An Interview with Kate Newby
“My work is about putting myself into situations where anything can happen. I’m not doing a lot, but I am fully immersed in the process”
I met Kate Newby in her Brooklyn studio, a simple, clean box of a room she occasionally used for mentally wandering, but not for making art. She’d recently returned from installing her show A puzzling light and moving (2018), at the Lumber Room in Portland, Oregon, which would be up for a year, at her request. Over the coming months, she planned to revisit it, adding, removing and reconsidering the choices she had made during her original installation.
The show includes many of Newby’s characteristic forms – tiles, wind chimes, puddles – all made from earthen materials: clay, cotton, wire, glass. The objects often appear weathered, like artefacts that could’ve been excavated from any global civilisation at any time. Her installations seem to reconstruct nooks from these timeless places and can express urban grandiosity and naturalistic modesty within the same space. For her recent show I can’t nail the days down (2018) she used thousands of clay bricks to lay a floor in the Kunsthalle Wien. Throughout the room, the bricks were speckled with the kind of quiet gestures you might overlook in your local pavement: dimples, embedded coins, errant scratches. A viewer must engage the work with head down and gaze soft.
Newby spends much of her research time outside, strolling the streets around her exhibitions, gathering elements from the ground. Many of these little items could be called ‘junk’ or ‘found’, and yet her sculpture bears little resemblance to the kind of art that is historically associated with those descriptors. She often transforms and merges her findings with her own elegant fabrications to create something almost artless. Her work, both indoors and out, often feels continuous with the world around it, like an intimate encounter with a patch of grass in the centre of a vast metropolis.
As we spoke, Newby and I played with a collection of thimble-size sculptures she’s made over the years. Many of these were metal castings of things from ephemeral life – a can tab, a match, a pebble – but she also laid out a collection of shell-like clay forms, which she makes in a single gestural push. Each one is filled with bits of found glass, and then fired in a kiln to create melted, frozen puddles that fit into your pocket. She’s made hundreds of these – compulsively, it seems – and has included them in many exhibitions as a part of her ever-growing vocabulary of objects.
Since moving from her home in New Zealand, Newby has only had a studio for a brief stint, preferring to make everything onsite. A few weeks after our meeting in the autumn, she unburdened herself of her shortlived studio space in New York and decided to work at home, which nicely suits her process.
“It actually feels good,” she wrote to me, “like the studio was a stretch and I was trying something out. But it’s good to consolidate and feel a bit safe as well. I remember we talked about energy and resources and taking care of the artistic self, and this all feels like a move towards that. I liked reading the comments in the interview about why I had a studio and I’m glad you got me in the moment when I was still in one… Maybe I’ll never have one again?”
Ross Simonini: We are here in your studio, but you don’t really use it like a studio.
Kate Newby: I don’t make anything here. My work is made in installations. I go somewhere, bust out all this work and then leave. And I’ve been wondering, is that going to become unhealthy after a while?
RS: Unhealthy how?
KN: Well, I don’t want to get depleted, and sometimes I feel very sad when I install a show and it opens and I never see that work again. I never get to revisit it, or spend time with it. Because the work can’t come back here to the studio. I mean, my show in Vienna was 6,000 bricks. That shit isn’t ever seen again… can’t be seen again!
RS: What happens to that work after?
KN: Galleries don’t want to store this stuff. In the case of the Vienna work, some got sent to the Kunsthaus Hamburg. Some of it was recycled. Now it’s being reduced to 1,200 bricks and I’m going to ship that to my mum’s house in New Zealand, because she can store them at the end of her driveway. She doesn’t know this yet.
RS: These bricks and clay tiles you make often have impressions in them. What’s your process to make those marks?
KN: Well, the brick works are made at brick factories. I carve into bricks when they have been formed but the clay is still unfired. I make marks by stabbing, scraping, carving; as well I push pieces of broken glass that I have picked up off the sidewalk into the unfired brick. The bricks then return to the factory line to be fired with all the other bricks. With the clay works I am throwing the clay on the ground, onto objects around the area that I am working, and I’m collecting these marks. Sometimes debris gets burned into the clay too. So I’m not really doing anything.
RS: It seems like you’re doing something.
