Feminine Rubble

play_station curator Angel speaks to Prairie Hatchard-McGill about her recent exhibition, Feminine Rubble, and finding inspiration in “lipstick, mascara smears, and broken acrylics on the floor.”

Angel: Feminine Rubble, I love the title. I remember a year ago you posted [on Instagram] about it, it has stuck in my head for a while … It makes me think of the messy vanity which is left after getting yourself ready for a night out. The single earring, spilled nail glue and cracked compact mirror at the bottom of my handbag. What does Feminine Rubble mean to you?

Prairie Hatchard-McGill: Well first of all, I love what it connotes for different people. I’d love to interview a hundred people and hear where it takes them. Yeah, it is that mess, and the revelling in it. The phrase came about with regards to all these little things that seem to accumulate in my orbit; broken jewellery, candy wrappers, champagne cork holders … It is also the lipstick, mascara smears, and broken acrylics on the floor. So it’s both little objects and little moments. I collect the objects, and the moments too I suppose. A rubble that I love to revel in, but is also overwhelming sometimes. It’s a grey area between beauty and trash.

Trash is just as fascinating and alluring to me as glamour. Well, maybe that's why glamour is so fascinating, because, you know, that all of this, like, kind of dirt and dust and mess, was created in order for the glamour to be created.

You mentioned that the paper works “sprung from a magpie-like urge to collect.” Looking at this body of work it’s easy to see that Feminine Rubble wouldn’t have been able to happen without a pretty substantial collection of vintage jewellery, handbags, shoes, cookbook clippings … Do you want to talk about any of the objects that are embedded in the exhibition?

My paper works contain many pieces of feminine rubble that I’ve collected over the years. Vintage belt buckles, napkins, tassels, even dried herbs—all things that have been in limbo for a long time, waiting for a home. They are strange objects, beautiful but not necessarily useful. Their use, to me, is their beauty, but they confuse me a bit. Where are things like this supposed to live? Scattered in my room? It felt great to give these liminal objects a home, cast in paper. Rumpty and precious, just like the objects themselves.

When we were originally talking about your show, you talked about upholstered wall works and soft sculpture … which in time developed into recycled paper works and scarecrows. Would you like to speak on the process of how Feminine Rubble came to be?

Working on this show became a process of finding my process. I have many interests and strands of my practice, which is great, but sometimes means that there isn’t much flow between projects. I’ll get really into one thing (such as soft sculpture), then decide to work on something materially very different. It’s a lot of setting up and packing down (physically and mentally), so I wanted to do something that could be more sustainable and ongoing for me. I’ve started thinking of myself as a one-woman factory or machine, in relation to art-making and living a life in general. Paper-making became a perfect process for me; each step done in between writing, dreaming, day job, life …

You wrote a story to accompany your exhibition, in which you mention eco apocalyptic utopias and scarecrows as guardians.

The story is a short description of the life cycle of my scarecrows. I thought it would be interesting to imagine a post-apocalyptic world from a hopeful angle. Humans are, naturally, afraid of what the environmental crisis means for them. Life on earth will become increasingly difficult, and then what? We all die? Horrifying of course, but I wondered what might happen on earth after that. Maybe the earth will heal from the destruction humans caused, and new things will arise. New guardians, new systems, a new purpose for the planet. What was left behind by human civilisation will be repurposed, given new meaning. The work in the show is all repurposed, reimagined old ‘junk’.

Your paper making workshop Dream Soup was a pleasure to participate in. Can you speak about your ‘forever stew methodology’.

Yay! So I thought that I could apply the same rules of my chicken stock-making practice to paper making. With stock, I collect scraps, boil them up, cook with the liquid and generate more scraps, make more stock, and so on. That rollover feels really good to me, like I’m doing something right, keeping the ball rolling. When I made découpage ostrich eggs for Sunlighting, the new commissions show at Artspace Aotearoa last year, I started holding onto the paper scraps that came from collaging. I realised I could turn the scraps into pulp, pulp into paper, make more collage with the paper, generate more scraps, make more paper. It just makes sense to me. If the bucket of pulp is never quite finished and more scraps are added, it’ll always contain some of the original batch. Kind of like a forever stew or perpetual stew, like that one in Bangkok. So beautiful to me!

I love your food instagram! @cacioeprairie Do you see other relationships between your interest in food and cooking with your art practice, as well as the stew analogy?

Kind of. I feel funny about food and art mixing. Cooking, eating, sharing and community are perfect and special as they are, and I get a bit annoyed sometimes when art tries to reimagine these things. Maybe I’ll come up with a way to navigate this in the future, but for now I do see my art practice and culinary practice as two separate strains.

They inform each other, though, of course. Where my interest in cooking and art intersect is in their processes. I love following steps, putting different things together to make new things, getting messy and mushy and playing with materials. I like when artmaking feels like cooking.

I am so glad you settled on making scarecrows for your show—they’re so fashionable! Do you find inspiration from fashion? And are the scarecrows inspired by anyone in particular?

I am so inspired by fashion! I was dead set on being a fashion designer for all of my childhood. The scarecrows are not based on any particular people, but I can’t deny that there is a lot of myself in them. They are wearing a lot of my old clothes, after all! But really they became their own characters, I had to get in their heads. I scavenged and styled as if I were them. What would THEY choose? How would THEY wear a scarf/bag/bra? I had to operate two brains: my own, trying to make successful sculptures, and theirs: dressing themselves from human rubble leftover from an imagined apocalypse.

You have a history with hosting workshops and inviting audience participation—is teaching and sharing in a hands-on way important to you?

Certainly. Artmaking is about ongoing discovery, experimentation and learning. It feels natural to involve others, and learn together. In my project at Artspace last year, I launched The Prairie Hatchard-McGill Institute for Holistic Expansion. This is my ‘handbag practice’, a term Becky [The Art Paper EIC] used I think. It’s a framework I can take with me anywhere, providing structure and meaning to anything I make or do, a DIY institution. I also see it as a travelling folk school. I can set up anywhere and share things I’ve learnt with others, and learn from them too.

I loved teaching paper-making at Dream Soup and seeing where my guests went with it. Everyone’s paper came out so differently, and was such a strong reflection of who they were.

Absolutely everyone has something to teach. I would like to invite others to teach under this umbrella too. Be it an art method, a recipe, or how to open a beer bottle with a lighter. Actually, to go back to art and food, this is how I’d tie them together, through teaching.