Interview between artist and sculptor Laura Canha Malpique and art historian Melchior Jaspers. Laura and Melchior had several talks about the work of Laura during a mentor trajectory and decided to do an interview together. Laura is working as a sculptor and Melchior works as curator and as advisor of the Chief Government Architect.
MJ: How did you start making sculptures?
LCM: Growing up in a small town in Portugal I saw little art, besides the occasional visit to art museums. I did a lot of drawing and painting before art school. At that time it seemed more free than sculpture to me since I knew mainly pots and bronze figures. When moving to the Netherlands, I was 17 years old, and started to see a lot of exhibitions. Sculpture and installation quickly became the focus of my attention and research. I remember looking at an installation by Dieter Roth for the first time at Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin, and knowing that sculpture is what I needed to do moving forward. From the first year at the Rietveld I shifted to 3D, which makes more sense with my spatial way of thinking and obsession with materials.
MJ: The Dieter Roth installation you mentioned, what installation was it and what was it that attracted you so much?
LCM: The installation was Gartenskulptur by Dieter Roth and his son. It had all started with a bust of Roth made of seeds. Those were eaten by birds, who replaced the portrait with bird shit. This was documented, and only the beginning of a many years project. The installation consists of a long wood structure which holds plants, glass jars with substances in, film documentation of the development of what happened in their garden and a lot more. The fact that the installation represented a sort of system, with stages, so layered, it made sense to me. It related to the way I understand the world, and the way I wanted to communicate my thoughts. It was also the kind of serious playfulness in sculpture that I needed to see at that time, while I was a student.
Gartenskulptur has also inspired my graduation project. It consisted of a 15 meters long installation symbolically describing the transformation process from earth into bubble gum. It is a project I don’t relate to anymore, but was very important to my development as an artist.
MJ: Which artists, besides Dieter Roth, have resonated with you?
LCM: Different artists give me different things. Conceptually, I feel connected to some of Katie Paterson’s work, since it relates the most to my practice. I am drawn to the way she interferes with natural processes, as seen in field of the sky 2012, and water drop 2022. I feel like these works talk about humans as curious and complex entities, who also interfere with matter in a non-practical and poetic way. The works speak about transformation and interpretation, language and translation. My favorite artist counting the whole body of work would probably be Michal Heizer. Aesthetically, I am inspired by Anne Hardy, Lucy Skaer and Pierre Huyghe for the form of presentation and curation of their work. They create landscapes which relate to our connection and the interference of physical and natural spaces. Other artists like Thomas Hirschhorn or Isamu Noguchi have also in some way played a role in my development as an artist.
MJ: What is it that attracts you to those artists?
LCM: I admire Thomas Hirschhorn mainly for his writings. His clear ideas and the way he explains them. I love some of his works too, like the monuments, posters on public spaces, and maps and schemas. Lucy Skaer attracts me in a totally different way. I like the materials, aesthetic, and presentation. Diether Roth was the initial inspiring force of playfulness, Isamu Noguchi inspires the calmness I always missed in my work.
Michael Haizer works with the architectural scale I aim to reach, plus he works with rocks. Displaced/Replaced Mass, 1966 Silver Springs Nevada, is to me one of the best artworks ever made. But truth must be said, the work is so special to me for my own personal interests and ideas, which are different to the reasons and ideas of Heizer, so it is hard to talk about my interest in his work. Let’s say he made some of the most visually inspiring work for my practice. In the end he aims to make great american art and he relates size to the american greatness. His motivation is weight, gravity, mass, position, distance, measurements and space. So his reasons to work are very different from mine. We share many ideas and interests though, like earth being the material with the most potential since it is the original source of material. Also the idea that how we manipulate earth defines us and our time, and that the fact when we personally build our own work, as artists, matters. But we differ greatly on the way to understand the man-built world and society, and the path for reflection we chose to offer the viewer.
To me, the way he aims for greatness reflects the character of being human on earth and the need to interfere in the landscape. I see the typical human signature on the ground as quarries on his geometrical holes in landscapes (gesture, within others). I see the way we displace and change matter to suit our needs on his geometric cut massive stones moved to cities (the equals that, within others). I see not only his work but also himself with his great energy as a caricature of the human characteristics that my work is about.
MJ: The artists you mention are a bit older. Which artist of your own generation do you appreciate very much and in what way?
LCM: This is an exciting question, it is great to find out how my peers develop. Hard to choose who to mention, I see a lot of great work coming out every day. This comes to my mind at the moment:
I love the work of Daniella Mooney, from South Africa. Laura Jatkowski, Janina Frye, Nora Aurreko, Olle Stjerne, Rick van Meel, Jan Hüskes, Anais gauthier, Frederik Ryt-Hansen, Justina Vilcinskaitė, Eshter Brakenhoff, Felipe van Laar, Willem de Haan. I will have to mention my classmates at the Rietveld, we were a very tight group of 4 and I appreciate their work, and have learnt from watching it develop. Those are Katri Pannu, Emilie Bobek and Koos Buster.
MJ: Back to your work, can you tell a little bit more about your obsession and fascination with materials?
LCM: I have always been attracted to rocks. As a child I constantly searched for them and brought them home. I also offered rocks to others which I later learnt was sometimes taken offensively. I would never have understood that.
I was not collecting precious rocks, it was just common stones. They were a piece of somewhere, a sample. They had specific characteristics to which I attributed an imagined meaning.
Only later other materials came to play, quite soon I came to think of ceramics as rocks. These thoughts brought me to the idea of “ground”, and how the cities we build are just reorganised ground. Like a strange mineral composition on a macro level. It is all made of rocks and organic matter.