KN: I’m just performing an action. There’s not a lot of craft involved. But I’m completely active. My work is about putting myself into situations where anything can happen. I’m not doing a lot, but I am fully immersed in the process. It’s also active in the sense that, every time I pick up a piece of glass from the sidewalk, it’s me walking, for one. It’s me seeing the glass, for two. And it’s me deciding if I feel safe enough in whatever situation I’m in to pick up the glass. Because it’s actually quite embarrassing.
RS: Why?
KN: Because I’m crouched down often around trees, going through the dirt, and people say, “What are you doing, picking up dog shit?”
RS: How many times have people said that to you?
KN: Quite a few.
RS: Is the embarrassment part of the work?
KN: Yeah, it means I’ve become vulnerable.
RS: Did you collect things as a child?
KN: I’m actually not a big believer in picking things up.
RS: Really?
KN: Someone asked me the other day if I collect rocks, and I said, no! It’s terrible to take rocks.
RS: But glass is ok?
KN: Yes. It’s a refused material readily available, it’s almost like cleaning in an insignificant way… Or shells. People give me shells, but I don’t collect things. Sometimes I’ll collect things if I’m sentimental. Like I had a Kombucha on the plane and it was called ‘Clear Mind’, and I liked that, so I kept the bottle cap.
RS: Are you always looking for things?
KN: Yes, but there are factors: how’s my mood? Because sometimes I just can’t do it. And: do I have pockets to carry it?
RS: You’ve made some work to be exhibited in pockets. For months at a time.
KN: I give work to security guards or attendants. Sometimes I’ve given these works to other artists who are in an exhibition with me. I like the idea that the work is getting shown privately. You can’t see the work unless whoever has it wants to show you. I like how things come in and out of visibility. They are not presents, though. I ask the work to be sent back to me.
RS: To see how it transformed?
KN: The work gets vulnerable really quickly. Pieces get lost. And that’s not uninteresting. Then you have the memory of it. A lot of the work is metal, and I don’t seal them, so they are able to develop a natural patina from the hand touching. It’s minimal. But I want to see the damage.
KN takes a jar from a shelf and dumps the contents on the table: dozens of miniature sculptures
KN: These are the ones I never give away. I’ve made several hundred of these.
RS: You seem pretty loose with your work.
KN: Oh yes. I’ll give it away without thinking about it. I just got an email, which said that a bird shat on my roofing tiles in Portland, which is great. What a success!
RS: Would you call these little works ‘charms’?
KN: No, because ‘charm’ elevates them. I want you to elevate them. What matters is that you find them valuable. [Holding a twig cast in metal] This is from my father’s avocado tree.
RS: Do you tell viewers this?
KN: No. I push back on narrative. It makes it easier for people to have narrative. But I’m stubborn about it. I don’t know why. Most of my work needs special attention. It needs weather, circumstance. The tiles need rain and the wind chimes need wind. They’re always changing. What’s a puddle if it’s not outside in the rain?
RS: Which is why you have to work onsite.
KN: Yeah. It’s exhausting. This recent show [at the Lumber Room], I made it in two and half weeks.
RS: When did you start working this way?
KN: 2010. My first major exhibition was in Bremen at the GAK [Gesellschaft für Aktuelle Kunst]. I was in New Zealand and I got an email out of nowhere. So I arrived in Bremen and made the whole show there, over the course of five weeks, and I just stayed on afterward. It set the precedent for me. Then I moved to New York in 2012.
RS: What was the art community like in New Zealand?
KN: Quite positive. I grew up on a beach on the west coast of Auckland, 40 minutes from downtown. In the bush, really. I was part of an artist-run space called Gambia Castle. Rent’s cheap there, so you can run a space with your friends. And I was working in hospitality and could get by on that. It’s small, too, so it’s an entangled community, and there’s a nice competition. We all made each other better. Here, in New York, it’s so vast and everyone is busy. I’m really happy that I’m an artist from New Zealand. I think New Zealand artists are good artists. I believe that. I don’t know why. Maybe because of our remoteness, being at the bottom of the world. Or because we’re both self-deprecating and wildly energetic. It’s a recently colonised place and it was the first country in the world to give women the vote. Our female prime minister is unmarried and just gave birth. Stuff like that happens. It makes for interesting artists.
RS: Why did you leave?
