthday!

SIERRA I’ve gotten that too, yeah.

LEIANN On your birthday, did you do anything fun?

SIERRA I think I may have. I know on my daughter’s birthday I did and then on our anniversary. And our daughter’s birthday— LEIANN But that one’s a really unique one!

SIERRA “Happy eleventh birthday!”

LEIANN Aww! Hidden message.

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SIERRA There’s a couple of them that have a little message. September…October…I don’t even know when my ann—February…This one’s a fancy one too! “Happy twelve years! I love you James!” I think there’s one with a weird death number. Is it this one? Over four thousand dead in one day was one of the highest days. But then we broke that record. Everyone was like, “Okay, that’s crazy!” And then later— LEIANN We broke it. Which kept happening! That was something that in the beginning I tried to keep track and at a certain point I couldn’t anymore.

SIERRA I made a spreadsheet. To keep track of it all. It’s funny ‘cause it used to be like, “Are you looking for this document?” Like it knew.

LEIANN ‘Cause it was something you were constantly referencing?

SIERRA Yeah. But now it’s parent stuff and school stuff. I’m curious, how far back is it?

Invoices…? I don’t even know where it is now- oh! There it is! Aw, you can’t really see it on my phone, it has pictures but it’s not displaying right.

LEIANN That was the map of your headlines and death tolls…

SIERRA Yeah but it’s weird on my phone. Each day was that, the day, the deaths, and the headline. That’s what I did every day.

LEIANN Did it become kind of a grounding method at all during that time you think?

SIERRA At the beginning, I felt I wanted to be informed. I’m not a Trump supporter, obviously. But I think that we felt we were being lied to a lot or things were getting switched.

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