THE FLOWER AS SUPER HERO: A CONVERSATION WITH NANCY BLUM
Interviewed by Thyrza Nichols Goodeve

On the occasion of "Wonderland" at Ricco Maresca Gallery
February 20, 2014 – March 15, 2014

"It is only human arrogance, and the fact that the lives of plants unfold in what amounts to a much slower dimension of time, that keep us from appreciating their intelligence and consequent success. Plants dominate every terrestrial environment, composing ninety-nine per cent of the biomass on earth. By comparison, humans and all the other animals are, in the words of one plant neurobiologist, "just traces."
~ Michael Pollan, "How Smart Are Plants? The New Yorker December 23, 2013

TNG: To start, I'm interested in your background because until I spoke with you I had no idea you had a past life working with ceramic and metal.
NB: I was drawn to the labor of the craft of those mediums. In the 90s I did some metal casting and ceramics and was around a lot of potters but I didn't make pots.

TNG: What did you make?
NB: I often dealt with the circle and from that kind of geometric abstraction the circle eventually turned into a flower. But when I came of age in the art world, craft was not valued like it is today where I feel there's an amazing return, a kind of connoisseurship applied to daily life.

TNG: Did you consider yourself an artist or a craftsperson at that time?
NB: It's interesting you put it that way because one of the main reasons I entered into the craft world was because there was something about the values there that I wasn't finding in the art world. It was more humble, more community based, and at the time I needed that.

TNG: So when did you start drawing professionally?
NB: I started drawing seriously about 15 years ago but drawing was the first thing I ever did. I was one of those kids who drew compulsively for hours and hours and I still do. The investment of time in my work is immense and I want to bring this consciousness of labor – of things coming into being --and the quality of that presence --to the viewer. I believe it is about wisdom, i.e., that things actually do take time and are made of layers.

TNG: We especially need to be reminded of this in the digital era.
NB: I like the digital world but personally I'm very interested in the somatic experience and the fact that we are still going to be stuck inside of bodies for a while. Do you see the spirographs?

TNG: Yes tell me about them.
NB: Well it was a toy I played with in the 60s. It's a mathematical device but it also embosses. It allows me to penetrate the paper. Paper as a ground is essential to me.

TNG: There is a psychedelic dimension to your work too—Peter Max, I think especially of the film Yellow Submarine.
NB: Oh my god I loved that stuff. In fact I was really into the TV show Batman—and my work borrows from the aesthetic camp of that show.

TNG: Well Flower Power was a big part of that era. Those bright bulbous pop flowers—I had them all over my room. So did you draw comics at all?
NB: No, I drew patterns. But my drawings were very psychedelic very early. I was born in 1963, into a very aesthetic moment and I loved and absorbed it. Which makes me think of that sci-fi story you recommended, Flatland by Edward A. Abbott-- that was perfect for me.

TNG: I thought of your work because you present us with a world that could be either bigger than us, i.e., we're immersed in the middle of a jungle or forest, or it could be a minute world you have zoomed us into. Kind of Horton Hears A Who by Dr. Seuss. Either way there is no establishing shot, no landscape with a horizon, the edges are cut off. These are not framed like a landscape; rather we are inside a landscape –a multi-dimensional world-- that is beyond our scope of perception.
NB: Well I have had a select few moments in my life where I have felt I have gone down the rabbit hole, where I have perceived breaks in how I understand dimensions. In other words, where I intuit other dimensions. Like in Flatland where Abbott writes about simultaneous worlds that are happening right now yet we can't have access to them but they are there. I can periodically perceive them. I know some people who are real intuitives. I'm pretty intuitive but I have never been psychic.

TNG: I have long felt that people who have psychic or telepathic experiences, and I know some people who do, are just more open to these other dimensions. And that is why I loved Flatland because after I read it, it gave me this image of Mr. A. Square as similar to the intuitive and psychic people in our three dimensional world who bump up against the limits of our perceptions. Do you remember that film Powers of Ten by Charles and Ray Eames?
NB: That's funny I've been thinking about that and after I read Flatland I reflected that the film had made a formative contribution to my understanding — the idea that the micro cosmos and the macro cosmos are the same. 