KN: I never left on purpose, but I’m glad I left when I did. I just kind of moved around, and New York was the place I left my stuff. And now I’m thirty-nine and I don’t know if I want to move again. I always thought I’d wind up in Brussels. I love it there.
RS: Why do you have a studio if you don’t use it?
KN: I only got this studio a year and a half ago. It’s my first real studio since art school. It’s a big deal. I just needed my own room, to think about things, to rejuvenate. This morning I just made a playlist of songs I loved from 1994. And it doesn’t feel unhealthy doing that. It feels good. I always listen to songs over and over again, and those are the songs on the list: Mazzy Star, Jane’s Addiction, Cowboy Junkies, songs from the Singles soundtrack [1992], the Empire Records soundtrack [1995]. Music meant and means a lot to me.
RS: Are you nostalgic?
KN: I wish I looked back more. My work requires a lot of first, quick responses. Working with clay is like that. So making this mixtape is way to balance that out.
RS: When you said you wanted to balance out your lifestyle, what do you mean?
KN: I just want to get better at lifestyle. Artists have a lot of agency. I can say what I need. I need time to think. I recently pushed off some shows to help myself, but it’s hard, because if you’re not showing, you’re not making money. It’s emotionally confusing.
RS: Are you a fully professional artist?
KN: Yeah. But I was getting my doctorate in art for a while and living off of the scholarship that came with that. I don’t sell a lot of work. But what else am I gonna do? I travel too much to get a job. I have cheap rent. I don’t spend a lot. I’m a tax-payer in the US but [legally] I’m a “nonresident,” and I’m also a “nonresident” in New Zealand. So I’m a nonresident everywhere! So I find it hard to get grants. It doesn’t matter, though. I cherish making art. I’m flabbergasted that I get to do what I’m doing. But this doesn’t mean I’m living it up. I find it tough to pay for yoga classes, but I’m not going hungry. I was swimming all summer because the pool was free. I picked up ten cents on the ground yesterday and that was all I made this month. I mean, when do we get to calm down, relax and pat ourselves on the back?
RS: Are you suspicious of art at all?
KN: I’m not sure when art is about thinking and when it’s about feeling. I think through doing things. It’s funny, I like Patti Smith but I don’t want to watch a documentary on her. I’m hesitant to learn more. I’m the same with process. I try to come at materials blindly, like glass and clay. I give myself permission to go into a glass studio and know nothing. I can just play around with glass frit and make choices.
RS: Artmaking is basically decision-making.
KN: I really don’t like looking at work when I feel like the artist hasn’t made a decision. I can see when they didn’t know what was going on. They felt overwhelmed making it. I like specific work. Sometimes people can’t make their minds up. They find everything appealing.
RS: Does this happen to you?
KN: Yeah, I can tell when it happens in my own work, too, but it’s usually a few days too late, after it’s opened. Maybe I wasn’t in the space of being able to make decisions. I just know when I’m tapped into the thing. But it’s also way more complex than that. It’s like the Patti Smith thing. I don’t want to refine what I know. I don’t want to complicate it. But I’ve never really vocalised this before. None of what I’m saying is very thought out.
RS: Seems appropriate though, for the subject.
KN: I think a lot about how I like to see work. I like the feeling of not knowing when a work ends and where it begins. But I think that’s often done with less, not more. For instance, I love the Sun Tunnels [1973–76] by Nancy Holt. It’s committed. I think about commitment all the time – to materials, situations, words. People muck around too much. This is why I give myself a set amount of time to work on projects. I like confidence and face-to-face interaction. I worked on the Biennale of Sydney recently, and it was all on email. How could I tell them what I want when I haven’t even been to the site? I found that very hard. I’m not artist who sketches up things.
But I’m still trying to understand the ways I want to work. For me, assertiveness is the goal. In Vienna for my show at the Kunsthalle Wien I wanted to do something but I was afraid to ask, because it would be so much work for everyone involved. And then I thought: is that really how I’m making decisions? That’s why I have a studio, to think and keep myself from making lame decisions. I was going to make a decision because it was too hard for people I don’t know who are paid to help me. And I almost didn’t catch it. But that’s just the self-limiting aspect of being a woman, a person from New Zealand and a sensitive person. If I’m not careful, these things can go unchecked. I can’t be bossed around by art.