One girl`s trash is another girl`s cache

STUDIO
CRAFT
Lisa
Kokin
One girl’s
trash is another
girl’s cache
L
isa Kokin’s studio is spacious, carved out of her
mid-century home’s original family room and adjacent carport. Even on a damp day, it is full of natural light. And every day it is full of (in descending
order by volume) sewing machines, second- and
third-hand books that are fodder for artworks,
cherished reference books for inspiration, folded
piles of fabric, a confectionery array of small metal things sorted into
plastic bins (including but definitely not limited to keys, snaps, watch
parts and hooks), used zippers excised from their garments, spools of
thread and buttons. The central table takes up more than a quarter of
the floor space—12 people can work at it with plenty of room.
STORY BY
ALYSON KUHN
PANACEA PLUS
PHOTOS BY
LIA ROOZENDAAL
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UPPERCASE
(2010)
The day I visit, about a dozen of Lisa’s artworks from her current series are pinned on the wall. In just a few minutes, I will learn what
“asemic” means, and I will be captivated.
Self-help book spines,
mull, thread,
61 x 56 inches
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ADAPT OR PERISH
Growing up, Lisa thought her mother had
coined her frequently cited maxim “adapt or
perish” to help Lisa navigate the vicissitudes
of life—but H.G. Wells had beaten her to the
punch. Regardless of who said it first, it’s a
fitting title for a piece made exclusively from
the headbands of hardback self-help books
abandoned by their original owners.
ON BEING AN ARTIST
Lisa’s work is diverse, so it is not inaccurate to call her a
mixed-media artist. She says that “conceptual” is a less
restrictive description than others she has attracted:
fiber artist, installation artist, book artist and political
artist. However, she adds, “I would never sacrifice the
materials in service to the idea, so I prefer simply ‘artist.’” I venture my own classification, suggesting that the
common thread in her work is text. She nods, smiles and
points out that the word “textile” has the word “text” in
it. It occurs to me that textile could be a coined word,
from text and tactile. Lisa’s text-centricity takes many
forms: sometimes she leaves you with something you
can actually read; other times she literally beats the text
to a pulp. Most recently, Lisa has been inventing passages and pages that look like text but are not (they are
asemic). You read into them whatever you choose.
Lisa earned an MFA in textiles from California College
of the Arts in Oakland. She is as accomplished at deconstructing as she is at sewing. Her parents were upholsterers, and her mother’s mother worked in a tie factory.
Her uncle gave Lisa her first sewing machine when she
was nine and had begun sewing her own clothes. “It’s
cast iron and weighs a tonne,” she says. “There’s more
metal in it than in 25 new plastic sewing machines. I
have a sentimental attachment to it, but there’s no zigzag. My main machine now is a Kenmore.”
Lisa’s interest in reusing reminds me of the way Native
Americans respected and used every part of a salmon or
buffalo. Occasionally she uses an entire book, but often
she is harvesting specific parts: a collection of spines to
stitch together into a quilt-like piece, a set of text blocks
to pulp down and meticulously re-form into books, and
even the headbands (the white fabric with striped edging glued across the top and bottom of the text block of a
traditionally bound hardback) that have cameo roles in
several works and comprise the entirety of one.
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ON CRE AT ING
A TEACHING PRACTICE
Lisa’s teaching practice is comprised of four different
formats. Together, they are a distinctive form of art advocacy, to help people find their own artistic expression.
ON FINDING INSPIRAT ION
For Lisa, sometimes the idea comes first and sometimes
the materials come first—and either can come from almost anywhere. Her local recycling centre, for example,
has a book exchange that has proven serendipitous. One
day Lisa noted that a large proportion of the books were
self-help books. She started thinking about how people
were not keeping them, so she “adopted” them and gave
them new ways in which to be helpful.
