I surround you with love.
Artist Statement: Reflecting on what kind of emotional residue this installation might leave behind, I wanted to offer something drawn from my own methods of coping. This began with a phrase from a video meditation I was listening to on Youtube which repeated: “I surround you with love” in a soft female voice. Intended to soothe, it became an urgent realization of our reliance on technology to reconnect with something deeply spiritual.
The focal point is the sculpture that derives its form from Kaf Maryam, or Rose of Jericho—a dessert plant indigenous to the Middle East and North Africa. Its root-like, bulbous body carries medicinal associations known to ease menstrual pain and support with labor and infertility. When soaked in warm water, the plant resurrects, thereby symbolizing hope and renewal.
Fabric is the bonding medium. In its intimacy, I found soft forms that mimicked floral buds, and offered the surface for the meditative yet laborious work of repeatedly stitching the phrase “I surround you with love” on its borders. The pink bed sheet lived in my studio, keeping me warm, while it collected dirt and traces of folds and creases over time. It also holds a synchronous relationship to one I had growing up. In the other bed sheets I gathered, they represented femininity, girlhood, playfulness, solitude, desire, pain, sensuality, and care.
As in much of my work, I’m drawn to the tensions between beauty and distortion, and death and safety. It reflects a bodily experience that brings to existence that which is monstrous yet tender, caught between the cyclical pull toward nonbelonging and dissociation, and the desire for connection and love. Drawing on processes that are repetitive, like mark-making, or finding references in nature of microscopic bacteria that resemble flowers in bloom, I try to find these subtle links in the stillness of being.
When we close your eyes and enter deep into our bodies long enough to find that stillness, what do we feel?
I want to ask about prettiness… for lack of a better word. For instance, your series Between Heaven and Earth has some absolutely pretty drawings. And in this installation, there is also this beautifully-patterned background with red and pink marks, the fabric has these delicately proportioned flowers, and then there are some sculptures that have so-called pretty elements, and yet are lumpen, the installation’s title suggests a circle (surrounded) and yet does not give us symmetry. Sometimes artists are not interested in beauty or prettiness, but when I look at your body of work, I *think* you are– if that’s true, can you talk about your decision to work away from prettiness sometimes in your work?
The decision to work away from prettiness is about working towards, and with, affect. It’s about giving texture to a gnarly feeling, like a cigarette that churns your stomach in moments of anxiety, or how your skin crawls in moments of deep self loathing or shame. It’s nonconscious and deeply felt, and goes beyond emotion. As much as I want to contain pain or transform it within the parameters of beauty, the core of my work is visceral, and the experiences I’m working through are not pretty, and so the decision becomes maybe about some sort of understanding, or a relationship with the unseen. To me, art is about an experience of feeling.
Malda: I was confronted with this question previously with the work I did on ‘I count my days in minutes…’, which also included a very tedious, repetitive process of twisting, curling and uncurling pieces of paper napkins. Conceptually, it was an anxious draw which I incorporated in the making of the work in order to reactivate my body and sit in the discomfort of grief. In reality, my ‘self’ began to resist the discipline and tedium and it felt very heavy, which was partly to do with needing to finish the piece within a fixed deadline and a fixed outcome.
With the fabric piece, I wanted to perform that same repetitive process, but I let go of trying to achieve its full potential so it became the most serene part of making the work for the installation. Aside from materiality, the puncturing of the surface was really satisfying with that occasional poke of the needle on the tips of my fingers. And the ability to stitch in the comfort of a sofa or my bed resulted in a less mentally and physically exhausting process, which allowed for a less intrusive mental space and connected me more with what I was stitching. Like prayer beads, getting through each phrase was a recitation, and a reminder. With every poke, it was a call back to my body.
Although some stitching sessions were done in pure silence, other sessions were done with the company of a friend, an audiobook, or a film. The piece itself became a companion; we spent Valentine’s Day together at a jazz show at RiffRaff for example.
The stitching was more grounding, because I could only sit for an hour and a half at a time which covered one phrase, and I would try to do two phrases on some days. It’s like coming back to the stillness of yourself each time. All I can say is that I stitched in moments when I needed to gather myself—early in the morning, during insomnia nights, after a disappointment, taking myself out, winding down after work, and before I went to bed.
And I would say that my hands are both an extension of my brain, and have their own brain. Something to do with planning vs intuitive making is how I see that relationship.
