Interview with Nadine Schelbert page 1

Studio Instruction by ; Fred Fehlau Sarah Seager Carter Potter

NS: This work is from my Senior Projects class, which is a senior fine art class. The students have a gallery space at their disposal for showing their work, each student for a week. That¹s the assignment and the class time is spent critiquing the work. Three instructors are teaching the class and they change every term. Usually at least one of them is from Art Center and the others come from the outside, but they are there for the entire term. The critiques are very in-depth and last for about three hours, and all the students are involved, of course. It's a really interesting class because you are exposed to so many opinions. Also, it is a wonderful opportunity for the students to have an entire space to work with.

This particular project came from the idea of wanting to work with paper and creating something structural out of material that is essentially not structural and seeing how much could be done with that, to test the limits of the material. At first it was much more of a formal and structural investigation. My idea was to make fairly geometrical shapes with the paper and attempt to make something perfect, with all the implied limitations of the material. It was an attempt that was initially flawed and there was something fascinating about that.

v5: You said geometrical, yet the project we see is anthropomorphic.

NS: Yes, I departed from the initial geometrical idea.

v5: How did that happen? Was that change based on the critiques?

NS: No, this is not really a class that guides you along the working process. It's an upper term fine art class focused on critiquing results. What happened was that fairly quickly a second idea merged into my initial one. It resulted from something else I was working on. I was trying to shape the interior space of a drawer and I did that because I was interested in defining a space that encloses memories. For example, if you go into a house where someone used to live and that person is not there anymore, you open the drawers and there are things that belonged to that person and they speak to you, or at least that¹s the common belief. So, the question I was interested in, was if they could really speak, or contained just silent information. I find this problem of how much something can or can not convey from the past quite fascinating. And therefore I wanted to measure the importance of a presence by producing its absence. I tried to do this by capturing the interior space of the drawer, but have it empty, thus making it silent. The paper as a medium seemed to lend itself well to this investigation because of its fragility and ephemerality.

v5: So these three figures have personal significance.

NS: Yes.

v5: When you see these paper shells, do you see them as being distinct absences of a particular person?

NS: I think the project started out as a personal investigation, an attempt at capturing the space of a particular person. There are all these things in our lives but a lot of them we really don't pay attention to or notice, they have a secondary function. So I thought that the things that are really important, whose presence or absence we value, are the ones we depend on in a sense, those through which we exist, like a peripheral self, and these to me are people. If they are absent from our lives it's almost as if a part of ourselves was absent too, because our identity is linked to their presence or absence. That¹s why I ended up making shells of people. After I had worked on these pieces however, I did not see a particular
person in them anymore. They became more universal, especially because there is nothing that talks about the particular person, except for the shape, and not even that is very precise. There are no distinctive traces. In this sense, these empty shells are more about a general idea of absence and presence.

As I was working on this project, I realized that it represented a
crystallization of a lot of interests of mine. Work that I had done before, which I thought was unrelated, suddenly came together. This realization made me very happy. Another way to look at the work is to reflect upon what we keep and what we lose and what exists between the keeping and the losing. I don't know if there is a word to explain that in English, but in French you say the word meuble, which means furniture, but is also used to talk about all the things that populate your life, physical or not. When I was referring to the things present in our lives, some of which are important and others not so, I was really talking about all these meubles. Since their presence is unstable, they can be here one day and gone the next. Their presence is related to their absence, and I am trying to capture the absence of the things that are present, in order to understand the whole world that exists between these two extremes.

v5: There is a ghost like character to the exhibit.

NS: The paper shells had to capture the shape of a person, while revealing its absence, and therefore I ended up not with a solid cast, but with an empty cast. In my statement I talk about slipcovers. I thought of slipcovers as something people put over furniture as protection, but also as stylistic element. I was interested in what would happen if that which is underneath the slipcovers was not there anymore and what would happen to these empty slipcovers. Then I thought about the things that I would like to protect and, as I have mentioned before, they are not chairs and objects, but people. I wondered what would happen if one would make slipcovers for people. That's how I departed from the geometrical pieces and moved towards casting shells of people. I think similar issues could be addressed with geometrical forms, it's just much more reduced.

v5: Is there significance to the trinity of figures?

NS: No, it's not anything religious, the number is the result of a work in progress.

v5: It is not a closed set?

NS: No, and the work is not a defined statement, but something that I explore and will continue to explore until I find a solution. I had made three pieces at the time of the show and so I hung the three of them. I also thought three was a good number, formally it was more interesting, and also I wanted to avoid a single comparison between two entities.

v5: With all the other references that two would have. In the detail of it I found it interesting and curious how you chose to document the body, where panels were and seams were. It is clearly not clothing and does not follow traditional seaming that one would find in the body. How did you establish the modeling of the surface?

NS: Well, there is the question of how to show an empty space or any space for that matter. Usually when you look at a solid shape, you see it because there is a shadow. It¹s a marker that allows you to read the outline or certain prominent features that lead to identification. If you did not have that you would not be able to read the shape. The seams work exactly the same way, they allow you to see something. At the same time they distract from the inside, so somehow you are dependent on these outlines to get a sense of the interior shape. It's very strange because you need to see a surface or the outline of the surface, a wire frame or whatever, in order to see, or at least understand the inside. Two of the pieces have very simple seams and another one is very fractal, with multiple seams. Because of the light you see the taped seams more than the paper, and you define the shape through the seams and the seams become the surface.

v5: Sort of cocoon like.

NS: Yes, it becomes more like the solid object and it is only a surface because there is a multitude of seams adjacent to each other, like the multitude of points that make a circle.

v5: Was there a conscious distinction in the development between two of the figures? One is almost fractal in its nature and the other is sort of a lose grid, a longitude and latitude, both seem to have a logic that is applied to a complex shape.

NS: I did the longitude and latitude one after the fractal one,
because I wanted to somehow understand the shape better. The first one represented a complex problem that I tried to put into a simpler language. Now that they are done, I think that the first one speaks more than the other, there are things that you lose by simplification. You can read the shape of the shell better in the longitude and latitude one, but the fractal one leaves more room for imagination and allows you to connect to it much better.

v5: How is the third one done? What process was used for that?

NS: The third one was done out of a textile called crinoline. I had a hard time finding enough of this material in order to make the whole piece. It is a very rigid textile, but very translucent at the same time, because the meshes are wide. I wanted to reach a higher level of translucency than what the paper gave me, so that you could see more of the inside, but it did not have the same rigidity as the paper, so it kind of fell into itself.

The space inside was transformed in a certain way, it was not like the space of the person anymore. In all the pieces the seams are on the outside in order to keep the interior space as clean as possible, since the cavity is what I consider to be the positive part of the shells. This was especially apparent in the one out of textile, because the seams had more volume to them than in the others.

v5: I think that aspect was particularly striking by bringing the seams to the outside, it created a super reference to the interior of the shell. I found it a very fascinating way of reinforcing the idea of the cavity as opposed to creating it as an object. You got the sense that you could cast a bronze in the interior, that sort of multiple part form that would come away from it and is itself so often much more interesting than the object is.

NS: Yes, at one point I thought that I could also cast these shapes out of a transparent material so you would be able to see inside. Then I thought that this would be very object like, you can look inside but it is very much about the exterior, and I abandoned the idea. What I like about these, and especially the cloth one, is that, due to the nature of the material, there is an attempt at defining a clear shape, and an inherent failure at doing so. It very much reflects our attempt at keeping something that we are loosing.

v5: One of the characters was male that you modeled from?

NS: All of them were.

v5: One was clearly male.

NS: Yes.

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