Karen Kraven & Jaclyn Bruneau in conversation

This transcript has been edited for clarity

Jaclyn Bruneau (JB): Both in terms of my research interests and my professional pursuits and in my personal life that this work has become really immense and rewarding to have spent time with. Thank you for that. This is a bit of a unique situation in the sense that this exhibition opened—what was it, five weeks ago now Karen?

Karen Kraven (KK): Yeah, I think so—around there. 

JB: Right and so obviously that means that this exhibition opened while quarantine was happening. And so I think it’s probably a good idea to start by giving a rundown of what was included in the show since no one is able to physically be in the space from what I understand. And just to hear about some of the different works that were included and to start to talk about your thinking behind this exhibition and that way that you sort of come to collide with this strange moment that we find ourselves in.

KK: Yeah, I guess like I started working on the exhibition obviously much before things started changing. And one thing that was kind of significant is that I sent the crate out quite a bit earlier, not exactly sure how long that it would take. And while that was—it was going by truck—while that was happening the rail stoppages throughout Canada, the protests against the RCMP’s actions in Wet'suwet'en were happening and so there was already a feeling of the movement of objects and the movement of capital was shifting. That was on the precipice before my trip to Edmonton was cancelled. I think it’s just interesting to think about how that was affecting my mind as I’m literally putting the work into a freight elevator, into a truck.

The work, before that, started a few years ago when I started some research about the garment industry. We’ll talk a little bit more about my own family history later, but my grandfather and my father had a sweater factory in the ‘60s to the early ‘80s. And I sort of began to research the garment industry in Canada and went much further back into the labour movement/‘30s time and came across a lot of things but one image that really stood out to me was this image of an abandoned work factory—like a sewing, garment factory—and on the tables and workstations were piles of unfinished clothes. There are sleeves, collars, parts of bodices of jackets and this image kind of was the inspiration for many works, and specifically the Toronto Sculpture Garden sculpture, in thinking of like the garment pieces or these sort of fragments as being stand-ins for the people protesting themselves, the mostly women who were working in piece-work so they’re getting paid by the little part that they are sewing and in a way, the garments are refusing to work or to become garments themselves, so sort of this metaphor that I was playing with. 

JB: I’m thinking about the trajectory of your work and how it’s always been oriented around the body. Your much older work picking that up through the lens of sports and uniforms and costumes more broadly. I’m curious to hear how you trace the line from thinking about the body in those particular modes and gradually moving more into ideas of labour and women’s bodies, women’s work, women in industrial work settings and it’s really striking how you’re making very specific works, the Toronto Sculpture Garden being one of them. I guess I’m curious to hear how you trace that line through your work, how the body has been in that line...

KK: Yeah, I think earlier work or a certain phase of work was thinking about sports in how the body performs through performing identity or gender and how certain costuming in certain sports lifts up or subverts those kinds of stereotypes. An so, in a way kind of thinking of the—I guess, in a lot of sport we think of the body sort of pushing the limits of the body or trying to succeed some kind of maybe perfection or a goal oriented physicality and yet those limits are really mutable and changeable and so maybe more interested in the surface of that, of the skin, the fabric, the way the fabric reveals and conceals the body itself. And then maybe this newer phase of work, thinking about how the body leaves its mark on those fabrics or clothing or costumes.

So in the case of the work at Latitude 53 of thinking about denim and how the perfect pair of jeans is worn in in all the right places and we also buy jeans that are already distressed or we customize them to fit our body so there is something about how the wearer has left their mark on the clothes and how the clothes have left their mark on the wearer as well. 

JB: But, I think that maybe this is a good time to talk about the wall-based denim work in your show and that this is the second body of work to come out of this particular working process. Maybe you talk a little bit about how that working process came about, and sort of shift from the way that it was at the Parisian Laundry show last fall as compared to here and then—yeah, let’s start with that. 