TNG: And yet do some of these come from studies of specific botanical drawings?
NB: Definitely. They go way back. I use 16th and 17th century botanical drawings as a way to generate imagery. But obviously, I take tremendous license. I was recently at a fair and came across an engraving that was one that I am currently working with and I thought about buying it—there are hundreds of these individual images that are available. And I saw this one and I thought: am I just copying? Not at all! I'm taking a tradition and breathing life back into it in a different way. It is why I sent you that piece on Carl Linnaeus, who laid out the taxonomy of nature that forms the basis for how we classify species still today. Plants are systematized and categorized and named and I love something about all of that exploration and I love minds that can do all of that but I'm not doing that. I'm using these old botanical drawings for my own purposes in the same way that I am drawing Chinese plum blossoms onto the images. I have looked for ways that flowers have been depicted with different impulses by different cultures at varying times. Poetic, analytic, symbolic –and I am not trying to value one voice over another. I like to put species of plants that wouldn't survive in the same eco-system together in a drawing. I don't seem to want to put two flowers together that would work together in actual fact because I am not making a landscape.

TNG: Do you think that plants have feelings?
NB: Well, I am interested in all forms of life and all sentient beings. For that matter, I can enjoy a rock as much as a plant. But I do not presume to know about feelings. Yet I do think that plants are intelligent beings that clearly respond to all sorts of sensory input. In this sense one might say plants perceive the world around them, which leads me to think possibly 'feel' it as well. Two of my childhood friends became molecular biologists and botanists and study plants in this way. They were both just mentioned in an article Michael Pollan wrote about plant intelligence in The New Yorker.
TNG: I read that. I liked the way he discusses the impact of the book Do Plants Have Feelings by Peter Tompkins and Christopher Bird, a book that made it sound like plants could laugh and cry and think. Pollan is able to expose the bad science of such speculations while maintaining that plant-life is hardly passive and has some kind of living presence we need to take seriously. I remember him saying we have to think of plants and vegetation as protagonists in their own drama, which sounds like your work. How amazing you grew up with… whom?
NB: Daniel Chamovitz who recently published the book What a Plant Knows where he addresses these questions. And Eric Brenner who is still one of my closest friends and one Pollan mentions for what he calls 'the Brenner Manifesto'. All three of us were actually on a Kibbutz together in Israel for half a year. Eric and I lived in a room together. We got up at 3:45 every morning to harvest onions. He was happier about it than I but I do feel we developed interests that we've been exploring in our work since that time. I am also sort of a Michael Pollan devotee. His book The Botany of Desire enabled me to understand what I already had perceived-- that plants have agency and are as likely to be manipulating us as we are manipulating them. To me this was a relief since I am not that thrilled about the way humans have chosen to control nature. Fortunately I am an artist and not a scientist and can take as many liberties with my 'plants' as my imagination desires.

TNG: You don't animate flowers or nature in the sense of turning them into characters.
NB: Every once in a while I think of bringing in the idea of a pollinator.

TNG: Like a bee?
NB: Yes, but I'm hesitant to describe narrative. The minute the bee comes in we as humans place ourselves as the primary player, i.e. the bee stands in for ourselves. Humans have this constant need for self-reference and I'm just not interested in that. I feel like I'm going for a deeper layer of consciousness.

TNG: What would you say that is?
NB: That the narrative impulse we have as humans to describe our lives, while fully understandable, limits the sphere of our consciousness. I want to know more and feel more about the exchange of energy that cannot be described through language and the ego. I want to live in the experience of unity that can be achieved by genuinely 'knowing' the interconnectedness of everything. My desire is to be more aware of the mystery and be able to sit in wonder of it. And I am trying to do this without hallucinogens!

TNG: Like all those 60s artists were. It's true, each panel is like a living, breathing, moving environment but without psychology. In this sense they exist on the threshold of narrative, of sentience. They're sneaky. They could do anything.
NB: I've heard more than one person say they are kind of ferocious and maybe that is because I have a genuine concern about our planet. I mean there aren't many things I can get behind as a political movement but I care a lot about the fact that we have over-used the natural world. We're really a bad species. We take too much. We use too much. We denigrate other life forms. When I was making these I was just trying to concoct an alternate reality where people were gone. I am interested in what happens when we are not here. I mean nature is going to outlast us. We will be gone but there will be other life forms that have a lot of agency and I like that idea. It's a different way of thinking than the idea that everything will be desperate without human beings.

