Winnie Sidharta

Winnie Sidharta is a painter based in Queens, New York. Born and raised in East Java, Indonesia. She studied painting in Indonesia and in Beijing, China, where she lived and worked as an artist before moving to the United States to pursue a graduate degree in Painting and Drawing. She received her MFA from The Ohio State University and later taught in the Painting and Drawing Department before settling in New York City. Winnie’s formative years were set against a complex cultural background— a multi-ethnic and multi-lingual society imbued with religious pluralism— that shared awareness of the long history of colonialism and the many revolts against it. She experienced, directly and indirectly, the fragile socio-political systems that manifested in the nation’s post-colonial search for identity. As a recent U.S. citizen, Winnie examines the experience of immigration and the kind of outsider complex it produces. This force is ever-present in her work as she continues to investigate her personal approach to the subject of identity within the medium of painting.

Statement
My work can be described as figurative landscape, a metaphor to think about various forms of migration and the complexity of memory, representation of the(female) body, and a shifting sense of place. The ways in which I approach image are informed by the histories of papier collé, film montage, and the highly vigorous and refined craft traditions within Javanese vernacular style, most of which are executed by women. In many ways, the process of cutting and editing painted fragments is similar to dissecting a language. My mother tongue of Bahasa is an agglomeration of multiple languages derived from various cultures that came, dominated, and influenced the semantics of expression, which has, in turn, informed the ways in which I think, construct, and reassemble images. Through this method of working, I explore the potentiality of edges and intervals as in-between states. I try to envision a boundary of ‘otherness’ that yields the possibility of new reading, one that engages the duality and complexity of being both in the inside and outside of land and body. 

Interview with Winnie Sidharta

Questions by Emily Burns

Can you tell us a bit about what led you to pursue a path as an artist? 
I literally can’t think of any other path than being a painter. Growing up, I loved to draw and make up stories that were both fictional and real to what I was experiencing in the moment. As a child, I lived a very insular life in a close-knit Chinese family in east Java. Art was a lifeline for me- it was all about being alone with myself, processing and questioning the things around me. Art provided a language that was freeing to me. I felt that I could be anything or anyone. We had no art museums in our city and I was not exposed to artworks until I was in my twenties. The only person I knew that worked as an artist was a distant uncle, who, until now still lives and works in Bali. He advised me to pursue a career outside of fine art, fearing that, as a female artist I would experience poverty and discrimination. I decided to take my chances and moved to Beijing to study painting. In the beginning my decision was very internal, but eventually it blossomed into a conviction that I needed to pursue this path for the rest of my life.

Can you take us through the process of making a painting? Do you look at any references when working?
I make a lot of drawings, small paintings, and collages that I use as studies for the larger pieces. Sometimes they are references and sometimes they are incorporated directly into the work.  These processes serve as an entrance point through which I develop units of images to convey light, space and various representations of bodies. I cut and sift through dozens of watercolors, drawings, and prints and reassemble them to produce a cohesive “whole.”  The resulting composites often evoke a feeling of landscapes where the interplay of color and form is constantly shifting. In the studio, I often sit on the floor surrounded by the fragments of “destroyed’ paintings.  At times it can resemble a hamster’s nest, full of shredded paper and scraps of wood, but this is how a collage happens for me. I sit and patiently assemble, mount, and paint each piece, sometimes reversing the order. It’s important to me that I can always learn something new when making the work. My mounting processes have become increasingly more elaborate as I try to develop unique ways to incorporate shaped panels and handmade bas relief papers into the paintings. This somewhat architectural process of stacking various forms in shallow relief always reminds me of the 9th century Temple of Borobudur.  The volcanic stones that comprise this structure are carved with hundreds of images that tell an ancient story as you ascend each level.  It is a place that was close and dear to me growing up and one of my earliest exposures to art of any kind. It would be fair to say that the images and colors of that place remain in my mind’s eye as I work through my own paintings and collages today.