KK: I think both exhibitions—there was an exhibition at Parisian Laundry in the fall called Dust Against Dust and both that work and this work were using a methodology of laying out all the pieces inside of a pattern. So I’ve received—I have a bunch of my mom’s old patterns from the ‘70s (she used to make her own clothes)—and they come in an envelope and then you cut out the tissue paper and you lay out the patterns. And so I would lay out, sometimes according to the way you’re supposed to do it and sometimes creating my own compositions, but cutting out all of the pieces and then what’s leftover is sort of this skeleton of the offcuts or the part that you’re not supposed to put in the garment it’s just reduced as much as possible to conserve fabric. I would start with that as the beginning of a composition and then adding pieces back into it, not following the instructions in sort of—in an exercise of composition.

I think what’s different about the work from Parisian Laundry is that for one I chose to use what kind of a dress maker’s silk, so it’s kind of like an organza as that one is, and it’s very sensitive to touch: if your hands are sweaty it leaves a mark, it frays really easily, it’s quite delicate. But I wouldn’t say that they’re so luxurious, like they’re still kind of tacky in their quality like prom dress kind of material. There was a certain amount of care that I had to take with the fabric and I think that was a metaphor for how I was personally feeling while I was making the work, like I needed to care for myself, and I needed to slow down and the work was extremely time consuming and there is a lot of hand sewing on the edges and I had some assistants helping me in the studio and it was very intimate with the material. Very hands on, very careful, very caring and putting a lot of emotion—or that’s how I felt—into the work and sort of sewing it in. And trying to make form out of those feelings.

And then I think that something else happened for Latitude 53 with Lull where I chose to use denim, which is much more robust and it’s—you can kind of be more cavalier with it. I can throw it and it can withstand quite a bit. And the frays were wanted in this case, like I wanted the frays to show and see how it wears. I could sandpaper it, I could bleach it, I could be rough with it and I felt that maybe emotionally I was more strong in myself to be able to handle the material in that way. I think those are the main differences between the works. 

JB: Yeah it’s really interesting hearing you talk about the care that went into that material process and it makes me think about Anne Boyer’s book, Garments Against Women, which has been a major source of inspiration and thought processes for you in this course of making this work from what I understand. When I was writing the text I came across this [interview] from Anne Boyer which was sort of a way of calculating and thinking that led to the eventual writing of this book, Garments Against Women.

She says: “I wanted to figure out some way to live as something more than information.” And in that book she talks about using sewing as a way of opposing the states of “working” and “not working” or, in her case, “writing” and “not writing” or “doing intellectual labour” and “not doing intellectual labour” and positing that “not working”, “not writing”, and “not doing intellectual labour” is also work. And thinking about using sewing as sort of a way of exempting herself from both of those states—from both “working” and “not working.” And I’m curious to hear whether that was something that felt like it was at play for your process in producing these works? And if so, what does that feel like? That willful wedging of oneself between those two states which are—it’s sort of hard to imagine what that “not” state is. 

KK: We had a bookclub around this book for three sessions, and one thing we came back to again and again were these two parts of the book called “Not Writing” and “What is ‘Not Writing’” and it’s kind of this conundrum and I think it’s interesting how you pose the question of “what does the space in between those two in betweens feel like?” And I think that I can speak of my own experience of feeling like I sort of have a rupture in my life of my father passing away a few years ago and I can distinctly feel different from the “before” and the “after” of that.

Before that I was a complete workaholic and I’m sure many of you can relate to that. “When is there time when I’m not working?” Or thinking about work or obsessing about it or loving the work and dedicating everything that you can to your work and feeling fulfilled by that. And then personally having a rupture in that where everything loses meaning. I wasn’t able to find the fulfilment in my work that I once was. In fact, I was totally consumed by anxiety and burnout and actually physically couldn’t work. Like, had to stop. And when I tried to go to the studio it was too painful and—too physically painful in my body, my body was exhausted, and I couldn’t stand for long periods of time. I couldn’t concentrate for long periods of time, or even short periods of time. And what comes up when you—I mean I used to go to the studio to escape myself, I didn’t really think about it. You just go and you kind of get lost in your world at the studio and that’s very pleasurable. But then something changed and I went to the studio and all of these demons and memories and pain and sadness were coming up and it’s like “oh, shit!” This is not going to be easy.