TNG: So "Wonderland" is a post-apocalyptic world where nature has won?
NB: That's one way to look at it.

TNG: A nature that is familiar but odd and distorted in many ways. These works feel cinematic or animatic. I keep thinking of Avatar.
NB: I was just going to say to you when I saw the first few minutes of Avatar I said, wow that's like my work.

TNG: So how do you reconcile this work with your public artwork? How did you even get into doing public art?
NB: I think I need two types of art. I have that service component to me, wanting to bring something to people.

TNG: Did someone come to you or did you decide you wanted to make something public? 
NB: As I said, I am a creature of intuition and that's how I got into public art. I was a professor at the University of Wisconsin in Milwaukee at one point and I just couldn't spend that much time with people there so I was like oh my God, I have to get out of here. I was there for 2 years and then I went to Seattle and while I was in Seattle I saw this call for manhole covers and I happen to love manhole covers and so I applied and got the commission. Here is where my past in ceramics and metal helped out because I had done carving into objects and so was able to come up with a successful piece -- the manhole covers are really my most successful piece of public art. And after that I just got pulled in.

TNG: What do you get out of doing public art?
NB: As I go along public art allows me to think more as a designer. It requires me to serve a community and problem-solve and respond to the architecture of a place and I really like that. I like the idea of putting artwork in hospitals or in transit hubs to be helpful to the people that are there. That is why in my public art I just let myself respond to things which is I guess why I associate it more with design. But with my gallery work I hold true to something just in my intuition. It's private. 

TNG: And you speak of the gallery as a place where you want the viewer to be able to fall into contemplation or meditation. I think of Monet's Water Lilies. There's so much of that same immersion going on here, where the viewer just stops before the work and falls into it; breathes and is there, in them.
NB: It's why I prefer to work larger rather than smaller because I'm interested in the world I am creating.

TNG: Right, even these smaller individual panels are made to be a part of a macro cosmos. Each is a fragment.
NB: Yes, I wanted to make something that would break down, but I love the large drawing and so kept to that sensibility. In fact, most of my drawings are probably the size of four of these panels. All of that space makes my imagination work harder. One of the reasons I started drawing after having worked in a sculptural medium was I just got sick of conceiving of an idea and executing it. With this I don't know what I'm going to come up with so there's an active engagement that is really magical.

TNG: It's about discovery.
NB: Right, because I don't know where I'm going.

TNG: How do you start then?
NB: I start with the spirograph.

TNG: You do! You start with the top layer?
NB: Yes, the spirograph is the only tool I use and it's the first thing I lay down. Then I draw out my major composition with a pen. I have found I need an emotional, visceral desire as opposed to a conceptual idea to move me--- in other words I work more through desire than my intellect. But I work across. I really like the scroll form -- I could have been a Torah scribe in another life, for instance I rarely make mistakes. Or if I do I just incorporate them. It's all organic.

TNG: Or to put it in temporal terms, you work more in the present, with what is at hand then planning it out ahead of time. 
NB: Yes, I place something then I place another thing and then I keep drawing it out in pencil and I keep erasing and then once the composition is drawn I outline it in black and then I'll draw the background pattern in pencil and go over it in black ink pen. With the shadows, I create the feel of etching and engraving – that sense of the flat two-dimensional paper as having depth or being carved. And then I go back over with little gold lines to give it a vibrational sensibility. I'm always trying to get the energy of the flower. There are all sorts of levels that this work can be approached on and I'm perfectly happy for a person to just have an experience with flowers. I've had people tell me I should make wallpaper and the thing is I don't have anything against hand-printed wallpaper but my intent is the exact opposite. My intent is to liberate the flower form the decorative so that the flower is in the service of the background as well as the foreground. I'm thinking of the way flowers have been devalued over time because they are seen as feminine (which has also been devalued over time). In this way we make beauty and power opposites. I care about the feminine and I care about beauty and I care about the decorative but I'll be damned to depict flowers existing solely in those realms. It's too reductive and it's not honestly true. Frankly, to go back to Batman and my love of the aesthetics of the 60s, my flowers are more like super heroes.