Interview with Nadine Schelbert page 2

Studio Instruction by ; Fred Fehlau Sarah Seager Carter Potter

v5: An underlying question is how did you adapt a technique to reveal information? When did this shell contain enough information for you? If the shell is a memory, how much information had to be held within that memory to satisfy you?

NS: I think I am still working on that. I am not satisfied with the amount of memory that is kept in any of them and that is why I continue to work on this problem. Also, I am looking for some kind of understanding of what presence and absence means to us. So I can't really say, once I find these particular answers I will be satisfied, but right now I'm not really sure where this is leading me.

v5: It seems that it is a fundamental question to sculpture. When you look at a Rodin there is an "authored character" who's nature is captured within that work. When you look at Graham's work, where the models are athletic and every pubic hair and eyelash is within that mold. Your work is a much more cryptic capture of information in itself and I find that enticing.

NS: In that sense it reflects something that I said before, about this not being a statement but exploration. Maybe you could look at it as the documentation of the process of exploration. You can see it in that sense, and then the exploration takes on more weight then the documents, but at the same time you can take these documents out of the process and look at them individually. They almost function as drawings in a certain way... a drawing leaves much more room than a finished painting.

If you put something that is finished in front of someone, then there is very little that they can add to it. I am a perfectionist, and this notion of finished and unfinished is something that I am trying to elucidate. I love things that are absolutely perfect, where every detail has been dealt with and controlled, but often times the process of making things perfect kills them. I am trying to test the border between perfection, which is kind of a removal of what is human, and that which is truly alive, and implies imperfection in a certain sense. I wonder how these seemingly opposed positions could co-exist. Perhaps there is a way to make something perfect and keep a certain spontaneity, but I'm not sure.

Everyone sees this work as architecture. (laughs) Seriously, even you made references to architecture.

v5: What I had said to you in class was that a lot of architects are working with these issues of surface and how surface contains memory and the issue of voids within complex surfaces. How all that is being worked through is a very current issue in architecture right now and I found your project very informative to architecture.

It has an "architecture" to it, but I think almost everything does when you begin to use the word architecture in that global way.

NS: One of the questions that came up during the critique was why they were so clean, as opposed to having information from the body they were cast after for example, and if they wouldn't work better had they had more information. They related the pieces to old houses and to model houses, not little models of houses, but houses that are built somewhere and then they become models or samples for residential projects or something else, with a staged domesticity for people to look at and fall in love with...

To me the pieces would not work with the addition of specific information, since it is exactly about the impossibility of access that I want to talk, about the spaces that cannot be filled anymore. It's something I see in my own life, and that's why I am interested in this. I can look at pictures from my past, and sometimes I discover a picture that I had not seen in years and because it is new it takes me back there. But these snapshots are used up so quickly that soon they don't say anything anymore. So what stays is information and facts, but nothing else and that is what I am trying to see, this emptiness, this total void that things leave behind.

v5: There is a reporting process of physicality, the surface of human shape. As you were talking it does seem that all of the different types of references that we carry around with us fall away. How do you find those aspects in a real way and how do we record these things about as person... There are autobiographies and all that sort of stuff yet they always seem so false.

Have you been to the Williamson Gallery and seen the show that is up now? Have you seen the spinning pot that had the laser beam that reads the groves and produces a sound? I found that very fascinating, that kind of idea that there is a sonic record here. It may be something and it may not be something but it was that sort encapsulation of information within a given medium and how that medium reveals itself.

NS: You almost try to read voices into it.

v5: Yes - It's exactly that anthropomorphic lust we have... seeing figures in the stars and trying to hear voices coming out of a clay pot. (laughs)

What are you working on now?

NS: A friend of mine is trying to force me to do something. (laughs). He wants me carry through with an exploration that I started on the same subject, but using sugar instead of paper. Sometimes in desserts you have a certain type of sugar decoration that can be used to build entire sugar sculptures. I have a special relationship to these because of my growing up in hotels. So I bought all the ingredients to use this technique for my shells. I thought that the brittleness of the material would lend itself to it, but I am not sure yet what the introduction of something edible would mean here. Anyway, I have twelve bottles of corn syrup at home and three cardboard boxes of sugar and a recipe to make it. So I tried, but the sugar was either too sticky or too brittle. And now all this sweet stuff is just sitting in my kitchen and I don¹t know what to do with it. (laughs)

v5: Thank you Nadine.

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 Photos by Duncan Stewart