Sell Out, A Series: 5 Questions with Alwyn O’Brien
/
Sell Out is a series by interdisciplinary artist Angela Fama (she/they), who co-creates conversations with individual artists across Vancouver. Questioning ideas of artistry, identity, “day jobs,” and how they intertwine, Fama settles in with each artist (at a local café of their choice) and asks the same series of questions. With one roll of medium format film, Fama captures portraits of the artist, after the verbal conversations have been had.
Alwyn O’Brien (she/her) is an artist and educator. Follow her work here: https://jamesharrisgallery.com/artists/alwyn-obrien
Location: JJ Bean
What do you make/create?
I’m an object maker. The majority of my practice has been making sculptural objects on a body scale. It’s tricky because, after the last few years, more emphasis has been placed on functional objects.
What do you do to support that?
That’s an interesting question. There’s how you support that financially, but that’s just one part of the question. The bigger one is probably how you support that mentally, emotionally, and spiritually. I would say those are related. What I’ve always done to support is saying “yes” to whatever opportunities arise. Being cognisant that I need a certain amount of money to do that, I end up doing all kinds of weird things for labour. In the past few years, I was lucky enough to get a teaching job. That’s afforded me a different kind of support, a more concrete kind of support. However, it also conflicts with other things you need to keep, which is a kind of a tension between freedom and financial constraints, which creates different artwork.
I have dynamic practices that are always changing how I feed where the work comes from. Solitude, space, and time need to come together in a very particular way; they need to be happening together. That’s why living, and having jobs, really competes with that. Contract work is better in some ways, where you have agency over your own schedule, so you can make sure that you have that space and time, which I don’t get now as a teacher. I used to clean toilets at an old age home, it was a very flexible schedule. In those kinds of jobs, where you find really unlikely sources of inspiration, those are the good jobs that really show you different ways of thinking about the world.
Describe something about how your art practice and your “day job” interact.
Teaching makes me think about making, or the responsibilities of what it is to be a maker, in a totally different way. It’s less about having a practice that is concretely manifested. It impacts me to think about creativity in the world in a more fluid and less material way. When I wasn’t teaching, there was more time for just being in the world. It was more about me moving through space and time, and less about relationships. Teaching is so much about being in relationship with the world. This might just be me getting older, I don’t know.
Now my practice is – if I could say I had a practice – really less about needing to exhibit work, to prove something with my work, or defend certain positions. I don’t need the kind of feedback from my work in the same way, because, I think, in some sense, being around other students, and the privilege of having a regular income, has given me a little bit of respite from high performance, high productivity. It allows me to regroup, play, and discover again, in a way that is really private.
What’s a challenge you’re facing, or have faced, in relation to this and/or what’s a benefit?
It’s disorienting in terms of who you think you are as an artist, and I think that there is a real ego struggle for me. There can be a lot of sadness. It feels like loss sometimes, like you’re losing ground when you’re not exhibiting to the same level that you were before, or you’re not in the same spotlight all the time. You’re not occupying that space. That has definite challenges in terms of letting go.
It’s interesting, because it’s a choice I make. I can make a different choice, to really push forward and still occupy that space. At this point in my life, and my current responsibilities, that’s not the way I want to meet the world. Those are the inner dialogues, like old demons of productivity, being the “best,” and all the classic capitalist colonialist modes of existence that I’m deeply shaped by. I also see them as being inherently problematic, and question where I am situating myself within those narratives. Teaching has gifted me a different kind of space and time to move away from those capitalist stories, but it’s scary! Because you feel like all that shit you worked really hard for, it’s just… gone. And you feel like a failure. When I saw my gallerist yesterday, he asked what new things I’ve been working on… I’ve been working on, like, teapots, and I don’t really want to show them – my whole motive has shifted. I can feel it in my body right now. You just feel like you’ve let down all the things you’ve worked so damn hard to do. You feel a little crazy, but you also feel good, and totally liberated, and empowered. Nothing is straightforward.
I feel like it’s been such a profound gift for me in terms of learning how to be in the world beyond… I remember when I was in grad school, an instructor asked, “What is your responsibility as an artist?” I was flummoxed by that question. At the time, I think my answer was something loosely political, or critical... and now I just think of the benefit of my relationships: being able to be in relationship with other people when the world is in such flux is a responsibility to change, adapt, and assess what’s needed. I feel like I get to be in that. I can’t put a word on what that is. It’s the benefit of… I guess it’s just learning, actually. That’s the irony of when you self-identify as an educator or something. As artists we’re signing up for “life-long learning,” that’s 100% the benefit. I’m learning daily from that job, and those relationships, how vulnerable they make me, how upended it is.
I remember, in grad school, I had another instructor who said he was trying to figure out how to be an artist without making artwork, and I was so pissed at that at the time. I was like, “You’re just creaming the system, you’ve got this job, and we’re all here trying to figure out how to make it work and make sense of it, and you’re sitting around in a kind of existential crisis.” But now I get it, because – and this is where critically our culture is so confused – we have a very limited understanding of what an artist is, and what those responsibilities are, which is like, “You’re a maker, a cultural producer, of X and X.” I remember being so frustrated, like “only 3% of you are going to be ‘artists’ out of here,” and that is such colossal bullshit. To even frame what it is to be artistic. It’s taken me a long time, because there are so many pressures in our society to show up in a particular way. I’m able to understand from inside what it can mean to be an artist and actually throw off some of those shackles.
Have you made, or created, anything that was inspired by something from your day job? Please describe. (*I know you don’t like the word inspiration)
The first thing that comes to mind is an incomplete project. I would love, love, love, more than anything, to do a show where I attempted to replicate all my first-year students’ first projects. Sit them all down – there’s like thirty intro projects – and just try and do them, because their moves are so brilliant, and I could never, I’m way too schooled now in my own habits. That’s my dream project.
It’s about being in relationship with others. Everything just seeps into you, so I’m sure there are ways I’m problem-solving, because I’m so smitten. It’s impossible not to be impacted by being around other people who are making, and by all the ways that people problem-solve differently from you.
Another thing has to do with confidence. Functional things are actually harder to make than sculptural things, so I think they afford a different set of problem-solving, which I find engaging, and more complicated, right now for me to meet in my studio. It’s tricking myself, in a sense, into what more I can learn. They’re also simpler pieces to give at the end of the day. Because I’m freed up to not think about a market in the same way (I really hate that part of it, it’s a real hindrance in my studio at the best of times), now I can really celebrate relationality.
Another point in terms of loss is sculpture is pretty easy to make (because you can make anything), and it could be culture, but the history of functional work is being so distilled – through image, industrial technologies, and mass production – that it’s almost a lost language. A motivation underneath is the desire to practice a certain kind of dexterity that I don’t know very well, because I only studied craft pots for like three years, and I’m not as immersed in it as many people in many parts of the world are. It’s a desire to hold that space and that’s partly about education.
There’s so much romanticism around ceramics and pottery, which I really fought when I was younger. That’s an easy thing to push back against and try to create different places for clay to exist. On the other hand, as I get older, all that material and craft history has a legacy, a potency, for a reason. I find myself really drawn to that, because it’s not a fabrication. It’s about these objects being between other people.
Angela Fama (she/they) is an artist, Death Conversation Game entrepreneur, photographer, musician, previous small-business server of many years (The Templeton, Slickity Jim’s etc.). They are a mixed European 2nd-generation settler currently working on the unceded traditional territory of the Coast Salish xʷməθkwəy̓əm, Skwxwú7mesh and Səl̓ílwətaʔ/Selilwitulh Nations.
Follow them at IG @angelafama IG @deathconversationgame or on their website www.angelafama.com