“I tend to prefer things that have the patina of time,”
Lisa says. “At the same centre one day, I noticed a couple hundred pulp fiction cowboy novels. This is a genre
I’d never been attracted to, but stacked up they looked
beautiful—newsprint pages with colour on the edges. I
was repelled by the violence and cover imagery, and yet
the sheer number of them made me want to take them to
my studio. They sat for quite a while until I started using
the covers. This grew into my How the West Was Sewn
series—horticultural pieces made from the covers and
pages. I also made lace cowboys using the imagery as
source material. If I hadn’t visited the book exchange at
that particular moment on that particular day, this work
simply wouldn’t have happened.”
Lisa also gets ideas while walking her three small dogs
(Chico, Cha Cha and Chula). The piles of rocks along
the water’s edge at the Berkeley Marina inspired her to
“remove the guts” of the self-help books, pulp them and
re-form them into faux rocks—or to recapitulate the pulp
(keeping each book’s pulp separate) into books you cannot read. “It is often about being present and observing,
seeing what is there and what can be made from what is
there,” Lisa says. “And I like the interplay between ideas
and materials. That’s how interesting things happen.”
R ECA P ITU L ATI O N
SEW NOT IN ANGER
(2008)
(2008)
These randomly selected books have undergone a summary execution. Their original
contents have been reduced to pulp, and condensed in the process. But they are integral,
in that each pulp-book is made only from the
pulped original and retains its original dimensions. The colours are created by the original
endpapers or the book’s paper quality and
vintage.
A cannibalized volume of helpful
household hints? Hardly. The
book’s original title was Sow Not in
Anger. These threads seem fretful,
stitching their displeasure every
which way, ignoring the title’s
admonition and barricading the
book’s contents.
Lisa taught art in four different eldercare facilities for 13
years, under the auspices of a community college. Then
the program was defunded in 2010. “I needed to figure
out how, without institutional backing, I could keep doing what I loved to do,” Lisa says of that period. “I had
already begun teaching workshops in my studio, and I
decided to diversify that to appeal to people with different needs and levels of commitment.” Lisa did not want
to replicate what she had done before; she wanted to amplify and broaden. “Losing the eldercare job had a silver
lining, forcing me to make a transition to what has become a thriving studio teaching practice. I also continue
to teach one day a week at the eldercare facility where
my mother lived for the last seven years of her life.”
Lisa describes what has evolved: “I offer semi-monthly
one-day workshops. For the past several years, I’ve held
a series of six-session classes called Reuse Muse, in
which we explore the use of recycled materials to make
collages, books and sculpture. Workshops and classes
are open to anyone, from beginners to people I consider
to be making graduate-level work. I also offer one-onone mentoring, in my studio or via Skype. In these artist-driven sessions, we work on critique, professional
development issues (artist’s statements, résumés, and
show and grant applications) and other art-related issues specific to each artist. I had started a critique group
in 2009 [while still working for the community college]
and I now have two groups.”
YOU DO IT
(2009)
Book fragments,
waxed linen, spools,
metal hinges
6 x 22.5 x 2.5
inches
UPPERCASE
F R ET D ETA I L
(2010)
Self-help book parts,
mull, thread
56 x 51.25 inches
She adds, “Lisa also encourages philosophical and psychological discussions about art, including how to deal
with not having enough time to do art, how to deal with
the discouraging voices in one’s head and the importance of empty space in one’s work.” She concludes with
what I consider the ultimate compliment to a teacher: “I
am always happy when I am at Lisa’s studio for the critique group.”
On quieting those doubts, Deborah says, “I have been doing mentoring sessions twice a month with Lisa for several years. It is wonderful to have her warm attention for
that hour. She is gentle, encouraging and really honest.
She has a kind sense of humour and can say even critical things and I don’t feel criticized. I always feel good
when I leave, excited about doing art, feeling a sense of
progress in what I am doing.” In 2014, Deborah began
showing her work in regional shows. She has launched
a website (deborahbeniofffriedman.com) and has sold
several pieces.
ME SEE HOW
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Deborah Friedman, one of Lisa’s long-time students,
graciously agrees to chat with me. She sums up her
work with Lisa as life-changing, so I am eager for details.