Malda: I want to say grad school again. A lot of things became apparent to me there; I could easily say Malda had a pre-grad-school self and a post-grad-school self. But it was within the first year at RISD where I had a clearer understanding and better grasp of these ‘unruly’ moments. They had always existed within me as a person, and in my earlier work, but not named or even welcomed. I understood they held power and information and needed to be guided.
I was introduced to so many new artists, like Wangechi Mutu, Brenda Goodman, and Carol Rama, whose own practices involved a form of ‘unruliness’ that resonated with me. I was able to better contextualize my work, explore, experiment, and expand on that unruliness in different ways. The way I worked with sculpture and materials for example, came from that same sense of “anti-authoritarian” spirit, and perhaps it helped (or did not) that I didn’t learn sculpture traditionally and was figuring it out along the way and doing my own thing for better or worse. There was a moment in my last semester of grad school right before our thesis show when I realized that I did not need any validation and that I was going to do and present the work I wanted, again for better or worse. And this was the only way I wanted to practice art, and it felt so empowering. What I hope more so is that, that unruliness is balanced with authenticity and intelligence.
I guess, like most people, there are parts of myself and my life that I have always been in conflict with, and my creative work has allowed me not only to give it form, but a space to exist and be expressed. So unruliness is absolutely essential, not only to challenge order, but to make peace with the dis/order, too.
Malda: Red is taking up space. Red is heat and menstrual, it’s internal. It’s appetising and it’s desiring. Red is active, and in motion.
Darcie: In your ps122 group show statement, you ask the question, “What does meditation, slowness, and mindfulness teach us about resistance?” – would you talk a little about your own meditation practices both inside and outside of your art-making, and the connection between meditation and resistance?
Malda: I’ve explored a few different forms of meditation which have been helpful at different times. In the past year I noticed that mindfulness walking is where it’s at for me! For an anxious brain, it helps me get out of the house and ground myself in the motion of my body. I love feeling the ground beneath my feet, my muscles in tension, and my sciatica flare up (haha). Again, it’s coming back into my body, rather than my mind, in a way that is felt. From my body, all the feelings of gratitude take shape, from my breath to my senses and my body’s ability in whatever form that looks like in that moment.
I began incorporating body movement and mindfulness in my work with my piece ‘Cycles of Lacerations’ with the jump rope, and in twisting with ‘I count my days in minutes…’, and these were necessary for me to exit one psychical state and enter another for the benefit of my ‘self’ and in service of my practice. For example, with ‘Cycles of Lacerations’, I would experience very heavy, depressive mental states before my period and the jump rope, which was hung in my art studio, helped me come out of that stale state into an active one. Whereas in ‘I count my days in minutes…’, the shock and paralysis my body went through watching the genocide in Palestine on social media led me to a slower, more grounded, and mindful action.
Where it became about resistance started with the idea of staying present in, and confronting the pain, terror, and grief instead of succumbing to it. And it was about acknowledging the diverse and natural temperaments of humans, and about acknowledging that many individuals from marginalized groups cannot resist in the same public and vocal ways, there was way too much at stake. So the idea of meditation, or practices that had a slow, craft-based, tactile, process approach, were deeply significant to me in that we could still resist injustice, discrimination, and white supremacy in alternate ways. Resistance also meant looking after the self, confronting its pain and transforming it so it had the fuel to power through and continue, and to transform the heaviness into an active participant instead of blocking it.
Finally, I’ll add that I began a daily practice in the fall of last year, after a series of hard days, where I would walk around Dexter Park and repeat the phrase, ‘I expand my capacity to withstand discomfort’. To me it meant that I was going to try my best not to flee, not to retreat, not to lose myself in provocation, not to sink in despair, not to fall apart, not to succumb to helplessness and hopelessness. So if you see me walking and talking to myself on Dexter Park, know two things, I’m working through something hard, and you are welcome to walk next to me.
Malda: Indirectly, I was thinking about the works of David Hammons (Body Prints), Tracey Emin (My Bed), Dala Nasser, Eva Hesse.. and others.
Darcie: Outside of the art world, who do you most want to view this installation– can you describe in detail this ideal viewer, and what you hope they might see in or experience from your work?
Malda: Hopefully anyone walking by can take something from it. I don’t think this work is necessarily visually complex, or requires a lot of abstract thinking. Maybe the ideal viewer is someone who has traversed into the vastness of their inner selves, and who has made a connection with its layered parts. Someone who has slowed down to notice the texture and form of things, not only tangible but the intangible too.
Darcie Dennigan is the author of five books, including the dark, recursive, and, to some, unreadable novel Little Neck.
