Meet Iann An

Iann An is an artist based in Tāmaki Makaurau whose practice explores the vulnerability and frailty of being human. Her works subvert the idea of a polished, flawless body, seeking to dismantle socially constructed notions of being 'healthy', 'able' or 'perfect'. Here, we chat to Iann about her process.

Portrait photography: Matt Hurley; styled by Tom So; makeup by Lara Daly; hair and nails by Marie Matheson; assisted by Jinghe

Artwork photography: Lindsey de Roos

Three words to describe your practice?

Wounded tenderly soothing 

How did you start working with dough as a sculptural material?

Nothing special. I love bread. And then I thought, I want to make it myself… But then I also thought I didn’t have as much time to learn about this because I’d just committed to being a full-time student. And school felt like a whole psychoanalytic saga. Anyhow, I thought, why not incorporate bread into the assignments so I can learn about it without separating art and life? It was a two-birds-in-one-stone kind of thing.

Walk us through your process. Do you make the dough from scratch?

Yes, from scratch. Yeast is almost always involved. Flour and water too. Sometimes I add sugar to make the dough stickier, but it gets awkward as the flies tend to fill up the studio space. I share the room with a friend, who has been very patient and understanding, but if I were him, I would get pretty irritated, so I usually go soft on the sugar.

What’s your favourite baked good?

Savoury pies—I even joined the New Zealand Pie Reviews page on Facebook to find the best one in every town I visit. But my taste buds get swayed more to a sweet danish, cheesecake, or something like that these days.

What images do you have in your studio?  

Let’s see…there are photographs of butcheries in India and Poland with hanging cadavers of pigs, ex-soldiers without limbs, and strippers.

What about books?

Many books… Cookbooks to Camus to ‘Celebration of Decay’. Classic.

Tell us about the pet names you give your works.

I gave them endearing names because I feel they need love, warmth and generosity, like all of us do…even if they appear dead, threatening and disgusting.

Where do you find the display mechanisms, and why do you use them?

I usually find them in the bins or on the street, or sometimes I buy them from secondhand shops. It depends. I’m drawn to rejected, damaged, and weathered materials. They hold a unique nature that ‘new’ things can’t acquire. It allows me to make ‘dying’ materials come to ‘life’ in a way that is no longer disregarded or neglected, reinforcing the idea of embracing the Otherness. If they have been bought new, I like to utilise them unconventionally.

If you could be reincarnated as any creature, what would it be?

I don’t know… Probably do the human thing all over again, even if it can be absolute hell and heaven at the same time.

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