Exchange III

by Erin

A few months after we began, I came across Tom Hart’s blog post on collaborative work where he outlines the YES AND principle,”The guiding principle of improvisation in acting and comedy is YES AND… This means AGREEING to the previous ideas and images (“YES”), and ADDING to them (“AND”). He goes on to praise a successful collaboration pointing out, “No one stepping on each other’s toes, every artist respecting the choices of the previous one, each artist making the previous one look good by adding to their ideas.”

This is central to the struggle and joy of working with another voice in the room. Working together means amplifying the strongest moves in the work while allowing the weakest parts to fade away towards ambiance.

Exchange II

by Erin

A rhythm developed

kalina: a spray of paint over a paper cut

erin: a print of thread

k: a particular mark made with a brush

e: a drawing of a ball of twine fished from below my studio table

k: a line of beads painted in

e: a smudge of white

a graphite splash

a prismacolor line repeated across the page

tracing paper softening the layers beneath

on and on

Through this process, a kind of game developed. Visual challenges arose that we would never have created for ourselves individually: How do you respond to a saturated chromatic language when monochrome tends to be your vocabulary? or cope with a faint printed line when boldness is needed in this area?Our visual motifs and the language of abstraction combined in surprising ways. Beads twined with strands of strings. Cut paper contrasted with washes of ink. A void spurt forth objects and marks to consider.

We began approaching the same things in different ways, remaking and merging the motifs of our collaborator.

Exchange I

by Erin

Kalina and I approached the first part of our collaboration with an intense artist residency of sorts. We met in my studio every morning for a couple of weeks at the beginning of summer and spent a number of hours together before splitting off to tend our individual studio work (or jobs) in the afternoon.

At first, although we knew we wished to make work together, we weren’t certain of what form our artwork would take, or even the direction we should follow. Rather than defining a specific goal in the beginning, we approached the first weeks with a batch of small works on paper no larger than 8 x 11″  which we exchanged back and forth across the table. We each brought material remnants and supplies from our studio practices and pulled traces of them into the conversation as we gained momentum. These small works allowed us to be spontaneous and develop a visual vocabulary very quickly. The process might be said to be akin to chatting back and forth over coffee, and indeed many of our early mornings were fortified with coffee and scones.