My conversation with Gail Grinnell develops, layer upon layer, circling back to themes of caretaking, women’s work, relationships, love and loss, light and dark. We do not start with A and proceed methodically to Z. We spiral, adding to the conversation each time we re-touch a topic.
Layers is an appropriate term to use here, for Gail describes her art as rooted in them. “My work is a reference to how I feel about people and relationships in my life. There is a transparency and layering. It’s bringing disparate elements together.”
In physical form, her layers are made of dressmaking materials – elements “humble, simple, nothing too refined. I don’t labor under the illusion that my pieces will last any significant period of time. Life is temporal and so is my art.” The inspiration for her work is rooted in layers of memory, tradition, ritual and work.
On the eastern Washington farm where she grew up, “people were always making things. My mother’s seamstress business was always visible on the dining table.” While from earliest memory, she was always drawing or decorating in her own way, it took a while for her artistic impetus to bloom.
After becoming pregnant at age 17, she married the father like a good Catholic girl. The teenagers and their baby started life together, in a room of the motel owned by his father. Their early years together revolved around her husband’s preparation for the world of work, earning a degree from Eastern Washington University. Gail dabbled in a couple courses there but was terrified of the university setting. “It was out of everyone’s expectations for me to go to college. I was supposed to just be paying attention to my baby.”
It wasn’t until after another child at 23 and a second marriage with two more children that she pursued more formal instruction, earning a degree in painting from the University of Washington.
Immediately she recognized that painting as a medium didn’t make sense given where she was in life. “I had kids at home, I didn’t have the space or the money for those materials.” Though she drew heavily from her training, she deliberately turned from the tradition of fine art.
Instead, she focused on “the tradition of the everyday” using materials that draw from “the intergenerational memory” of women’s work. From her personal history of “having been a domestic my entire life, taking care of others” she found the impetus for her own artistic expression. “I wanted to express the value of caretaking. Wanted to leave a track back to that activity through my art.”
In the early days, she worked on her creations between diaper changings and parenting interruptions, her pieces often migrating from the spare bedroom she had designated as her work space to the kitchen table. Intertwining the kids and her work, she learned to include them in the making. From a young age, they would often participate by cutting or gluing. Now adults, they helped put together some of the final touches on her piece currently on display at the Bellevue Arts Museum.
Lightly Here at night at the Bellevue Arts Museum
The piece, titled Lightly Here, is the marriage of line and drawing with the memory of women’s work, done by her and her mother and her mother’s mother, imbued in her own bones and evident in the bones of the piece.
She spent two months in Ballycastle, Ireland in 2008 doing an arts fellowship. To this remote destination all that she brought with her were bolts of interfacing fabric -- the primary media of her work, a gallon can of acrylic, and marking pens. No paints or other means of providing color. For inspiration she turned to memory of that most basic task of domestic work – the laundry. She felt the movement in her muscles of plunging the fabric into water, the twisting to release water, hanging to let the air do the rest. She thought of these movements and the actions that might follow when the laundry was done – drinking a cup of coffee at the kitchen table – and layered the two. Soon, she was dying the interfacing she brought into tubs filled with coffee or tea, the beverages adding not just subtle color but the richness of tradition to the materials.
Back in her Seattle studio she crafted the individual pieces used to construct her piece, the construction itself the last part of the creation. Like life, Gail’s work cannot be contained within a frame, but “has to respond to the space where it lives.
“You have to consider the volume of the space, and the light” – in this case both artificial from within the museum and external through the window. Even the movement of air as it circulates through the space and animates the art factors into the final design.
Not having many artistic instincts myself, I imagined my personal terror in choosing that first panel and each addition thereafter. But Gail harkens the construction of the piece to a drawing “each line changes the picture. In a real way, assembling the piece was like drawing in the space.”
The first time she constructed the piece she was not satisfied. “It looked like a sad white curtain, dusty and derelict.” The timing of the show hadn’t been great. Gail was being pulled in many directions, including final preparation for a show at the Francine Seders Gallery with her now grown son Sam, who had recently graduated from the Rhode Island School of Design. The scar on her hand, sliced open by a glass she was washing, is a reminder of how distracted she was at the time. After her life settled some she returned to the museum to re-hang, or re-draw the work to what it is today.
More than my other interviews thus far, Gail worked hard to be sure that all the words she used in answering questions were exactly the right ones. It became obvious that this is a person who demands of herself a precision of expression – she wants to be very clear about the statement she puts out. But at the same time, she’s thrilled when people bring their own references to its interpretation.
Almost giddy, she described comments she overheard from a young woman upon viewing her work. Although her words were very different from the ones Gail would use, it was clear that this stranger found something within Gail’s art that spoke to her own experience. That’s what Gail strives to find – some image or reference that has layers of commonality even across uncommon backgrounds.
To see more examples of Gail’s work, both finished and in process, check out her lovely web site.
- Janet Pelz
Gail at work with her grandson.
Gail’s (not so) secrets for how she does it: What books are on Gail’s bookshelf? Fortress of Solitude by Johnathan Lethem Motherless Brooklyn also by Johnathan Lethem Favorite reads include Housekeeping, A Novel, by Marilynne Robinson, and anything by Annie Proulx Whom does she want me to interview next?
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