In the Studio: Liliana Pasalic

Liliana Pasalic sits down with Erik Sommer to talk about Julije Knifer, harmless robots, curated accidents, and protecting what you love.

I love learning and have no fear of using new materials.

(ES) Describe your work for us.
(LP) I am interested in the spaces between painting and sculpture, abstraction and figuration. The spectrum between man-made and natural, history and the present, the “material” and the metaphysical. I use an array of materials and techniques to make paintings, wall reliefs and sculptures.

I try to translate the invisible, abstract ideas and values into something visible. I work with intentionality and curated accidents at the same time, playing with contrasts and symbols. I respond to architectural and natural landscapes. I take elements from art history and reconfigure them into something different. I realised that my last exhibition looked like a little love letter to contemporary art. My goal is to always include fierce experimentation in my process, create dialogue and tension between elements, and use materials and tools in my own way.

High risk, high reward.

Tell us a bit about your background. Where did you grow up?
I grew up mostly in Osijek in East Croatia and moved to Zagreb when I was 18. In late ’90s and early 2000s, it was a difficult season in history after the war there, and my family lost everything but our lives and had to start from scratch. However, I was raised and surrounded by people of great resilience, in a culture of dolce vita with big respect for the arts. No one in my family is an artist. I see my work partly as a mirror of where I am at in my evolution and documenting that path.

Where do you live and work now?
Adelaide, Australia. After living in London shortly, I moved to Australia. I don’t thrive in huge cities. I have learnt that we always carry the most important things within us. I might move continents again if I have a good reason and feel the calling.

How do you think this has influenced your work?
I picked up something in each place along the way. I had a solo show that was about my experience and visual moments taken from these three places.

Croatian 20th century art and architecture is all I knew growing up and it had influenced how I see. It was quite rebellious at the time. I had an incredible and quite eccentric art history teacher in Croatia, Radovan Ivancevic, who taught us how to look at art. After that, in London, I probably saw 3-4 shows every week, dragging my two small homeschooled kids to galleries and museums. I was so happy that I can finally see many shows that were not accessible to me in Zagreb and I think seeing so much art has made me fall in love with it more and start making more consistently.

Australian ever-present sunlight and saturated colours affect my mood and my use of color.

Do you remember any artists as a child that captured your attention?
My favourite artists in early childhood were musicians. I played the piano and my favourite composers were Debussy and Chopin. 

As for visual arts, just a couple houses down the road from my house was the birth house of a well known contemporary artist, a minimalist, Julije Knifer. When I was a teen, he had already moved to Paris and his work was in The Centre Pompidou collection. I loved hearing stories of how he succeeded, coming from absolutely nothing. When I saw his work in Paris in 2009, I had an intense experience of joy and reverence.

As a teen I saw Erwin Wurm’s work in Vienna while visiting my late uncle, who was teaching sociology in university there. He knew a lot about art and took us around galleries. I thought “What the hell is that? It’s so weird, but somehow I love it”.

Any artists today you are looking at?
I like the approach of Erwin Wurm, Adam Parker Smith, Kennedy Yanko, Joe Bradley, Yto Barrada, Doris Salcedo, Stanley Whitney, Roni Horn, Larry Bell, Tomas Saraceno, Bram Braam, Maria Pratts, and my friends, Christian Lock, Sundari Carmody and Henry Jock.

Your background and formal education are in industrial design. How do you think this has influenced your work?
It has more impact than I initially wanted. 

In the beginning, I decided I don’t want to make work that looks like when designers and architects make art. Often it seemed to come from the position of looking a certain way rather than what the work “does” and tries to communicate. So, I wanted to deschool myself to reprogram my mind and run as far as possible from design. I stopped following what was happening in design.

However, over the last two years, I have seen how much some principles in design that I appreciated, like finding the right material for each project and developing a style that suits the project/work, instead of being known for working in singular style or material, is serving me well now. I love learning and I have no fear of using new materials.  

