SPEAKER_00 0:00

I'm Alejandra Rusi, and this is the Rusi Hive, conversations with people who treat their work and life as a creative practice. This week, Kate Berry Brown takes me through a life shaped by making, from fashion and flowers to motherhood, wood sculpture, and thousands of marks on paper. We look at abstraction through lived experience, a labor-intensive practice built around interruption, forms that hover between portrait and vessel, and the mind-bending proposition that form is emptiness, emptiness is form. This podcast is presented by Rico Moresca. Thank you for joining me, Kate Berry Brown, and welcome to the Rusi Hive Podcast. Thank you for having me. Congratulations on this remarkable exhibition. It's always so great to see an artist surrounded by their work here in the gallery. Thank you. Feels good. So today you get the first three-dimensional hive card in the form of this pillow envelope that reminded me of your work. So I'm going to take out the contents, read them if they allow themselves to be read, and uh then you can put each in whichever category seems most appropriate to you. So we have keep, discard, and question mark.

SPEAKER_01 2:35

I'm keeping a man.

SPEAKER_00 2:37

Just in case, right?

SPEAKER_01 2:38

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 2:39

Memories. Okay. Very, very interesting. So we have emptied our little cryptic philosophical pinata. And we can forget about this for now. We will circle back at the end of the interview. Okay. Um, you know, the one thing missing from your opening the other night was in fact a pinata. It was fun, right?

unknown 3:03

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 3:04

We had everything else. We had so much fun. Just have fun and exactly what happened at the after party. It's classified. So let me begin by saying that you present as an extremely reasonable, genuine, and wholesome person, which is useful because the podcast needs to restore balance after last episode's very disturbing guest. And your biography, at least on paper, reads like a little fairy tale. And before you challenge that, I would like to indulge in that statement just for a little moment. Once upon a time, a girl from Evanston, Illinois, went off to study fashion design. A few years later, she followed a trail of flowers to the Netherlands, where she spent six months studying flower design and took up residence with her bulldog in a little trailer on a dairy farm. Then, as one does, she found herself married, pregnant, and living in Las Vegas, where painting re-entered the story. Eventually, she returned to the Midwest, had two more children, and painting gradually gave way to drawing, partly because pencil and paper could be picked up and put down as life required, and partly because all those tiny, repeated marks had begun to exert their own spell. Then came the plague. Our heroine escaped to a tiny island off the coast of Massachusetts, where her father had a woodworking shop full of tools and scraps of cedar, walnut, and cherry. There, the objects began to lift themselves off the page, and eventually her path turned back toward paper, but the paper was no longer quite the place she had left. Okay, so storybook narrator retreats to the background, and I'm back to podcast host. Okay, I love that. So just between fashion and flowers, what would you say was the creative core of that early Kate?

SPEAKER_01 5:21

Definitely I was drawn to the color, the design, the pattern of fashion design. And I quickly, that fairy tale, Kate, did not fit into the world of fashion. And so the things that I loved about fashion sort of rolled into the flower design. All the things that I loved about fashion were the color and the pattern and the form and the art, just art, the artistry of it. And so when I found literally stumbled into fat flowers, I found that those are were all the things that I loved about fashion. And it was a nicer environment. Yes. It was, you know, not cutthroat. It was purely to make people happy.

SPEAKER_00 6:05

So at that point, did you think of yourself as an artist, or were you still figuring that out by trying your hand at different things?

SPEAKER_01 6:13

No, I thought of myself as an artist, and I and I wasn't painting or drawing during that point because, well, I was busy, but I was also getting my creative outlet through creating every day in my job.

SPEAKER_00 6:26

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 6:27

It was very artistic. So it was very clear to me that it was just another form, another medium.

SPEAKER_00 6:33

Yeah, I'm curious what it entails to study flower design.

SPEAKER_01 6:37

That's a normal thing in Holland and not a normal thing in the States. We literally started at the beginning. We learned all the like taping and the wiring and the technicalities behind actually building an arrangement or like large scale or bridal bouquet or boutonier. And then also design-wise, you know, it was very, very technical. Put the bigger flower here, and then if it comes out this way, you want the smaller flower out in the air. It was it was really about design, but it was very technical.

