Jude Griebel – Artist Interview

Transcript:

Joanne Marion: Jen asked you [Russell Yuristy] about playfulness and humour in your work, and what you’re talking about now with the structures for children and so forth, it makes me think of the playfulness in your work, Jude, and how you use it. Can you talk a little bit about that?

Jude Griebel: I don’t have the same depth of history and experience to speak from, after all those amazing stories, but I feel there’s a lot that sort of manifests in my work in terms of growing up on the prairies. In a few ways, sort of through material and through the space itself. I was lucky enough to grow up between Saskatoon and a family farm in central Alberta. And on that family farm, I feel like my first foray into sculpture was a lot of agricultural-based craft. So a lot of things like building crop figures, and scarecrows, and snowmen, and then there was, what my family were, sort of wheat-weaving figures as well. So there was that really direct correspondence between natural materials that came from the land, and the agricultural community, and the body. So that really plays into my work. And also, these sort of non-conventional materials – art materials, that were just present and could be used for making work. So in terms of living in Saskatoon, my mother was working at the Mendel, and I had – it was lucky for me that a lot of older artists were spending a lot of time at our house. Folk artists as well, for instance, Dmytro Stryjek, who has a number of pieces downstairs, spent a lot of time at our house growing up. And he would come over and often paint my brother and I. And he made a large series of paintings of us as children. We ended up looking like sort of little piglets against our fence in our backyard. And for the fence he would just cut and glue popsicle sticks as a background, and then we would be painted in sort of combinations of gouache, and he would bring over his materials and it would be sort of gouache and nail polish and makeup that he would use. So just all these very domestic materials that were at hand. The other way that this sort of prairie experience really affected the work I’m making now is the sort of sense of humour and fantasy that people sort of injected into everyday prairie experience. Using this very isolated, open landscape as sort of a stage for the imagination. So that was sort of – I came to understand that through a lot of folk craft in Alberta. For instance there’s a small town called Coronation. And a lot of farmers in that area created an experience for the children there in the early 80s, and it was called Fantasy Lane. And it was just a normal country gravel road, but the farmers and parents had assembled all these very mythological figures and scarecrows, sitting in outhouses, and standing in trees, and families would come and drive the kids up and down, back and forth, to see these little scenes. So it was a very sort of makeshift novelty theme park in a way. Also, later seeing the Torrington Gopher Museum – I’m not sure how many people know about that space, so I was talking to Joanne about it yesterday. But in the small town of Torrington, I’m sure everyone on the prairies knows the childhood sort of ritual of killing gophers and bringing their tails for bounty, which existed in this town. And this woman in the town, I’m blanking on her name, began amateur taxiderming the gophers, sewing little outfits for them, and building little dioramas of scenes from the town, Torrington, which she would then place these taxidermied gophers in. And it was all arranged in a big trailer like this little museum, that you could pay a dollar and sort of walk through. So seeing things like this really impacted my work. And in terms of folk art as well, growing up across from the University of Saskatchewan. I was very haunted by the Kurelek mural in the St. Thomas More Chapel, that he had created there, and I would sneak in to look at it often because I was quite frightened and taken with it. And I’m not sure if any of you are familiar with that mural, it’s a very large mural depicting the miracle of the loaves and fish. So in the mural you see all these farmers forming around the wheat field and the grain elevators, and Christ is standing in the centre, and there’s these dark storm clouds rolling across the prairies, and the hands of all the dead coming out of the wheat. So to take sort of a cultural narrative like that, and apply it to rural life for me, sort of join those two things, was very important. And I feel like it keeps playing out in the way I work. And, you know, I’m still working with a lot of craft-based materials. You can imagine how jarring it was when I began my arts education at Emily Carr, where the Vancouver school of Photoconceptualism was being pushed. I was making sculptural maquettes with barbecue skewers and yarn and popsicle sticks. But those are things that continue to play out in my work, and they’re also things that I really admire about the work of my peers here on the prairies. People like Heather [Benning] and Wally Dion, who are using crafting – making this very obsessive craft-oriented work.

David Thauberger: So perhaps that lady was a child of the depression there in Torrington. I’m just thinking, she was stuffing the gophers, and we know that people from the depression never threw anything away. If you pulled the tails off the gophers, you discarded the rest of the gopher because all you got was a nickel for the tail.

Audience member: She would have to remake the gopher tails to make them look right.