CARLIE LEAGJELD's multimedia paintings and installations are formal abstractions that foreground texture and process. Her works contain a wide range of paint applications and styles of marks: tiny, meticulous dots; precise, meandering lines; paint drips; washes of color and paint blobs that seem to be squeezed directly from the tube. Carlie earned her BFA in Painting and Drawing from the University of Oregon (2007) and her MFA in Studio Art from American University (2010), were she was the recipient of several prestigious scholarships, including the Van Swearingen Graduate Scholarship and the Catharina Baart Biddle Art Award. Her work is included in the Watkins Collection at the Katzen Museum in Washington, D.C. Carlie lives and works in Portland, Oregon, where she continue to paint, draw and enjoy the outdoors.
OtherPeoplesPixels: In your statement, you say, "I work in a process of discovery. . . making a mark, erasing, connecting one line to another, overlapping, seeing through, and editing out." Could you say more about why you choose these recurring strategies? Do you see these strategies as metaphors?
Carlie Leagjeld: I don’t start my work with a set
plan or outcome in mind. For this reason, strategies, processes and
materials become what the work is about. I see the processes I use,
which are more or less about trial and error, as related to the
experience of existential searching. We create our own realities through
our habits, our thoughts and our decisions. The processes I repeatedly
use are attempts to create or uncover another kind of reality or world.
The work starts with one element and grows from there. Working on a
piece is a process of discovery: I’m editing things out, cutting the
piece up, reassembling it, turning it into another piece and so on.
Evolution,
life cycles and decay are also metaphors in my work. I’ve always been
interested in work that reveals the time spent, the process and how it’s
built. I use patterning and repetition, which are linked to our habits,
obsessions, jobs and routines, as well as to natural patterns such as
leaves on a tree or cultural patterns like city grids.
OPP: Your combination of a variety of styles of marks and paint applications within a single piece keeps me looking. Have you always painted/drawn the way you do now? How/when did you develop this style of working?
CL: I’ve been painting since I was very young. Initially, I painted and drew from life (still life, landscape and portraiture). But over time, I realized that I was more interested in the paint itself and getting caught up in the details. The actual image that I was painting became incidental. I started working abstractly but was using botanical drawings as inspiration. I liked the scientific aspect of botanical drawings and how the detail in them showed a variety of marks to make the illustration more descriptive. Working abstractly gave me freedom and allowed me to focus on material. Working non-objectively made it hard to find a starting point for my pieces. Out of frustration, I began taking dried paint scraps from my palette and collaging with them. This is now one of the main starting points in my work and has become important because of the removal of my hand. I paint on a palette, let it dry, scrape the paint off and then collage it onto a surface. The dried paint pieces often look jagged, torn or wrinkly. From there I work back in with more traditional paint techniques to bring the pieces together and create a space.
OPP: Could you talk about your installations from 2009-2010?
CL: I did those installations during grad school. I was interested in the installations of Diana Cooper and Sarah Sze.
Slowly my drawings and paintings started to meander off the page and
onto my studio walls. I was using a lot of the same processes as the
paintings and drawings. I pinned the dried paint pieces directly to the
wall with map pins and then instead of painting a line or drawing a
line, I used string. And instead of painting a shape, I cut it out of
paper. So in some ways it felt easier than painting. It was much more
direct.
Coming from a more traditional painting background made
it hard for me to imagine working outside of the rectangle. But as I
started to move more into abstraction, the edges of the paintings seemed
to be an issue—too much or not enough space. One of the first pieces
that I created directly on the wall was a drawing on paper that I cut up
into six squares. I spaced them out into a grid and pinned them to the
wall. Then with the space between I drew directly on the wall with a
marker to connect the squares. It became a way of editing and expanding
that was different than the way I was used to working. That’s when I
really started to feel like there was less struggle in the process of
creating. There was more of a flow and ease to working. I felt a
freedom—the same freedom I felt when I stopped painting from
life—working outside the rectangle, limited instead by physical space.
OPP: Based on your website, it looks like you have turned exclusively to painting in the last few years. Have you given up installation for good?
CL: No I haven’t. I recently finished a small installation in my studio. The main drawback to installation is the space and the material needed. In some ways it seems wasteful because it’s temporary, but I like the relationship of the fleeting quality of life with the process of an installation. I’ve worked pretty exclusively on small paintings and drawings for the past few years, but in the process of making them, I’ve been collecting dried paint pieces. I'm constantly doing experiments with paint, from acrylic to gouache to oil to different ways of applying paint and pouring paint. I also cut up my works on paper as an editing process, and I’ve been saving all the leftover scraps. So this current installation in my studio was created mostly from an inventory of remnants from other artworks. I’ve also been carving woodblocks to use them like stamps to create patterns. So this installation uses elements of block prints and remnants from past pieces, which made creating this installation very quick because all the elements were on hand. I pin up one piece, and then from there it starts to grow organically.
OPP: If someone forced you to choose one or the other to work with for the rest of your life, would you choose color or texture?
CL: I would choose texture. I look at my paintings as very shallow, sculptural reliefs. The physicality of each gesture—even if it’s a blob of paint or a thick brush stroke—becomes important. I could never give up the tactile aspect of my work.
Featured Artist Interviews are conducted by Chicago-based, interdisciplinary artist Stacia Yeapanis. When she’s not writing for OPP, Stacia explores the relationship between repetition, desire and impermanence in cross-stitch embroideries, remix video, collage and impermanent installations. She is an instructor in the Department of Fiber and Material Studies at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where received her MFA in 2006, and was a 2012-2013 Mentor-in-Residence at BOLT in Chicago. Recent exhibitions include solo shows I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For (2013) at Klemm Gallery, Siena Heights University (Adrian, Michigan) and Everything You Need is Already Here (2014) at Heaven Gallery in Chicago, as well as Here|Now, a two-person exhibition curated by MK Meador and also featuring the work of Jason Uriah White, at Design Cloud in Chicago (2014). Most recently, Stacia created When Things Fall Apart, a durational, collage installation in the Annex Gallery at Lillstreet Art Center. Closing reception guests were invited to help break down the piece by pulling pins out of the wall.