Travis Morehead

ARTIST STATEMENT

A poet once told me that form is a pair of gloves to handle material otherwise too hot. I keep returning to this, because it feels like an apt image to describe the process of softening our hardened places, both inside and out. Craft is a form of attentiveness that works the edge of concept. It reveals ideology and its inscription as innately unfixed and permeable. In this spirit, my work tends to the corresponding shapes of things written through/in relationship — efforts to better register and erode the artifice of dominion through processes of time, attention and intimacy.

For a while now I’ve been whittling down found wooden objects originally made to bear weight. Reduced to their points of connection, they become unable to do anything other than hold themselves together. I see this gesture is something both liberatory and regressive — an attempt to articulate the emotional/cognitive dissonance of modernity and its logic of alienation. Prosthetics turned bellwethers on the threshold of collapse; these structures become the physical contours drawn between desires and their material support.

Interview with Travis Morehead

Can you tell us a bit about your background and how you became interested in becoming an artist? Who or what were some of your most important early influences?

Like a lot of sensitive types, from an early age making was a sanctuary for the more innate and intuitive parts of self to find shape in an environment otherwise dominated by normative expectations. To my parents’ credit, I was given a lot of unsupervised and unstructured autonomy, which provided a container for the beginnings of an artistic practice. This is where I learned the value of cultivating and externalizing other possibilities for being—expressions and ways of relating that I didn’t see reflected in the world around. I think this was a sort of genesis for an open-ended ethic of care that I’ve carried with me since. Artist, as a label or identity, was something that I arrived at much later.

Any stories you can share about early memories of how an aspect of the arts impacted you?

My mother worked as both choir director and janitor at a church down the street from where we lived, and in lieu of child care she would often take me with her to work. While she rehearsed or cleaned, I would run up and down the aisles of the chapel, noticing how each footfall traveled through the quiet like a ripple on still water. There was something about being in a place of worship in the off-hours that helped me understand the potency of space. How a point of focus invokes its periphery, whether consciously or not. The way that notes in a song gain significance from the space around them; their relationship to each other and to what’s in-between.

Where are you currently based and what initially brought you there? Are there any aspects of this specific location or community that have inspired your work?

I moved to Chicago in late summer 2020 to attend graduate school at Northwestern University, and I wrapped up my studies there last spring. Having moved to a new place in a pandemic, I still feel like I’m getting to know the city, but I’ve found many wonderful friends and mentors through school, all of whom I admire for their generosity of spirit. More generally, all of my work finds its form from within the immediacy of place. An example of this (since moving to Chicago) is a participatory project I’ve been working on with a family of beavers that live in a human-made lagoon a short walk from my studio.

Can you describe your studio space? What are some of the most crucial aspects of a studio that make it functional? Do any of these specific aspects directly affect your work?

I try to make my studio feel warm and inviting, a place that I actually want to spend time in. It’s pretty small, so I try to stay tidy with everything in its place. If it’s not visible then I’ll forget it’s there, so keeping tools and materials organized and within my field of vision helps me to stay within their sphere of influence. I usually work on multiple projects at once so that I can pivot between things when something needs time or distance, which also allows for ideas to bleed into each other in unexpected ways.

What is a typical day like? If you don't have a typical day, what is an ideal day?

A typical day has a lot of variability, sometimes by design and sometimes by necessity, but ideally involves time to read and/or write, time to walk, and lots of time for working with my hands. Everything I do is incredibly slow, so it’s a loose feeling of consistency, day after day, that garners a sense of accomplishment.

What gets you in a creative groove or flow? Are snacks involved?

Staying out of my own way. Finding the rhythm of the task at hand and falling into it, which usually involves a sense of reciprocity between listening and action. Crackers, cheese and olives are my current go-to studio snacks, and I share them with the ants that live in the cracks in the floor.

Is there anything that interrupts and stagnates your creative energy?

Mary Oliver said it well: “On any morning or afternoon, serious interruptions to work, therefore, are never the inopportune, cheerful, even loving interruptions which come to us from another. Serious interruptions come from the watchful eye we cast upon ourselves.”

How do you select materials? How long have you worked with this particular media or method?

I most often work with materials that are either found or gifted. This makes for processes that feel more akin to dialogue than an imposition of will, since their qualities and histories are already legible in physical form long before they make their way to me, and I don’t know how not to contend with those realities. It’s a disposition I’ve always had.

Can you walk us through your overall process? How long has this approach been a part of your practice?