Inventing ways to join materials, making models, a feeling for space, proportion, texture, composition, colour theory, mechanics, production, using tools, technical skills and use of technology, idea generation, meeting deadlines and consistency, all come in handy now. For my solo shows, I discovered I still remember how to work fast in 3D software, so I quickly make a 3D model of the gallery space before install or even before making work. I don’t like clutter and I love a grid. 

The transition from design to art was an inspiring process, in terms of finding a really different way of thinking and making.

You use a wide range of material, everything from yarn and fabric dye to spray paint, acrylics, cloth, aluminum film, perspex and more recently LED lights. Is there a medium you prefer? Any new media you hope to yet still explore?
Paint is my favourite and I am a painter at the heart of hearts. All my work is rooted in painting and built like a painting. I made fun of the imperative of traditional materials in the arts, making text based tapestries with just words, like “Oil on linen”, but I do love oil paint and am currently learning more about the secrets of oils. 

I like to combine high and low. I want to make more sculptures in the future. I feel drawn to glass, metal, stone and kinetic sculpture. I’d love to make some robots that don’t use AI, just benign, old-school, stupid, simple, harmless robots.

You combine painting and tapestry in unique and exciting ways. Do you see any boundaries or challenges between the two?
Thank you. There are many technical challenges. Fabric suitable for making tapestry with guns is not inherently suitable for painting. Canvas, on the other hand, is absolutely not usable for tufting with tapestry guns. 

I played with it a lot and found a way. I roughly plan where I want yarn and where I want paint. I’m still pushing it further and experimenting more in each new show. But, now that I have tested the techniques for a couple years, I feel like I am onto something that can coexist.

I don’t see boundaries between them. A kid that draws with a marker and adds a dolphin sticker on top, they don’t think about boundaries, so I don’t need to either. I look at the picture I am building, adding colour and texture where the work requires. Some of it I will add in yarn, some in paint. I treat the yarn as paint as much as I can. I can’t mix any colour I want in yarn, but I found ways to cheat and load the gun with 2 different yarn colours to get the mix of those colours. Your brain sees it and if you stand far enough, it looks like pointilism, like pixels, and your brain will then mix the “paint”. 

Contemporary paint (acrylic and spray paint) and wool yarn are different materials with different inherent meanings. I use wool yarn to represent nature and acrylic paint, spray and lights to represent the man-made. That is how this combination of materials happened.

You have mentioned you draw inspiration from architectural and natural landscapes, yet you are able to create abstract forms and symbols that are completely new. How do you see all of these ideas intersecting?
I am after exactly that, coming up with new forms and symbols. It’s hard. I intervene in almost all my source materials before using them. My colour is often independent from the object. I combine real life inspiration and add elements that I come up with from memory or imagination. I make a sketch of the sketch. I am the filter. I want them to feel in between familiar and unfamiliar.

In my recent work I used and combined symbols and cues from man-made and natural environments to draw attention to what I really want to communicate, which is the current state of the relationship between humans and nature. We have been living a story of separation for centuries where we have seen ourselves as separate from nature and each other, instead of a part of nature. And it was easy to extract from nature, take, kill, use. We didn’t realise the ripple effect it has, because we don’t see ourselves as being nature and having a common denominator with all that is; the same consciousness that created everything. To harm nature is to self destruct. We need to start living a story of unity, with the rest of nature and other humans. We need to fall back in love with nature. Because what you love, you protect.

Are you more concerned with the process or the end result?
When I am making work, I consider the process and the result equally. 

I care about being honest with it, that I embraced accidents occasionally and that I changed direction, even that I was struggling with problem solving. I am excited to make work by being really present with it and staying away from all distractions. This is what I am concerned with in the process. We are now under attack of weapons of mass distraction and my task is to reclaim my focus. It’s not always easy to navigate the necessity of being present in social media and need for focus. 

I am deeply curious and excited about the end result, even though I don’t know the result a lot in advance. I find out more precisely what it wants to be towards the end. I remind myself that what it does is way more important than what it looks like.

I don’t identify with my work. It’s not who I am or everything I am. I am not here for the validation and accolades. That is a slippery slope. I am here because I think it’s important to practice devotion to things you love and energy that needs to be expressed. I borrow myself for something to come through me from aether of ideas. Unexpressed creative energy is dangerous.