So, going back to your question of the book, she talks a lot about all of these “in between” spaces and how they are welcomed and unwelcomed. How caring for oneself or for other loved ones becomes something that you want to pay attention to. And that writing, in a way, got in the way for her. She says somewhere in the book that “writing steals from my loved ones” and it “steals from my already empty bank account” and that it is, in a way, easier for her to stop writing than it is for her to continue trying to forge forward under those conditions. So, the first part of the question, you were talking about information. Yeah, that quote she—somewhere else in the book she says “what to do with the information that is feeling” and there’s a segment there where she talks about “inadmissible information,” kind of thinking about what does that mean? What kinds of feelings are not supported by our society. What kinds of feelings are not okay to express or to admit that you have or to include in your artist statement and so there is much more there but I’m not going to go any further right now. 

JB: I was going to ask you about the book club and how that thinking through that book with the group has evolved your thinking around this and the way that the book has bearing on your thinking around the show. And in the book club we are referring to, I also want to give credit to your co-facilitator Kim McCollum. I’m curious how that process has gone and what would be your reflection on it now?

KK: It went really well. It was really fun to have. Actually, the online situation made it such that I was able to participate. When we had originally thought about it, it was going to take place in Edmonton in person but I kind of took a backseat and Kim McCollum was the leader of the book club and so many participants were able to read the book and we had different themes each week and it was really nice to discuss different ways that we were taking in her book.

There’s parts of it that are intensely dark, and there are parts that are witty. She’s constantly creating contradictions and contradicting herself and setting up structures and then breaking them. I feel like I can relate to a lot of that in my studio practice, setting out with some rules and then intentionally breaking those rules or allowing myself to break them and make new ones. There’s sort of always this spectre of form or genre that is sort of always in the margins.

There’s a part that I’ll read that is really nice that she writes about sewing, as you mentioned. This part of the book is called “Sewing”, it’s just a paragraph. “Having given up literature, it was easy to become fixed on the idea of a single shirt. One with two pieces, no facings, not even set-in sleeves. What can be done? How can two flat pieces joined together in four places accommodate a grown woman’s torso—not at all flat and with arms often in motion. It’s just the same thing over and over, like when I used to listen to music. Always stuck on a track, just this time in flannel, that time in linen, so many double pointed darts around the waistline cinching it in. Platonic ideal.”

I think there is some way that she uses the sewing as an in-between “working” and “not working”. It’s a seemingly straightforward task: you’re following instructions, there are rules on how to do it but she finds herself kind of like sewing too quickly, or getting excited about finishing something, or getting caught up in the price of fabric and the price of buying new clothes or making her own clothes out of thrifted fabrics. There’s a lot more dimension that comes out through it. So what starts out as being this thing where I’m going to put my desire into making these objects that don’t really matter, they’re not my life’s work—they’re just things, it brings out all of these other things. I think that’s one thing that is really great about her book. 

JB: That reminds me of something that you said to me on the phone while I was working through the text which was sometimes you have to remind yourself that you weren’t making jeans. Related to that idea that she’s getting into about all of the sudden it turning over into something that does begin to resemble work and what to do with that impulse and that reflex as well, that’s really interesting. So getting back to this idea, I feel like this idea is a good segue to talk about the title of the exhibition which is “Lull.” I’m tempted to say more but we can take a few minutes to talk about your own thinking about the title.

KK: I’d like to hear your reflections. The title came late in the process, as titles sometimes do. Really early on I was committed to the idea of working with denim because of the Great West Garment Company in Edmonton. However, originally I wanted to use a material that’s an insulation—a home insulation—that’s made from recycled denim. It’s this blue: it looks like fibreglass, like pink fibreglass, but it’s blue and it has little tiny bits of scraps of threads and stuff that you can see in it as well. I’ve used it once before in a small exhibition that I did in Ottawa last year. And I was thinking about its qualities as soundproofing, because I was circulating these ideas of “silence as resistance” or “reprieve as resistance” or something about sound.

