SHEILA CARR
BY KUTAY TUFEKCI
Sheila Carr surrounded by her thesis work.
SHEILA CARR (b. 1998, Ulm, Germany) is an interdisciplinary artist whose practice gives the emotional weight of memory a physical presence through forms that hold imperfections, repetitions, and erasures of familial and cultural histories. Her work contrasts warm memories against cold industrial material to form jarring and beautiful narratives. With a background in neuroscience and clinical research, Sheila makes emotions and sensations physiological with surgical skill. KUTAY TUFEKCI shares Sheila's interest in memory and familial bonds. In his paintings, sentimentality peeks through layers that obscure and fragment the image. Kutay met Sheila at her studio at SVA to discuss her thesis, "Ingredients to a Recipe I Can't Remember."
Kutay Tufekci: Hi Sheila. thanks for joining me today for our conversation! I want to start with an icebreaker question to start our interview off. Do you have a core memory of the first time you made something with your hands? If you do, what is it?
Sheila Carr: As a child, obviously you can't work and you don't make money, but birthdays and holidays come around. So I would always make cards for my family members. I would make an envelope, you know, there were always drawings included in them. But those are probably my first memories of making. It would be those envelopes and gifts made out of the paper, collaging and cutting for family members as a kid. Now that I think about it, I always lived in this more three-dimensional realm.
KT: That's cool. So you were always, in a way, documenting time and memory.
SC: Yeah. Yeah. I guess there's a very sentimental nature to myself and my work. I've kept almost every card anybody's given me.
KT: We kind of talked about your thesis before we started our conversation. To my understanding, you're preserving certain personal memories within your monumental sculptures. Makes me think about how memory is a fleeting, unstable blimp that you're stabilizing with the materials you use such as metal, concrete and resin. It's pretty interesting to me that you chose to cast apple slices in resin, can you talk more about that and your process?
SC: I don't think the audience necessarily needs to know this when approaching my work, but a hidden gem for me is that apple pieces in the resin tiles are something that comes from a personal memory of my dad. He has always cut and sliced his apples in a very specific way, super old school. He would take his favorite knife to cut his apples, and start by peeling the skin off fully around in a circle, creating almost spiraling shapes, and then slicing the apple in slices. He only likes red delicious apples, which I think is, like, the worst apple around. But I still used them for the apple tiles because they're his favorite apples and I recreated his ritual. I kept practicing and learned to slice it with a knife, then I dried them and put them in resin tiles. I feel like there are other things that are rituals in my work, which I think are kind of unintentional like the ways that I create and the things that I gravitate towards. As another example, I think the process of chemically rusting my items has kind of become a ritual in my work. I do that often and it's become a sort of muscle memory to me, it's very mindless and meditative when I do it.
KT: I see, so you're mostly gravitating towards certain materials because of your personal experience and interests. But I still see a pattern of you gravitating towards stability within your work. Can you talk more about how you see stability and what it means to you?
SC: In my thesis I do talk a lot about stability. I'm specifically looking at what the loss of memory looks like and feels like. How unstable memory is, which is actually why I'm using these materials. They're all used in construction and are supposed to be or known as very sturdy structural objects. For example, the concrete swing -you would think concrete is so sturdy and stable, but it crumbles and cracks so easily that you have to use reinforcement. It has no tinsel strength, which it's not made for but in the swing tensile strength is necessary. And, yeah, you have to use it in a very specific, almost formulaic way in order to create that structure and that foundation. If you don't, then it's actually not very sturdy. So I think I'm using these materials as both nodding to the stability and also showing its instability, like the seesaw. In some ways it is unstable. The material use of it looks fairly sturdy, but then inside there's these casted, delicate roof tiles and they're on a slope. So there's this unease in their positioning on the seesaw, they could topple over or they could break. I'm interested in the loss of memory and its change over time. No two people's memory of the same experience is actually the same. The way that somebody words something can make you think of a memory in a different way, so then it's changed. That's a lot of what I'm examining with this project specifically.
KT: So kind of stretching from your answer to that. If you could pick a material that you would just say it represents memory to you. what would be that material?
SC: Whoa. Crazy question. Good question. I don't think I can answer this question. I am gonna sit on it, but I'm gonna explain why I think I can't answer it. I feel like there isn't one material that can communicate memory because memory is so complex, especially if you're making work about memory. It has to do something that relates to other people too. Not everybody relates to one specific material, so it's really hard to answer. I think it would be the opposite of the topic if you tried to really narrow down memory into one material. For the sake of the question though, I think my answer at least today would be steel, but untreated raw steel. Raw steel shows aging and time very well. When exposed to the elements, it rusts over time. That's also what I'm doing in my work, allowing time to be an active participant. All the steel that I use is basically untreated because I'm also allowing all of my materials to change over time. Something that I wrote down yesterday was, there's this saying "time heals all wounds," but if you see your body as a piece of raw and untreated steel then I think that in that reference, time is kind of just like a fog. And when the fog clears, you're left with these untreated, now rusted, gashes from all the moisture in the air. ..