I am not concerned with the end result in the sense of how the viewer will receive it. That would mean being concerned with trends or individual preferences of every single viewer. I am trying to have a revelation, a learning experience with the work as I am making it and when I resolve it. I can only hope that the audience or part of the audience will also have a similar feeling with it. I have no control over that, only of my good intentions. As Rick Rubin said, I do the audience a favour by making it for myself. 

What is your normal studio practice like? Any routines or superstitions?
My ritual is to get up early, ideally at 5:30am and do uninterrupted 4 hours of deep work. This means ideally no distractions. I have a sign in the studio that says “Fail forward”. I make some tea and start. I am a mother to two unschooled kids and I had to learn how to be very efficient and get the maximum out of the time that I have in the studio. After those 4 hours of work, I will do my other responsibilities in the day, live my other life, until 6pm. This is when I usually either spend another 2-3 hours in the studio or do a couple hours of admin work. Before shows, my days look different and I am absent from the studio, working with install teams, attending openings, sometimes travelling. But I always look forward to getting back at it, my rituals, making work, living a simple life, without the need to be seen (on the contrary), in my hidey hole.  

Making it is the best part. 

I prefer to only make work in the studio. My brain associates that space with executing. I don’t like just sitting there. I don’t like doing admin work, sketching or doing research there, maybe because I don’t keep a cosy chair there on purpose and I have no heating or aircon. I do research in my car parked by the beach, because I need to be outside every day in the sun and I am a big fan of beautiful nature views. This gives me a sense of freedom. I indulge in working from wherever I want. I go for 30 minute walks a couple times a week by the ocean. I believe water carries information and lots of ideas come to me from the ocean, if I walk barefoot in the water. I also love working on concepts in cafes on the weekends. I try not to work and just relax there and be bored. Achieving boredom is key, and feeling and relaxing through sensations in the body. For me, that is a bait for ideas to visit. I don’t force it. I’m creature of habit, I always work in the same two cafes where everyone knows my name, so I see these spaces as an extension of my studio. 

Other routines that benefit my work are daily movement, red light and sauna a couple times a week. I try to nurture this vessel the best I can in service of everything around me, my work included.

What about your working technique? Walk us through how you start and then develop a piece.
If chaos had a twin brother… It differs depending on the medium and fluctuates in general. I write down ideas in form of doodles when I’m out and about. I have a million times more ideas than I am able to execute, so I curate tightly what I am going to make. I think about the metaphors I want to use and how to represent things.

When I get in the studio, I get straight into it and start making. I usually have a rough idea and lots of individual little sketches to use for different parts of different works, a vocabulary I am building. I start building with placing a couple elements on canvas, weather it is first layer of paint or a form in tapestry. I build around that, deciding what the work needs next. I make general colour decisions in the beginning, but this often changes as I go. I like to challenge myself using colours or elements that are not my favourite and try making it work. I am learning to simplify and do less. My mediums are slow, and I also spend a fair amount of time just looking at work and making decisions. But I am very consistent, so I manage to make a lot of work every year.

What excites you the most about the current art world?
Not much excites me in the way it operates. It’s exciting that the conventional gallery system that we have now seems to be falling apart. I am curious to see how things play out and what will replace it. 

In the arts, revival of crafts and the renaissance of textiles is interesting. Some exciting things seem to be happening in sculpture. I saw a documentary about Troika London’s solo in Langen Foundation in Germany that was beautiful. Seeing some successfully self-represented artists thrive. Seeing more women, minorities and people with disabilities getting a bit more visibility and opportunities. New galleries with brave curating still opening in spite of capitalism and other obstacles.

Any recent or upcoming projects?
I just had a fairly huge solo exhibition at Praxis Artspace in Adelaide, with 43 works on display. In September I have a solo in Kolbusz Space in Perth and in November a solo in Curatorial&Co in Sydney. In December I am coming to New York to do some gallery hopping and to meet some gallerists. I would like to arrange a space for a solo there next year.

Finally, what is your favorite color?
Yves Klein blue.