How long have you been making work in the way that you are making now? How has it changed and what has stayed constant since grad school?
In the last six years, my work has moved gradually from image-based painting to collage-based processes. Before this, my work relied heavily on photographic prints, film stills and painting from life. The photographic path felt constricting as the images were so often propped up by forceful power structures.  It lead me to larger discussions about desire and the solicitation of gaze, which proved useful in its own way. I was exploring the patterns of representation in various glossy women’s magazines and began painting extra life size faces in watercolor. I was interested in seeing these faces as obscure landscapes; regions with various subtle depths on a somewhat frontal ground. I began seeing them as masked figures and thinking of them in relation to my research on iconography and gender studies, which was very eye-opening to me. In my last year of grad school, with figuration merging into spatial abstraction, I decided it was important for me to engage landscape in a deeper and more personal way.  I started to make collages as a way to see the image differently and to find freedom with my hands. I enlarged and printed my collages, painting and cutting them simultaneously. Parallel to this, I was becoming increasingly fascinated with the sequential editing techniques of montage films and tableau vivant. Though I often combined collage and painting, collage felt more aligned with processes of editing. I also became keenly aware of the pace discrepancies between collage and painting.  My thoughts moved with more ease when I was cutting and pasting. The sensation was like a stream of consciousness monologue. This continuous flow is something I still strive to achieve in my painting process today.

Instead of building my paintings in layers, I started to draw and paint as quickly and directly as possible. I began experimenting with mounting systems and staggering the collages schematically. As a way to relinquish the feeling of finality in my work, I cut up many of my paintings and reconstructed them numerous times to find the right relationships and to ground their presence. I wanted to challenge my process in a complete and absolute way. Rather than painting from direct perception, I became interested in the ethereal aspect of painting from memories- of places, light, and fleeting moments. The impossibility of these ideas led me to more abstracted and disjointed forms. My current practice feels more open and liberating as a result. This process has allowed me to learn more about my hands and the potentiality of materials in my work.

In your recent solo show at Ortega y Gasset Projects in Brooklyn, you combined your work with richly decorated and colorful wall paintings and prints that resembled wallpaper. The effect was a wonderful combination of patterns, textures, colors, media, and more that came together in a rich experience. Can you tell us more about creating that show? What was the overall effect you were looking to create for the viewer?
‘The skirt’ at OYG project is an ‘L’ shaped hallway that leads to the main gallery space. It is a transition space for people from the outside world to slowly weave in and ease themselves into the interior of a gallery. I did not change the structure of the space but utilized the walls as an extension to give my works more context. I wanted visitors to feel enveloped as soon as they entered the hallway and to slow down and observe the works without being overwhelmed by them. I hung a piece on each wall and then began expanding each one’s relationship to the space through framing or the expansion of pattern onto the surrounding environment.

When I was planning the show I did a lot of drawings and cut outs that eventually turned into linocut materials and stencils. These elements informed the way I planned for the wall paintings and the motifs that you saw in The Skirt. These recurring shapes have persisted throughout my work over the years- silhouettes of heads, bodies, plants, open gates, negative spaces, stairs, hallways and the morphing between these forms. I have often thought of them in connection to Matisse’s ‘essential characters,’ when he refers to the signe in his work, Jazz (1947).

The first wall on the left as you walk down the stairs, was the only one on which I did not hang a work. Instead, I decided to create an ornamental wall piece inspired by Javanese batik compositions and colors. I created a 10 x 8 ft drawing and cut out the forms to produce a stencil through which a warm spiced-colored pigment was stippled, filling in the negative shapes. In this wall piece, I explored notions of duality through the use of symmetry and a combination of both rigid and arabesque shapes, engaging positive and negative forms defined by hard and soft edges. On another wall just around the corner, where Entrance#1 was installed, I created luminous, bright yellow plant patterns to evoke feelings of exterior light and the incising aftereffect of looking directly into the sun.  This magnified contrast allowed your eyes to rest when switching the gaze from the blazing wall to the colorful painting suspended in front of it.

About that show, it was written that your work references “the refined textile traditions within the Javanese vernacular style —most of which are executed by women…” Can you tell us more about this style and its importance in your work?
My connection with craft and women’s labor in East Java is important in both the personal and formal aspects of my work. The most salient vernacular style in Java is informed by mythology and epic tales of Hindu and Buddhist symbology. This is most seen and saturated in the form textiles, architectural and decorative carvings, and ornate visual modes of storytelling like shadow puppets.  Within the craft communities of Javanese society over the centuries, women had the role of bearing and nurturing the arts in order to regenerate these values outside of themselves (to be a role model for the nation; to educate). Still, there are women working the fields and preserving the traditions to this day.  The vast majority of batik makers and weavers are still women.  For most of them this is their only means to live and survive. On a personal level, observing the role of women in my culture made me think deeply about my position as a maker and my identity as an artist and immigrant in this country. As an artist, I identify with the labor of the craft workers; though I realize the stakes are different. I don’t see my art practice as a job to survive or to feed a family. I appreciate the preciousness of my time to experiment in the studio, to scribble away, cut up collages, and spend days alone making work- this is a tremendous privilege. I owe so much to people back home and the work somehow always circles back to a sense of connection with the terrain of narratives, modes of thinking, and the traces of details from that environment.