KT: When you're out in the world. what do you think when you look at stuff? Do you ever think, like, oh, that's a sweet piece of steel, I would love to rust that, or is it more of an exploration that happens in the studio?
SC: Yeah, I think that's an interesting question, what do I look at out in the world? I think about the processes that I do in my studio. It's a particularly interesting question for me because I had an art history class last semester and a question that came up a lot is, what is considered art? We had a conversation about it in that class. I didn't come from any type of art background, I didn't even really see much art until I got into undergrad. So things that I thought were art are not traditional forms of art or considered fine art, you know, by institutions. I'm never really making a commentary on things being mass produced, but there is this interest in the kinds of materiality that mass produced objects have that makes its way into my work, probably unconsciously. I don't really know why I gravitate toward metal so much.
KT: Okay, so, at what point does the story about the future subject start to begin or take shape?
SC: I think the subject of my work is the form that it takes. I'm very specific about the objects and materials that I'm using. The reason that I use steel, which I said earlier, is because of my life experiences. My subject in this thesis is memory, both personal and collective. So the material is the subject in a way. The roof tile is the subject because the original roof tile is from my 0ma's house, it is a direct representation of my memories. The Apple pieces are direct memories that I have, so they are the subject. The form that the tile is taking and then the way it is disintegrating is also the subject. It's like the memory is fading over time. Whether you know the specific details of that memory or not, you know? And then there were several versions of the way that it was presented, before I landed on this. Originally there weren't gonna be this many tiles and it wasn't going to be what makes the board of the seesaw. There were going to be 3 tiles that slowly faded away, but that came across more fragmented rather gradual shifts. It ended up transforming into these tiles that slowly kind of, you know, lose their form.
KT: I see, so you keep adapting to difficult situations and imperfections that happen during your process of making. Are there any failures that happened along the way?
SC: You see this swing [points to a thick concrete slab on the floor], which is kind of the first attempt of the seat's final form. It was structurally great, but aesthetically a failure. So, I remixed and recycled it in a slightly different way to get it to where I wanted it to be. I made the swing seat that way mainly because of the structural integrity that it needed. Then I finished it and I looked at it and I said, "I don't like this, it's too thick! It doesn't look enough like a seat, it's chunky, heavy. I hate it. How did I make it?" Then I had to do so much backtracking and research on such little time to figure out how to make it look like this other one. Which is a really interesting process, I think, that I used for that one.
KT: How does the swing idea come along? I feel like you need to be seeing a space that you're interested in and then an idea strikes like, a swing would look good in this area. That's how I viewed the work out as an outsider. I'm like, okay, I think you're coming up with these structures looking at other architecture and then trying to fit it in that architecture.
SC: The idea of the form that these pieces took didn't come from me looking at architecture and imagining a site that it would be in. It came from the subject matter and idea I was thinking about initially. It started with one piece and then all the pieces kind of clicked into place to fit that piece. So essentially, I never thought, "oh, I envision this here." It came from the idea of the loss of memory, how it feels, and how that would look. I was thinking about the instability of memory. I feel like when you think about memory, you go backwards, obviously, because it's past, and a lot of the time you go back to childhood. So I just had this idea I wanted to make a swing and a seesaw because they both move. It came from this notion of a seesaw as a playground object, but it's also a scale. Unstable in the sense that it moves back and forth and somebody's in the air, the weight changes on each side causes it to shift. When I was looking at the seesaw I was thinking of all these other playground objects, and then I was like, "wait, swings!" And that's how that came along.
KT: How do you consider space and architecture when exhibiting your work? Do you like to work on site specific projects?
SC: I think I haven't had the opportunity to do site specific projects. That would be something that I'd want to do: create a specific public art piece or something like that. But I think, sad to say. Maybe I don't consider space as much when I make my objects because I have a hierarchy. First comes the idea, then I have the aesthetic and the form, and then I have the structural integrity of it. If I were considering space, these objects that I'm making right now would not have been made, because this studio has no space for it to live. I have two seesaws now, right? The first seesaw was the same idea, but with some different aesthetic choices. How it looked came from consideration of how much space I currently have versus if I was under optimal conditions in a space, it would have originally been much larger to begin with. I already know that, sometimes when you build objects, you have to consider the space that you're in. And so I think in some senses, space is considered but it's also not, you know? My objects would have been much larger. The point is you're really dictated by your space. I think it's a balance for me. I have the idea before I ever consider the space that I'm in, and then once I actually think about the space that I'm in, sometimes I edit the idea.