“Our critique group has been together for more than six
years, and I have been part of it for four years now,” says
Deborah. “We meet once a month for three hours, and
we each take 20 minutes or so to present what we are
working on. Everyone is committed, eager and skilled
both at artmaking and critical examination. I get lots of
ideas from the other people and really look forward to
showing them my work.”
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E R R ATA ( 2 01 5)
The thread of this story is that
some tiny puffs of tangled
snippets—from other works in
progress—formed themselves
spontaneously on Lisa’s
worktable. On the table’s oft
re-covered white surface,
they looked like little line
drawings, so Lisa recreated
them by cutting slits
into industrial felt and inserting the tiny tumbleweeds
through the back.
ABOVE:
EQUILIBRIUM (2014)
This is a facsimile of a page
from the 1954 Britannica
World Language Dictionary.
Black zippers represent the
entries, assorted colours of
zippers give the definitions,
and stitching recreates the
illustrations. The length of
each piece of zipper corresponds to the length of its
word on the original page.
AT LE F T:
REBUS #1 (2015)
Perhaps these rusty hieroglyphs do indeed form a
rebus, but in a language we
cannot read. Where does our
impulse come from, to try to
read anything aligned in tidy
rows? These particular bits,
from a multitude of mechanisms, were part of a treasure
trove gathered by a student
while walking her dog and
gifted to the artist.
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UPPERCASE
PRACTICE
(2015)
Safety pins,
industrial felt, thread
22 x 15.5 inches
ON H AV ING A W E B P RE SE NC E
Lisa’s website (lisakokin.com) is rich and robust. It provides a guided tour of her more than 25 years of work,
all professionally photographed by Lisa’s spouse, Lia
Roozendaal, who also designed the website. Pieces are
thoughtfully grouped and generously annotated. Each
section (Sewing & Alterations, Book Art, Button Work
& Assemblage, Commissions) is supplemented by Lisa’s
conversational narrative about the particular body of
work. She is both linear and lyrical in sharing her influences and insights.
Lisa never misses an opportunity to make a pun, and she
embraces double entendres. The titles of her works often reflect this love of language and understatement. “I
like to write, but I never realized that I could write until
I went back to school in my mid-30s,” she says. “The visual is the main thing for me, but I use writing in a lot of
my work. I tell my students that they have to be able to
write an artist’s statement. It’s an essential tool for getting one’s work out in the world. It doesn’t have to be a
long treatise, and it doesn’t substitute for the work—it
supplements and amplifies.”
FAUXLIAGE:
NO BIRDS SING
(2011)
A branch of ethereal
eucalyptus leaves
made from thread
and wire provides
a surface for bits
of text from Rachel
Carson’s Silent
Spring. Rather than
from dust to dust, the
book’s pages have
gone from leaves to
leaves. This piece
won first place in the
Dorothy Saxe Invitational for Creativity
in Contemporary
Arts at San Francisco’s Contemporary
Jewish Museum.
Lisa has no doubts about the value of having a web presence: “Having such a comprehensive website has proven
to be an effective tool for me, enabling my work to be
seen by lots of people. I think it has helped me secure
gallery representation. I also use Facebook to talk about
my work, and I’m on Instagram (@lisakokin). Many of
my works are on Pinterest (Lisa Kokin), and they are frequently repinned. When my work is mentioned on blogs,
it drives traffic to my website, where people can see more
of my work and sign up for my monthly newsletter of exhibitions, classes and other art activities. Social media
has made my audience much larger. And although I am a
Luddite at heart, I do appreciate that this new platform
dramatically increases the audience for my work beyond
those who see it in exhibitions.”
FRONT OF THE BUS (ROSA PARKS)
( 2 0 0 6 ) One of three large button portraits commissioned for the Juvenile Justice Center in San
Leandro, California. Lisa chose her subjects
(the other two being social justice activists
Cesar Chavez and Fred Korematsu) to reflect
the ethnic diversity of the center’s population.
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