You quote me nicely in your text saying it’s like the feeling of putting a pillow over your head, where it’s not really a welcomed feeling, it’s kind of like you’re screaming “no!”, you’re so stressed out you can’t hear another sound. That’s where the original ideas were coming from and it carried through to shift from being directly about sound—we were trying to get a donation of this material and we weren’t able to do it. So things changed and I ended up thinking about how pause and reprieve have a similar effect. And this word “lull” has this—someone mentioned that it kind of has the word “lullaby,” or it’s part of the word “lullaby.” It’s sort of like an in between state, before the next thing or after something. It has a softness to it, it’s sort of like maybe an unwelcome stop, I’m thinking of a child going to bed—they don’t want to go to bed—but then there’s a moment where it kind of feels safe and calm. So that’s kind of where the title came from. 

JB: Right, I’m also thinking about it as just another one of the ways that the thinking behind this exhibition has come to align with the fact that everyone is staying inside right now and that it’s a lull that’s enforced upon us but it also requires our participation. This sort of thing that this lull is bringing up for people. Obviously everyone has extremely different experiences of it in terms of what it means about their barebones survival situation, but also about mortality, collective grief, reflecting on what it means to work and what kind of work that we’re all doing. For myself falling into existential traps about and around work, and facing the fact that this lull is happening all around me but I’m still working at 130%. On that note, to other times in my life where I’ve been forced into a kind of lull and working through it and then thinking about what I lost and what I don’t even know that I lost in forcing myself to continue in a time when everything surrounding me is strongly suggesting that I do not continue as if everything is just rolling forward.

I think that’s part of the heaviness of thinking about this work, the title of it and the way that it comes to align with what everyone is experiencing just on the way it is right now. Maybe on the topic, too, I’m curious to hear you, you touched on this and your father’s father operated a knitting company for—what was it? 25 years?

It closed the year before you were born and I’m curious to hear you talk about what it means for you to work with textiles considering your family history.

KK: I hadn’t really made a connection between working with sort of fabric before—like the before and after—before my dad passed away I hadn’t really been thinking about the textiles I was using in my photography and the gymnastics sculptures, that they had anything to do with my family’s background in textiles until I started looking at that, genealogy and looking into your roots, which you tend to do in those moments.

What’s kind of interesting is…we have an image of the factory that my dad, this was in the 60s, this would have been around the time that my zeyda took over this factory. It was under a different name and he turned it into Kraven Knitting. Just looking at the piles of sweaters, this is the sewing section of the factory, but there is another large section that has these huge knitting machines.

There’s another image that we have of this newspaper article that I had never seen before I was forced to or, y’know, had to go through everything in my multigenerational childhood home. And the first line of this article—so, that’s my dad there sitting underneath some idle knitting machines—the first line of this article says “the clatter of knitting and sewing machines, the heartbeat of Kraven Knitting Ltd. for more than 25 years, has stopped.” This is just a few months after my birthday, and it’s a heart wrenching photo to see my dad sitting there in this kind of defeated position. He was a small guy, but he looks so small next to these huge machines and they’ve stopped producing.

There are several reasons why that is, one of which is talked about in the article, that there were tariffs that protected Canadian manufacturing in the 1970s and those were beginning to be lifted so that imported goods could come into Canada. A lot of local manufacturing couldn’t compete with the prices of clothing that was manufactured in exploitative factory conditions, which is still the conditions of fast fashion today, 30 years later, so that was the very beginning of that. This is a moment of loss for his family, of his dad’s business that he took over, of having a new baby, having a life—a livelihood. There’s so much loss in it and there’s something so powerful about that metaphor of the stopped machines and what that means. 

JB: One of the things you said to me during the process was that the process of putting this show together has been more intuitive than the way you have previously worked and that you are less concerned in the case of this exhibition with being able to communicate… Thinking about these ideas of trying to figure out a way to return to the studio and to return to your practice in a way that felt right after coming up against a lot of resistance for reasons of grief and bereavement and living in a society that is not built to accommodate people who are grieving, even though literally everyone has to grieve people throughout their life at all times. I’m curious to hear you talk about why this felt more intuitive and why you dispensed with this idea that it needed to be coded in a certain way or led people in a certain way, that an attentive viewer would be able to put XYZ together possibly into something cohesive at a specific time in the story.

KK: This is a tough question but I like it. I mean, going back to Anne Boyer’s statement of “what to do with the information that is feeling,” I feel like that’s a nice way to describe what intuitive working feels like for me in that I was trying to work with something that I couldn’t really that I didn’t want to name or that I didn’t want to code in a language.