Another element that has informed my work, though slightly more formal in nature, is how the Javanese design textiles using color and form to represent a given region’s temperature, soil, sunlight, oceans, vegetation, and so on. I realize just how much I relate to this kind of decision making, both consciously and subconsciously each time I compose the colors and forms of my own work.

Your recent paintings use a unique combination of media including watercolor and shellac ink on handmade paper mounted on burlap, like in the painting Flight. Can you tell us more about the materials you use in your work and what draws you to these combinations?
What drives me to new materials often comes from a desire to solve problems that I perceive as inherent to my process. Comfort is one example of an inherent problem. It leads to a sense of order that can curtail discovery. Working with new materials keeps my practice elastic and open. I make a lot of my own paints, absorbent grounds, inks, and handmade papers. Burlap and jute have been essential as well. They have an open grid structure that makes them the perfect substrate for paper pulp. The pulp and the fibers of burlap become enmeshed and solidify into a sturdy and flexible ground that can absorb many layers of paints and glues. Cultivating these grounds has allowed me to re-think my pace and sense of time within the work. Shellac Ink is another important material because it is more permanent and less forgiving than watercolor. It forces me to draw with a more decisive hand. This awareness of single chance mark making produces a mindset that allows me to focus on the rhythms of the lines, forms, and colors in the work.

The collage works seem to evoke the feeling of frames, and worlds within worlds—as if they are referencing numerous landscape scenes that have been layered to create an otherworldly time-travel effect. Do you use references to build these paintings?
I don’t use specific references, most of the spaces evolve out of intuition. I often find that using references to produce a collage is very constricting. One of the most liberating things about my collage process is that it is done fast and often in one sitting - though not every time. I have to paint a lot and accumulate many cutouts in order to freely assemble a potentially compelling collage. There should be enough combinations, permutations, and options for how the collage can work as a stand alone piece. It almost feels endless sometime and one has to figure out how to stop. The elements need to ‘communicate’ to each other in order for it to work as a resolved piece. The collage starts to work when it does something visually compelling for me in a particular moment. This means that when a collage can’t be resolved, I can’t force it into realization- this may take weeks or months and I have to either disassemble, reassemble, or cut them out and repaint them again. Working this way has been a great learning experience because it has challenged my own fear and heartbreak of cutting up my own paintings over the years. The best studio day for me is when my intuition takes over and I can see everything as holding potential, only then am I able to ‘play’ with collage in an exciting way.

I’m very interested in how fragmentation crystalizes a sense of time, producing a Mise en abyme type of experience. I have always been fascinated by the metaphysical aspect of ‘mirroring’ or repeating things, such as patterns, shapes or hidden camouflage. For me, it is parallel to how memory functions in my work. It can play out in a somewhat Proustian way; bringing back the past by re-igniting the senses, which in my case is often about temperatures, colors, lines, shapes and depth.

You have written that you use fragments in your work to create meaning. Can you tell us more about how combining elements tells what seems like a very personal story inspired by your past and lived experience?
For me, working with fragments is similar to formulating a language, albeit a visual one. I speak about my mother tongue, ‘bahasa’ in my artist statement. Though it is rooted in Sanskrit, the  language itself is drawn from various cultures that came into contact with the islands over the centuries, whether through systems of oppression like colonialism or years of trade and immigration. It is an agglomeration of hundreds of indigenous languages from the surrounding islands and hundreds of years of cultural entanglement. The evolution of the language itself is reflected in the structuring of sentences and expressions. Having some fluency in complex languages like English and Mandarin, I sometimes still feel that speaking Bahasa is more like connecting puzzle pieces. Bahasa ‘embodies’ all the jumbled fragmentary elements and somehow makes them harmonious. Subconsciously, I believe my decision making in the studio is consistent with and informed by this mode of thinking. I observe the fragments individually and then view them together simultaneously in order to make sense of their presence in the larger context. Color, temperatures, representations of bodies, and particular times and spaces are among the most intimate elements I have extracted from my lived experience. It is not a translation by any means because to discover how a collage works, I cannot know at the onset where it will take me. It’s like poetry, I have to play with the fragments and allow them to unfold in time.  If the the parts feel relevant and meaningful there is a sense of everything working together in a new and exciting way.

