F:<\/strong> That’s a very nice way to put it. If I’m working with a student as an artist-mentor, I will always go and see them at least once. I remember very early on, in the 90s when we just began, and I’ve been part of this program since 1992, I had a student who lived in Alaska. I was living in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and teaching at Carnegie Mellon at the time and we had mostly phone meetings, and then for the last meeting I flew to Alaska. I stayed with her at her b&b for a week. And we talked about her work every day. We had two or three hours of a chat and it was amazing.<\/p>\n

The studio visits are really important. That’s really what artists should be doing anyway, in practice, having people come to their studios so that you can actually see what the work environment is and all of the stuff that you would never show in a show but that is part of your work and part of your process.<\/p>\n

It’s a very special kind of thing to be working one on one with a student. I’ve been an art professor for a long time, and it’s a very different process here at VCFA, because we do actually see our students in their homes, often with their families, in their neighborhoods. And I think that is very much part of what this program is about, because it’s not a lot of young people coming to the college. It’s a lot of mature people.<\/p>\n<\/div><\/section><\/div>\n

Nico, how have the conversations with Faith affected your thinking and process regarding your work?<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div><\/section><\/div>\n

N:<\/strong> I wasn’t sure if some of the work was appropriate. I felt like I was making work that felt like sketches to me, or preparatory works, and Faith gave me permission to really experiment and say this is your work, this is your process, you can be really exploratory. And I think she helped give me some language to wrap my brain around to anchor what it is that I’m really searching for.<\/p>\n

My work this semester has felt like scientific explorations because I’m using a lot of materials like dead animals and worms. I’m trying to make something special with the things that I’m doing in making compost<\/a> and the activities of the garden, to raise an understanding that these are not just farm chores, these are really fertility rituals. How, as a species, we take the broken decay of our system and what do we make from it because we can’t have a clean slate to start over.<\/p>\n

I think Faith\u2019s conversations with me have helped me to wrap my brain around it. I’m trying to think of a specific thing that you said Faith, it was something like: you’re taking the bones of capitalism and you’re creating some new future with it. That’s been kind of my key phrase for this work.<\/p>\n<\/div><\/section><\/div>\n

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F:<\/strong> Yes, I think the aspirational is really important. You know I am always quoting William Blake<\/a>, a self-taught visionary artist, and Nico is tired of Blake.<\/p>\n<\/div><\/section><\/div>\n
N:<\/strong> I love Blake. I\u2019ll never get tired of Blake.<\/p>\n<\/div><\/section><\/div>\n
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F:<\/strong> We all love Blake. Because Blake, dirt poor as he was, worked as a printmaker, and this is another thing that Nico does, he’s actually also a printmaker. Blake was making illuminated manuscripts, but he wanted to make multiples. You don’t really make multiples of illuminated manuscripts and he figured it out. He figured out how to make his books so he could make twenty books at a time. It was super important that it was printed and that it was in multiples. In a way, he was inventing the form that spoke to what his work was about.<\/p>\n
I think it\u2019s the same with the work that Nico is doing. Nico gave me a fantastic tour of his garden, which is not a usual garden. It’s not just one bed, it’s all of these different formats of beds and heaps and different plants in different places. It was really creative and incredibly joyous to me. We talked about paradise and about release. The garden, and making the garden, is one of the oldest arts and this image of paradise is what we strive for. This garden, which we were thrown out of, according to the Bible.<\/p>\n
These are the kinds of conversations that we get into.<\/p>\n<\/div><\/section><\/div>\n
N:<\/strong> It’s the oldest predicament too, because humans are all reshaping the landscape to be more suitable for us. We\u2019re picking and choosing who can be in the garden, who cannot be in the garden. I’m deciding what is a weed and what is a flower. It is fascinating as a topic.<\/p>\n
I\u2019ll be stuck on the garden as a topic for the rest of my life.<\/p>\n<\/div><\/section><\/div>\n
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<\/div>Nicholas Lima, SunTeaFishery, 2021<\/small><\/div><\/div><\/div>\n
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Could you describe a pivotal moment or exchange that helped shift something for you?<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div><\/section><\/div>\n
N:<\/strong> This last visit Faith got to see everything set up in a mock exhibition and she got me to start thinking about how to show this stuff. Because a lot of my little maquettes are super fragile, and even the idea of taking them to a space is kind of logistically troublesome. I asked if I should make a bigger, more durable version. And she encouraged me to think it’s okay if the work is fragile. It’s okay if the work doesn’t have a longevity. Part of the idea of the work is<\/em> its fragility.<\/p>\n
Faith gave me the okay to keep working with these crumbling materials, and she encouraged me to take a lot of photographs and record everything because sometimes all you have left to show is the recording. The process is the work, or it can be another facet of the work.<\/p>\n
Before this program, I never really had an idea that the process could be the work. I thought I do the process and then I show you the work. Just like, I make the sandwich and then I serve you the sandwich; we don’t have a conversation about the mustard and the pickles. I just show you the finished product. That was how I was wired. Now, because I am really into the experience of the creation, these conversations have me thinking more about how to convey the experience of the creation.<\/p>\n<\/div><\/section><\/div>\n
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F:<\/strong> We talked about things like giving garden tours because the work has this performative possibility where there could be interaction. That is totally part of thinking about it as art and also thinking about it as, maybe this sounds a little grandiose, but world building. That’s what artists are always trying to do in a certain way, to create something that allows us to see what the wholeness of life and creation could be.<\/p>\n
A garden is a very ancient image with Paradise and being thrown out of the garden, being excluded from the garden, and we are at war with nature. I think that’s part of what needs to be thought about in a larger scale. I introduced the term Gesamtkunstwerk to Nico \u2013 which he loved. It means the entire artwork \u2013 everything is part of it \u2013 from your sketches to your mockups, your photos, your tours, your actual garden.<\/p>\n
The other thing that we talk about is what other artists have done and how does what you’re trying to do fit into or not fit into the work of other artists from ancient times to now. So that you see yourself, and it’s always helped me as an artist too, as not alone and as part of a very large company. And Blake thought about it this way too, that there’s this company of thinkers and makers and dreamers that you are part of as an artist, as a poet. I think that’s a really important thing to be aware of.<\/p>\n<\/div><\/section><\/div>\n
Nico, how are you finding and defining your company?<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div><\/section><\/div>\n
N:<\/strong> \u00a0I’m looking at a lot more sculptors these days. I’ve always just focused on painting and drawing and printmaking. And I’m finding that a lot of the kind of weird, interesting work that makes me think is by artists that are working with found objects.<\/p>\n
Faith mentioned one artist, Mark Dion<\/a>, who makes these giant installations where he works in a spot that’s been disturbed, and he does an excavation. And part of the exhibition is all the materials that he finds and sorts and organizes so it’s like a cabinet of wonders. I wrote a paper about how he constructed this 30\u2019 climate controlled greenhouse around this giant dying spruce tree that became an ecosystem because of all these mosses and plants and bugs that were already growing on the tree. It made me think of our whole agricultural system and having to put in all these chemicals, money, and materials from around the world, rather than trying to build something with the materials that are already present where you are. We make these overly complicated systems.<\/p>\n<\/div><\/section><\/div>\n
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(Com)PostConsumer Garden TV, Nicholas Lima, 2021<\/p>\n<\/div><\/section>
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