SPEAKER_00 7:08

Yes.

SPEAKER_01 7:09

And then obviously you leave school and you break all the rules or you do the way you want it to. What if I do it this way? Yeah, exactly. Or this isn't my style necessarily. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 7:19

So moving to the middle of the story, I I am fascinated by what pregnancy and motherhood do to a woman's brain. And maybe this is only tangentially connected, but how did that begin to change the way you made things? Like especially your relationship to interruption.

SPEAKER_01 7:36

It really changed it. I go back and forth between wanting to bring that into the story and then sort of letting the work be on its own. But I sort of developed this particular way of working when the kids were really small because I was interrupted so much, but I needed an outlet. And I could, like you said, pick it up, pick up the pen, put it down, pick it up, put it down. But I was still getting that release. This work is built off of a body of work that was based on this feeling of just being squished and hugged, and you just feel so loved, but almost to a point where it's like you have no space at all. And so um that really this is very rooted in that aspect and the the forms that are sort of soft, like skin, and that really is built into these pieces. And being a mom is such a huge part of who I am that they really are, they balance each other out so much.

SPEAKER_00 8:44

Yeah, I thought like maybe either interruption becomes part of the practice somehow, or as you said, the fact that you're working on something tangible and can return to it. Yes, that actually creates the continuity in a very otherwise very fragmented, kind of disorienting day. Yes, right? That's a very beautiful way to put it.

SPEAKER_01 9:04

It's very true, and it's just mine. So I could, I could set it down, I had my desk. The kids were always, always very good about not touching it. I didn't ever make a big deal, like, don't touch this, but they always kind of knew. And it was for me. It was like the place that I could come back, come back to and center myself. And it helped because then it can also be very tedious to do this work. And so that balance of hectic and quiet is a nice balance.

SPEAKER_00 9:34

Yeah. Now moving closer to the present, COVID sends you to Cuty Hunk, which sounds like an extremely easy place to romanticize, starting with a name. Uh obviously the scenery changed, the materials changed, the scale of the work changed, but what changed in you?

SPEAKER_01 9:52

Yes, you are so right about that. It is very easy to romanticize, and it is a magic place. But that was not an easy time. But I was really looking to adhere my drawings to the wood as opposed to framing them because they're so it's so expensive to frame. And then it morphed into sculpting the wood, and they became objects unto themselves. And I, because it was, I found this real peace on Cuddy Hunk, I started just admiring adhering the white paper to these sculpted forms. And it really mirrored the sense of calm that I felt when I was there, without all the running around and the activities and the cartoons, and our life simplified so much. And it was so much about being outside. And so I think it started mirroring that. And I I myself had just been doing these very dense cross-hatch drawings and couldn't quite figure out these two pieces of myself. Like I they felt very disparate, and only now are they starting to make sense together.

SPEAKER_00 11:01

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 11:02

So they're kind of converging finally in my in my mind.

SPEAKER_00 11:06

Yeah. So Rico Moresca came into your story in 2022. And since then, we have shown the wood and paper sculptures in just about every exhibition format online, solo, group. And I just love them. I want to eat them. They're like yummy to me. Probably not your intention.

SPEAKER_01 11:27

No, I hear that.

SPEAKER_00 11:28

Or not great for yeah. Maybe not a good idea. But now I'm interested in the drawing, sculpture, drawing loop that you just underlined because it has landed us here. These works really do look like they have passed through sculpture and come back changed. Does it feel that way?

SPEAKER_01 11:47

Yes. The wood pieces help me think in a more object way as opposed to completely abstract shapes, piles of shapes. Because I like the idea of when people see the wood, they want to hold them. And I've heard that many times. And I've watched people feel them. I mean, just it kind of blows me away. But I hardly have the I I don't want to say no, don't do it, because it's part of what I love about it. People's reaction is very like, wow, you know, I love that idea of the object.

SPEAKER_00 12:22

Okay, so before we get into what these works might mean, I want to get extremely literal. Take me from a blank sheet of paper to one of these finished drawings. What touches the paper first, second, third, and how much of the composition do you know before you begin?