With this particular motif of whittled objects, the logic of the process is pretty straightforward—reducing structures of support to their points of connection. Most of the work is done with a small knife, slowly paring down the wood while trying to retain the overall integrity of how the object holds together. The destination is always ambiguous though, because I’m trying to stop just before the threshold of collapse. That point can’t be known until it's crossed, so it feels like a Sisyphean task that gets perpetually slower as the work becomes more delicate. I’ve been working in this way for a couple years now, and haven’t tired of it yet.

Can you talk about some of the ongoing interests, imagery, and concepts that have informed your process and body of work over time? How do you anticipate your work progressing in the future?

A prevailing through line of my work has been tending to the physical contours of relationships, particularly as they become inscribed through time. As a kind of conceptual framework, this helps me to recognize the reciprocal mutability inherent to all things that share space together, on every scale. It’s a lens that I find endlessly fascinating and applicable. Lately I feel like I’ve been looking for the gardens that have no god, and find solace in the ever-latent potential of a commons that defies individualized authorship or dominion.

Do you pursue any collaborations, projects, or careers in addition to your studio practice? If so, can you tell us more about those projects, and are there connections between your studio practice and these endeavors?

I’ve worked as a caregiver in many different capacities: as a nanny, daycare teacher, autism therapist, end-of-life care, etc. These roles and their relationships have taught me that one of the greatest gifts I can give someone else is my attention. Every individual carries their own innate and particular intelligence—the ever-cumulative wisdom of one’s personal history and context. I’ve come to understand notions of difference as an extension of ecological thinking, and as such, difference constitutes a space to better register and respond to the needs and desires of others. I’ve learned that curiosity is a practice of possibility, and that everyone (and everything) provides an opportunity to learn from.

Have you had any epiphanies recently that have changed the course of your work or caused you to shift directions?

I try to hold epiphanies with an open hand, not as a rejection of ideation, but to acknowledge their inevitable change over time. Maybe that’s just part of getting older—understanding personal insights more as a field of relationships, rather than emphasizing individual points over one another in some sort of hierarchy or progression of knowledge. Maybe that’s an epiphany in its own right, or maybe I’m just a generalist.

As a result of the pandemic, many artists have experienced limited access to their studios or loss of exhibitions, income, or other opportunities. Has your way of working (or not working) shifted significantly during this time? Are there unexpected insights or particular challenges you’ve experienced?

Most of my time during the pandemic has been spent in school. Knowing that the experience was going to be compromised to some degree from the outset, I tried to keep my expectations low, but it ended up being an incredibly supportive environment in which to weather the storm these past few years. Even when classes were held online, I still had access to my studio on campus, and if anything, really leaned into time spent in-studio, just to stay grounded. Peers and faculty really helped with that too. I have so much gratitude for the people around me, for mutual care, accountability and support.

Can you share some of your recent influences? Are there specific works—from visual art, literature, film, or music—that are important to you?

I read a lot of poetry and work from the social sciences, and that’s what I would point to first—Anne Carson, CA Conrad, Arthur Sze, Barry Lopez, David Graeber, Bruno Latour, Anna Tsing, Andreas Malm and Kyle Whyte are some of the authors I return to regularly. One of my favorite books of all time is “The Book of Qualities” by J. Ruth Gendler, which I use as a divinatory tool more than a book to read from front to back. It imagines emotional qualities like longing, doubt, boredom or joy, as characters personified through descriptions of their respective habits, histories and interior lives.

Who are some contemporary artists you’re excited about? What are the best exhibitions you’ve seen in recent memory and why do they stand out?

Right now I have a big art crush on Kate Newby, whose work feels so earnest and utterly itself that I’m wary of even trying to talk about it. I just want everyone to experience it for themselves. A really good exhibition that I saw recently was Maw at Apparatus Projects, with work by Elena Ailes and Antonio López. It was beautifully curated, and felt like a Sebald book turned inside out.

Do you have any tips or advice that someone has shared with you that you have found particularly helpful?

Years ago at Ox-Bow I had a studio visit with Deb Sokolow. At the time I was carving little wooden spoons to hold dead bees and installing the handles directly into the wall. The only thing I recall from that visit was Deb asking, “What if there was just one?” I doubt she even remembers the visit, but the question made an impact because it helped me to reconsider the impulse for accumulation, and to think about ways of saying more with less.

What are you working on in the studio right now? What’s coming up next for you?

I’m working on a lot of different things in tandem right now. One thing that I feel excited about at the moment is a patch of grass that I cut out of a putting green from a golf course nearby. It’s about the same size and shape as the actual golf hole, and it’s in a pot on my windowsill now, growing in the way that it is never allowed to do on a golf course. Next up is a residency in Monson, Maine, and participation in the Hyde Park Art Center’s Ground Floor Biennial.

To find out more about Travis Morehead check out his Instagram and website.