Hello and welcome to the 30th interview for my interview blog 3 Art Questions With Jackson! 30! I am so happy to have the 30th interview be with the wonderful artist Kordula Coleman. I have been amazed with her art from the first time I saw it and now everyone in my family loves it too. We have her art hanging on our Christmas tree right now! She was kind enough to give her answers a lot of thought and I think everyone will enjoy the interview. Thank you so much for reading!
Jackson: What made you want to use clay for your art? Did being in Germany have anything to do with it?
Kordula: The most important factor for my investment in working with clay was my mother. My first love was drawing and painting, and my focus settled on humans early on. I was obsessed with human anatomy and really wanted to get it right in my drawings. My mother was a potter, and had a pottery wheel at our house. At some point - I think I was around 6 - she introduced me to clay, and showed me the basics of working with it. My mother was never attached to having an impeccably clean house, so whenever I felt like it, I could work with clay, right at the dining room table. I think the supple, forgiving nature of clay, and the possibility to undo mistakes - won me over right away - and I loved having the option to explore the amazing possibilities of showing of showing a figure from different angles. I was often an anxious child, so I'm sure the therapeutic qualities of working with the cool and supple clay - the tactile experience - calmed me down. I drew voraciously at the same time, and as I became a teen, I often sketched my sculptures before executing them in clay. I realized more and more how much I loved having the option to create something in the third dimension - it just added so much more possibility of expression. My mother kept on supporting and encouraging me, and always saw to it that my pieces were glazed and fired. This sent a powerful message to me that was I was doing had merit and was valued. I also remember being hugely encouraged when the ceramic artist who fired my pieces told my mom that he thought I was a talented clay artist. In Germany, that is a big deal, because people in general are a lot more stingy with praise, and to get this kind of compliment from an artist we respected meant a lot to my mother and me. After high school, I became a ceramic journeyman at a company that builds large handmade tile ovens, ceramic fountains, and architectural pieces. I don't know if you know of the artist Friedensreich Hundertwasser - this company made many ceramic columns and mosaics for a famous house he designed in Vienna, Austria. I learned many important technical and artistic skills during that time. After getting my journeyman degree after 2 1/2 years, I took a detour studying graphic design and illustration and becoming an art director for some years, working in ad agencies in Germany for some years. During that time, my love for working with clay was buried under my demanding job and crazy working hours. But after coming to Minnesota in 2000, and being free of the restraints of a full time job, I rekindled my love for clay and have never stopped working with clay since then. While my children were small it was often difficult to find the time or mental focus, but over the years clay has once again become a huge stress relief, vehicle for expression, and island of sanity in difficult times. The possibility to show the human figure from different angles through clay gives me so many tools to express a mood or an emotional process. The mood and expression can be enhanced even more through different surfaces and treatments and glazes. I also love the fact that the pieces I create will outlive generations to come, and might even become beloved family heirlooms. The fact that a ceramic piece literally goes through fire twice - first for the bisque firing, and then for the glaze firing - is also a powerful symbol to me. You have to build it thoroughly and with care - you can't fake any strength or stability. Otherwise it will not survive the firing process. It reminds me of the strength a person will eventually develop, when they go through their life's challenges with patience and integrity. Their defining qualities will have become permanent, and resilient to the encroaching chaos of life.
Jackson: How has the global pandemic affected your art or your art career? So many artists have had things postponed or cancelled.
Kordula: I am happy to say that the global pandemic has not had a noticeable effect on my art or my career. I have always worked from my home studio in our basement, and loved the solitude and seclusion, but also the closeness to my family and pets. I get my ideas anywhere, and being limited to mostly being at home, walking in nature, watching movies, listening to music or reading hasn’t hurt that. There is a certain lassitude and heaviness in the air because of the pandemic and the hardship it has brought to so many people, and that is palpable to me, but it hasn’t affected my drive to create art. I am immensely grateful to the Northeast Minneapolis Arts Association for setting up an online shop for every interested member artist this year, right in time for Art- A-Whirl 2020. I was able to show and sell my art very effectively during this event and ever since. Also, I am glad that I started taking the role that social media can play for artistic presence seriously some years ago. I started to invest time and thought into how to establish an online artistic profile that would keep people interested and captivated. That way, I had an online following when the pandemic hit that wasn’t greatly affected by my inability to meet people in person at art events. It also enabled me to be an independent artist and sell my work directly and on my terms, such as offering a payment plan for larger pieces. I will have my first solo show at Lanesboro Arts in Lanesboro, MN, in October 2021, and it was admittedly sheer luck that this show will open when a Covid vaccine will most likely have been widely distributed, and art openings and shows can happen in person again. I am immensely grateful that this opportunity for me to connect with people in person, and for people to see my art in person, has not been taken away by the pandemic.
Jackson: If you could meet any artist living or dead, who would it be and why?
Kordula: I found this to be the most difficult question! There are many artists that I admire and have drawn inspiration from, and would like to thank for motivating me to keep on expressing myself. There is, for example, Maria Zherdeva, a figurative paper maché artist working in Moscow, whose work I find mesmerizing because of its storytelling character and atmospheric density. There is Kelly Garrett Rathbone, an American figurative ceramic sculptor whose work I saw at the Northern Clay Center and deeply admire because of her technical mastery and the intriguing characters she creates. Then there’s the Russian born sculptor Sergej Isupov, a figurative porcelain sculptor, whose work I saw at the Museum of Russian Art, and who completely blew my mind. But it’s not just visual artists, but also writers, composers, musicians from all kinds of genres, and film directors that have given me a wealth of ideas and inspiration. What I am most grateful for is when art helps me enter a frame of mind where I feel inspired to create my own work, confident that I will be able to create something that will be genuine and satisfy me. That often works best for me when the art I’m experiencing isn’t too close to what I do myself - otherwise I feel that the danger of unconsciously copying what that artist is doing, or comparing my work to theirs, is too great. So for now, after much mulling over this question, I will pick Cary Joni Fukunaga - the film director who directed the 2011 movie version of the novel ‘Jane Eyre’ by Charlotte Brontë. I feel so much at home in this movie - the emotional depth and also heaviness that is so well portrayed through light setting, nature shots, music, and costume design, and the redemption from this heaviness in the end. I grew up in a home that was burdened with my father’s intense mood swings from happy and creative to depressed and anxious. He had been a German soldier and then a prisoner of war in a Russian camp in WW2, and his trauma was ever present and colored the atmosphere in our house with the same bittersweet, changeable, deeply contrasted light situation that I find in this movie. Because of these early experiences, I have always been drawn to stories of survival, and I have always been deeply moved and inspired by being outside in untouched natural environments, and by classical music. This movie offers me all that, and the emotional depth and intensity that I am trying to express in my sculptures. I would like to meet this director and tell him how much his movie has inspired me, and ask him about his own inspiration sources.