I wanted to create another language that was maybe my own language of shape and form and texture and materiality; I feel like that’s one way to describe it. I think it felt maybe more like I had a methodology that allowed for a lot of space within it so it wasn’t so much about creating intellectual connections but letting the material or the process that I was in speak back to me. Which, for some people, might be a familiar way to make art but for me it was not that familiar to start out without much of a plan or just a feeling of how I want something to look and not really knowing or not even really picturing it in my mind, of this is what I’m going for. I wouldn’t see it until I saw it. 

JB: I’m trying to ask this question in a way that is honouring this way of working and I think maybe. I’m curious to hear about other aspects of the show aside from the denim works on the wall in the exhibition. So kind of I’m curious to hear you provide a more rounding out, I have one more question after this but before we go and considering this is the last day of the exhibition, I’m just curious to hear about the other things that are in the room aside from the denim works that we’ve talked about so much, just, again, no need to overly interpret but just to give people an idea. 

KK: One space is dedicated to these sculptures, which are my imagination of these thread stands for sewing machines kind of oversized and, in a way, are idle. They’re sort of half-covered with these dust covers and at the far end of that image there are some rags on the floor that are dyed orange and that’s the west end of the gallery and I was thinking a lot about time in the studio and the end of the day as being kind of this sweet moment of reflection and clarity and there’s beautiful sunsets from my studio and sometimes orange light comes through onto my wall. And so those fabrics are kind of like thinking about their absorbency, of mopping things up and that there’s a constant flow of feeling and you’re mopping them up and they’re ending up sort of at the end of the day. And in a way the dark denim and the dark walls are sort of the twilight moments, there’s maybe some more calm in that time, for me at least, of the completion of the day.

And the spiderweb, of course. What’s kind of interesting—I mean spiders weave webs, that could be something. I’m not sure but there’s something about thinking now about what I’m doing in my own life during this quarantine time of clearing, not even clearing out the cobwebs but noticing cobwebs—literal ones—in corners of rooms and noticing things that have been not cared for or not tended to because I am too busy with all of the emergency things that are of the day-to-day. Like, the desktop files on my computer in general are a complete disaster and I don’t think I’ll ever get to it. You want to but it’s this thing that’s always in the background of wanting to get to but you never get to. There’s something there. The spiderweb is so charged for me as an image. And then there are some giant needles as well, they were also in the show in Parisian Laundry. They are three foot-long needles that were CNC’d out of steel, leaning against the wall there. 

JB: They’re very weapon-like. Great, thank you so much. I think my final question is just around how it feels to open an exhibition that won’t have any in-person visits. This is weird. I don’t even know what the subtext of that question is, it feels very important to ask—does that ever happen? Has that ever happened? I’m just curious how you’re feeling about that. 

KK: Well, I can’t speak for Latitude 53, but there was a moment where I was questioning “should we even be going forward with this?” We had a moment to pull the plug and a lot of exhibitions were deciding to just cancel if it wasn’t already up. We decided to go forward but it felt so strange

I think the thing I was missing the most was the conversation that happens in the environment of like, installing in a city that you don’t live in and you get to meet people in the community and you’re working in a different space and that brings a lot of valuable conversation and new ways of looking at things. Then there’s the opening, that’s fun but it's also a time when people talk and they share ideas. So that was what I was feeling at the beginning, like the most pained about. And so by having the book club and having this conversation we were able to have some of that. It’s not the same but it’s definitely been fulfilling.

There’s something certainly ironic about an idle sewing room sculpture that’s empty and there’s actually no one there. It’s a sculpture of a thing that sort of became real, so that’s kind of eerie. In my studio neighbourhood, there’s a lot of sewing and manufacturing there, and I imagine all of these empty workstations. So in a way, it doesn’t feel that bad because that’s sort of what it was supposed to be, it’s supposed to look like that. But of course, the details of my work and the up close feeling and the spatial feeling and the intimacy that a viewer gets to have with the work is lost by only seeing photos and that’s something that’s a little bit sad. But some of these works are going to be in an exhibition in Montreal next year, or later this year so they get to have that opportunity but just not in this context. 

JB: Amazing, thank you.