This is fascinating for me. The manipulation of materials that exists everywhere around us. I want to learn how and why it happened. We are creating samples of now for the future. Instead of a portrait of a place, the rocks we create are portraits of humans at a given time. Fundamentally this is also what I do, I manipulate materials to create portraits of humans.
MJ: What do you find so fascinating about geology and man made materials?
LCM: Mainly the relationship between both. The fact that the man-made world, that we don’t consider nature, is in fact just that. The question of how cities were made, made of what and for what? Which leads to the most important question: what does that tell us about us humans and how we are developing? Towards what we are developing?
We built our concrete shells which were made from sea bug shells (lime). Roads which could be called a mix of rock and ancient plants (asphalt). The path between what is around us and what we call nature tends to be short and simple. We destroy and rebuild rocks. We manipulate geology.
On a practical level I work with both manmade and raw geologic materials interchangeably. I manipulate them both chemically and mechanically, and they are the same. Matter that responds to me according to their composition and their past, how they were formed and what they went through since. Human interference is such a tiny fraction of that history.
Based on humanity’s manipulation of geology, I study the needs and characteristics of being human in the western world. Those in turn inspire how I manipulate materials sculpturally to create a geologic conversation, a poetic monument to being human.
MJ: How do you start with the making of works?
LCM: I guess rock hunting, reading about geology and man made materials must count as the first steps. They not only feed my concepts, but also inspire and motivate my work.
Drawings always come before the sculpting. They usually consist of systems, timelines, or at least some kind of order. After, when working on the piece, I let intuition and shape change the plan. The drawing is very essential nonetheless.
MJ: Your sculptures look on one hand really human made and on the other hand they feel very natural and there is also a certain coincidence in the work. Are you looking for that balance while making?
LCM: I must say that I am very happy to know you get this feeling from my work. The fact that what is man-built is in the end nature and natural, since changing matter is an almost inevitable human impulse that characterizes us, is an important idea I want to pass on with my work. So I do like to meet that balance, show that there is a plan, a need and an effort together with a natural flow that invites play.
MJ: What is it that you are looking for in the sculptures you make? Is there something you try or would like to achieve with your sculptures?
LCM: I try to make sculptures which are like meteorites. Meteorites are objects that don’t necessarily seem precious, but as the viewer knows they come from space, they will use their own knowledge and understanding to find a message. Meteorites can be a small opportunity to have someone changing their own set beliefs about space. A rock that comes from out of earth puts our planet and humans into perspective, as if watched from far away. My sculptures come from my mind and earthly materials, but I hope to manage some sort of similar effect.
With my work I aim to tease people into considering humans as domesticated, kept tidy from nature, growing together with materials which are essential for our survival, and what is the meaning that has. How does it influence our actions, our culture and how we feel? But I want my sculptures to carry no statement. Only an invitation for reflection within a given subject.
MJ: I’ve looked at your work a lot and some parts of your sculptures still seem mysterious to me, how did you manage that?
LCM: Hard to answer this question. Maybe the fact that I avoid statements, and that I am not ready with a sculpture until it seems to work independently, has a character, feels unbalanced in the right way.
MJ: I see clearly in your work that it is handmade, is that important for you?
LCM: A big part of my subject is the human compulsion to alter matter, an urge that I obviously feel myself. So handmade is definitely very important to my work and it is also what I love about being an artist. I search for meaning in the act of manipulating materials to suit us and the resulting influence that has in our development.
MJ: Because of the hand making, I find your works intimate and very physical, what do you think?
LCM: That’s how I relate to my work. Often when I am working on a piece or a project, I feel like I am the work. I embody the object at that time, to question what it needs, how it relates to the world, how it relates to me and possibly others. It is easier to think this way.
MJ: I find your work hopeful as well, it seems to say something about our disturbed relationship with nature in a non-judgmental way. What do you think about that?
LCM: Non-judgmental indeed. Hopeful I am not so sure, but that stays more on a personal level. Hopeful comes with expecting change. I do not expect significant enough changes, per say.
With my work I would like to bring attention to the inevitable characteristics of being human, of needing to transform the environment, alter matter and landscapes. I am looking at facts, at behavior, and somewhat use those ideas hoping it will invite the viewer to note their power as well as impact. But those characteristics which are destructive in reality are also what makes us special so I admire them. They are the same that allow positive change. So we cannot ignore them but we can use them differently.
When imagining our remains on the planet, I imagine that if something ever finds them, they would understand a poetry about being human. The special on abstract thinking and acting, original and complex behavior, non-practical and odd presence on earth. This way I am not-judgmental, even admiring to a certain degree.
I hope that noting our intrinsic character has the potential to work as a tool to zoom out, take a step back, and view ourselves from a distance, and help people observe what is happening from further away, free from political, moral and societal interpretations, so ideally they could go back to those with a fresh outlook on human behavior.
MJ: What kind of work and sculptures would you like to make in the future?
LCM: I never want to stop building small scale work in my studio, that is important for my development. But I would like the work to reach an architectural scale too. Since I mainly think in landscapes, size becomes an important next step for me in terms of communication. The idea of creating massive rocky landscapes, indoors and outdoors, is a dream which I hope will soon come true!
MJ: I can definitely see your sculptures more large, like a sort of monuments. How do you think that will affect your work?
LCM:I hope not on a fundamental level. I don’t want the size to affect the playfulness and intuitive side of the work. I do count on having new challenges and needing more detailed planning.
So far the only large-ish scale sculpture I did was the mountain (5.5x3x4,5 meters permanent sculpture) and in that case there was a lot that was decided during building, while understanding what is happening. I did it all alone, and understood that I must learn how to work with others too. That is something I am working on this year. Until now I have avoided collaboration at all costs. Now I am trying to let others come in and help, both theoretically and hands on. I have always searched for critique, but never for a real input. This is a massive challenge for me.