The paintings feel flat but incredibly dimensional, which makes the experience strangely difficult to fully grasp when looking at them in photographs. Since so much work is viewed via photos these days, this experience is even more interesting. Is this mystifying effect something you are going for?
When working, I do not consider or make it a goal to imagine how the work will appear as a photograph. I’m not opposed to the use of photography and have even found that seeing a different translation of the work can be quite revealing. I sometimes take pictures of in-progress work to record steps, mistakes, and discoveries that I’ve made in the process. These pictures inform me of how colors and the relationship between scale and edges work as a whole. In the studio, I try to consider every aspect and dimension of the work from every angle. Because all of my fragments are laid on the floor, I work mostly looking down and therefore seeing the work from an overhead view. Once mounted, however, I typically hang the works on the wall, rotating them to figure out which orientation works best. I’m often surprised at how my work translates in photographs. It flattens the layers and the gaps between the fragments. Though the current digital age has conditioned so many of us to see with a kind of photographic lens, I still believe that materials and the dimensionality of the works matter and that their effect on and within the physical space is a necessary element of the experience. This makes me think a lot about the relationships between the body, our understanding of image, and the future of art.

Can you tell us about your studio? What do you need to be productive there?
In the last six years, I have been working in the living room of a one-bedroom apartment. This allows me to access my working space easily. It is essential for me to have an open floor, ample wall space, shelving, and a long desk. I mostly work on the floor, especially when I have to reassemble, paint, and mount large fragments. This condition provides a unique challenge when I need to work on multiple pieces at the same time as my floor is filled with cut outs, wooden panels, and stretched papers waiting to dry. I have been learning slowly to develop a habit that allows me to work in a fragmented but continuous way. One thing that I utilize regularly are my huge stacks of magazines: women’s lifestyle magazines, architectural digest, art in america, etc. My husband’s family often collects their magazines and tucks them aside for me. These are perfect weights for mounting works on panel or paper, something I discovered in my early days of collaging. There are two windows in my studio, one of which provides a decent view of the sky and trees outside. This makes me feel connected to what little nature we have access to in the city.

Can you tell us about how to navigate the need to either stay focused and leverage distraction as an asset while working?
Distraction for me mostly comes from social media. It’s a double edged sword in the sense that these platforms allow me to be informed of the greater arts culture, while at the same time can be visually excessive.  We have built up a tolerance to the fact that everything is filtered, manipulated, and designed for the purposes of soliciting desire or providing instant gratification. It’s no surprise that an excess of social media can truly distort the way I view time especially when the work is at an impasse. I try to establish guidelines for myself, where I shut down all social media access and try to feel completely alone in the studio or during my walks outside on studio breaks. I’m constantly learning that my process and the work has its own timing and in order to maintain this, I need a private space not a shared one. I generally feel happier and more productive when I am able to immerse myself in the practice. Making things from scratch keeps me engaged tactually and music and audiobooks make for good company.

Who are some of the artists you look at most often?
I look at artists who create deep and personal connections between their life and work. To me, they have invented new ways of seeing that are real and intimate. I hugely admire Van Gogh for this reason- he is timeless for me. I also love Louise Bourgeois, Agnes Martin and James Castle. Henri Matisse works because he is one of those artists who can masterfully use decorative elements and patterns as a way to think about the order of things beyond their physical boundaries.

I’m also married to one of my favorite contemporary artists, Michael Ambron. He is a material expert at Kremer Pigments and is constantly finding new ways of expanding his material practice in painting.  We share our discoveries with one another and find a lot of overlapping interests in our practices, despite the differences in our approaches. It is a wonderful symbiosis for which we are both grateful.

Whats up next for you?
I’m very excited to be a part of Maake Magazine’s Spring Project along with many artists that I admire. I will likely be showing new works that incorporate handmade bas-relief paper collage for this project. Another exciting development in the studio is that I am developing my own plant based modeling paste to create dimensional paper contours and shapes. I’ve also been mulling new colors and tweaking my methods for incorporating absorbent grounds in the work. So stay tuned:)

We are excited for the Maake Projects show too! Thanks so much for taking the time to talk with us!

To find out more about Winnie and her work, check out her website.