In Dialogue

Katy Martin & Jo Wood-Brown
January 2019

Katy Martin: The context is Free Jazz. The music we love is open yet precise, deeply present and attentive to the moment. How does that relate to what we do as visual artists?

Jo Wood-Brown: It’s a philosophy behind making the work.  You go in with a set of ideas and something begins to form, and then it shifts as you’re making it. It’s a process of being in the studio – you’re working but being very open at the same time.

Katy: You and I are both painters. So we make marks in response to a form taking shape.

Jo: You’re not sure where the work is going to bring you. You’re learning something from it. You’re exploring something from it. It’s going to take you to a place that you’ve never been before. So the impetus of doing it is not to put down something that you know in your mind, but it’s rather to discover a way of looking, a way of being with something, that you didn’t know before you began.

Katy: So first we set up a context – a certain scale, a choice of materials, maybe a basic palette.

Jo: We set the stage. There’s a process that develops that you could compare to a composition.

Katy: I’d call this entering the zone. Then what?

Jo: Well, we’re both working from one medium to another, in a way that is already interdisciplinary. I’m working from my painted forms, as a place of departure, and embedding them in a different medium. Which is like what you do.

Katy: Yes. We both start with an image, and we look for that image in another context, and in the process it becomes something else.

Jo: It becomes embodied somehow.

Katy: How is that like music? Is this like a theme?

Jo: There’s an improvised section and then there’s the framework of the composition. There’s a repeated riff or theme that runs through.

Katy: In my work the theme is so loose and so simple.

Jo: What is it?

Katy: Right now the theme is this alternation between painting on my body and pure painting – on canvas or paper – using the conventions of brush and ink painting. There’s a lot of Tao because ink painting comes from the East. So there’s a lot of thought about verticality and cosmic energy coming down into the materials. It’s a transformation from one state into another.

Jo: That’s sound, you know, it’s this cosmic energy coming down into this pelvis.

Katy: Yes. So I make a big painting. Then I set up the camera, stand in front of that painting, and paint on myself as if I’m just another part of the painting. But what I’m doing is, I’m both appearing and disappearing into that painting.  And the sense of materiality shifts in the photograph because the photograph, you can say, is non-material. Then I generate prints, which are back to material.

Jo: So you’re working in time?

Katy: Yes. And in this physical and metaphysical framework.

Jo: And being inside and outside. You’re both inside and outside of what you’re doing. You’re using technique and you’re also totally open to what’s going to happen.

Katy: Yes.

Jo: For me, it’s really the materiality. Being able to work from the ground up and feeling something, whether I’m using the raw linen, whether I’m using the viscosity of wax … So I’m always coming back to ground, to the motion, to existing in the real world.

Katy: There’s a sense of control / lack of control that we both cultivate.

Jo: There’s that place, philosophically, that extends back into everyday life. Are we in control or are we not in control and how comfortable are we in that?

Let’s say, at the Vision Festival, I’m showing projected images onstage. How they look is changing with the different kinds of music that is being played. So they might have one character and then they might switch and have a completely different character. They begin to embody the idea of range within the work, to come to mean their polar opposites even. The very fact of those changes becomes something that we can work with. We can choose images that have this ability to ride all of these permutations.

Katy: When I was making my videos, I wanted to create space for whatever sound / image relationships the moving image set up. For the Vision Festival, I wanted to make video with an open ended quality, so a viewer could walk in and see different things in it.

Jo: When I’m working with the Vision Festival, I’m thinking more that maybe the image is what happens when it hits the architecture. How does it relate to everything around it? So I’m thinking a lot about images that can build a relationship with their surroundings.

Katy: What you’ve talked to me a lot about is activating the space.

Jo: How much of the world gets drawn into the experience?

Katy: And how is the image going to mesh with the sound?

Jo: Well, you know, we’re learning from it. I’m looking at your work and your film that has body and it has line. So, almost, I can project myself into your body as it’s moving, and your lines can be moving with the sound. You know, there’s a different way in which, as an audience member watching your work, you see what becomes a physical representation and what stays as an abstraction. How we project into the sound comes through our body and inhabits our body.

Katy: Exactly.

Jo: I always feel very physical when I’m listening to the music. It’s inside, traveling in my body, and then I’m looking at your body moving and it becomes all of a thing.

Katy: Yes. We think a musician plays an instrument, but actually they don’t play an instrument, they play their bodies and the instrument is some kind of extension – a resonating chamber for their breath. The room is also a body.

Jo: It’s a container or a vessel. As visual artists we’re connecting these threads in a different way than musicians, but also the same.

Katy: So the question is, how can visual artists be part of the ensemble, the performance, the sound? How do I create a video that leaves enough room for what’s going on musically?

Jo: I think that it doesn’t just leave room for something else. It does at times and at other times it takes a solo.

Katy: What’s so interesting in all this, for visual artists, is the opportunity to be part of a bigger picture. We’re not isolated in our studios, in our individual work.

Jo: But also we talked about what we’re learning from this process. How for us, it’s reading as a newly formed ensemble with visual art included like another instrument, another voice.

Katy: Right.

Jo: It’s really interesting because we’re not hearing other people responding to the work when it’s in the studio. In fact, most visual art stays on the walls, and we don’t hear anyone responding to it. It’s this very silent thing that goes on in people’s heads.

Katy: Yes, even when we exhibit.

Jo: One of the pieces I did for the Festival years ago was, I directly filmed the audience as they were listening to the music. Then I projected it simultaneously up on stage so that the musicians were seeing the expressions of the audience as they were playing the music. So for us, it’s that the work is being responded to in real time, and we’re hearing that response and we’re watching the shift in our work.

Katy: Which brings us to the issue of content. The music is actually doing something. It’s not just this formal container. What happens when actual pieces – art and music – are put together? These days, I’m up to my ears in Matthew Shipp’s piece because I’m in the process of cutting it and my video together. Now that the Festival is over, I’m making it into a new video on its own.

I’ve talked about the Tao in my work. There’s a way that Shipp structured his piece as a series of buildups to these very spare passages. I think of it in Christian terms of dissonance and faith, dissonance and grace. So if you put that kind of spirituality next to the spirituality of mine, what is it doing? Something happens.

Jo: It’s dyslexic poetry. To juxtapose your imagery and Matthew’s music is naturally going to create synapses where they connect…

Katy: And go apart. They’re also separate.

Jo: And go apart.  But I think, as way of being in the world, it’s a path for moving into the future, to be aware that this is actually what’s happening. It’s happening in physics, it’s happening in spirituality, it’s happening in that we don’t always see the connections and then there’s a connection, and then it dissipates. An image is formed and then it’s lost. A life lived, and then it’s gone.

Katy: But that’s what the Vision Festival is. It is reaching for some kind of bigger meaning.

Jo: I’ve never been able to listen to music and say, oh, it’s about a leaf blowing, oh, it’s about … whatever. You’ve got tone, and you’ve got rhythm, and you’ve got energy, and it’s reminiscent of this or its reminiscent of that, but it’s fluid.

Katy: How can visual artists be part of that, where we’re not alone in our studios, but instead contributing to a dynamic Free Jazz context?

Jo: I feel like I’m in conversation with the world with my work.

Katy: Well your Sylphs are literally. Can you talk about your Sylphs?

Jo: I showed them as a slideshow at the last Vision Festival, along with a video I made with Miriam Parker.

The Sylphs are painted figures on clear acetate, which I hold up and then photograph through, so you see a painted figure with an actual place behind it. They became an avatar. They populate, they engage.

I like my art to be a tool of engagement. I like my art to be a lens that’s part of other lenses with the capacity to have that inner-to-outer, the inner world, the inner mind, in conversation with the actual world and the tangible reality.

We all have these worlds we carry around with us that have never been seen before. What happens when we start to let these imaginations have a dialogue? That’s creativity.

Katy: So you’re modeling how we can step out in the world. How do you listen and observe? How do you contribute your voice?

Jo: And how do you shift the conversation?

Katy: In a way that contributes to the bigger picture.

Jo: Right. That also means you can shift in and out of it, somebody else can shift in and out of it.  It’s a very democratic environment.

Katy:  Yes. That said, it takes skill. With improvisation, there is mastery, but on the other hand, it’s the absence of that. It’s the honing of a practice that opens up more and more. You’re never the master. So what the Vision Festival can offer to visual artists is the opportunity …

Jo: To see what’s going to happen, when you put these ingredients together.

Katy: Because in art, as soon as you know something, it’s gone.

Jo: And we’re all masters. We’re all on a level.

Katy: Including the audience.

Jo: They’ve been listening to this sound for a long time.

Katy: Or not. They come with an open mind.

Jo: And they come with their whole being, the way they are, their perspectives. And what can resonate with that – with each and every person – that’s the ensemble that we want to be part of.

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Jo Wood-Brown works in various media – painting, sculpture, installation and more – and has exhibited widely in the US and Europe. She has worked within the Arts for Art community, participating in the Vision Festival for the past 20 years. In 2001, she founded Artist Exchange International, promoting dialogue among artists in the US and abroad. For the past decade, she has collaborated with dancer Miriam Parker as the collective, InnerCity Projects.

Katy Martin is a visual artist whose work has shown nationally and internationally. She is represented by Galerie Arnaud Lefebvre in Paris. She is also part of the Meeting Point Project, a collaboration with three Paris artists, since 2012. In addition, she has a weekly photo exchange with a Berlin artist that’s been going on since 2011. For the Vision Festival, she’s made work on her own and also in collaboration with Miriam Parker and Jo Wood-Brown.