SPEAKER_01 12:40

I have a sketchbook that's filled with shapes and I don't belabor that part very much. I have to, it's I work very intuitively.

SPEAKER_00 12:51

Are they like outlines of shapes?

SPEAKER_01 12:53

Yeah, they're just outlines.

SPEAKER_00 12:54

I see.

SPEAKER_01 12:55

And I'll translate that onto a large piece of paper or a larger piece of paper and I'll measure only just to get them centered or center-ish, and then um get the the border in there. But after that, I'll start in on the pen and ink and I make changes all along the way. Just and that's where the intuition comes in. Like I do not have I, it's almost like I work with a vision and it changes as it needs to be changed. But I do have some idea of how I want it to look. So I have I'll sketch it all out and then usually start on the pen and ink, and that's the dip, I dip the pen in, scratch a few lines on there in varying ways. I layer color, usually indigo and brown, and then black. So there's a little more depth. Um, and then I'll start in on the background.

SPEAKER_00 13:49

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 13:50

And I just I don't use any gloves, I don't use any paper under my hand. So I've spilled coffee on them before.

SPEAKER_00 13:59

I saw that. Well, that was painful.

SPEAKER_01 14:03

The notes that I got were hilarious. Yeah, that one hurt a little bit.

SPEAKER_00 14:08

So let's just explain this. You posted a photograph of a very big coffee spill on a drawing.

SPEAKER_01 14:16

Yes, yeah. Yes, and I I just knocked it. I I've knocked it over with my hand, which I've done with bottles of ink before. Not on these, though. Okay. I don't think on these. And but if I do, I also feel like it's they're not, they're living. They're they're not pre they're not so precious that they can't be touched. Or and that's why I don't worry about the borders. And I just I a long time ago, I saw in a book an artist. It wasn't anybody in a museum or anything who had this ongoing drawing that he just kept on his desk and he would just add to it, like noodles almost. And there were coffee rings on it, and it was like almost like a journal of his life.

SPEAKER_00 15:01

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 15:01

So, and I just that always stuck with me.

SPEAKER_00 15:04

Yeah, you know, I um I'm like OCD with things looking perfect, and I kept really perfect notebooks until now. I have a really messy one. It's a paper that I love. I don't know if you've heard uh stone paper. No, the ink just glides in a way that's so appealing and so pleasurable. And so I love these fountain pens that are not really fit to write on this paper because it doesn't, it's not very porous and there's a lot of ink. So some of the words get really like kind of spread out, spread out, but then you close the notebook and open it again, and it kind of, you know, there's a print here, and then it looks a little like a ghost of a word. And I was like, wow, okay, I can get into this. I love that. Like now it's like a messy-ish notebook, but um, okay, so the color field surrounding these central forms feels active, atmospheric, not decorative. For you, what is it doing?

SPEAKER_01 16:08

I think it creates a sense of movement in pieces that would otherwise be really static and brings them to life and puts them in an atmosphere. That's a nice way to put it. And it brings in my love of colored pencil. And people ask all the time, what is that? Which I one of one of my favorite things is when people appreciate the time that goes into something and they say, What is that? That's like, I did my job, I created a little bit of magic.

SPEAKER_00 16:40

I also love um the little tiny itch details, like the ticks and the stripes and the beads of paint, uh, which you discover if you look really, really closely. They feel almost like punctuation, almost like a musical notation of sorts. What changes when you add them?

SPEAKER_01 16:57

I think it satisfies a tiny bit of ornamentation. I love simplicity and I love um clean lines. Well, clean lines, but there's a little bit of ornamentation that I always go back to this little Tupperware box that my mom gave me when she moved, when they moved out of their house seven years ago of baby clothes that were my grandma's. And they're all white, but they have the most minuscule details of embroidery, white embroidery on them, in this otherwise like gauzy but very simple shape that I just think about all the time. I I love that. I love the simplicity with just a little detail. I love that.

SPEAKER_00 17:48

I love that.

SPEAKER_01 17:49

Yeah, I I I want to mimic that feeling so much. Yes, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 17:55

You feel good when you discover them. Yes. So meditative is a word that gets attached almost automatically to repetitive mark making. Inside that repetition, do meditation and compulsion actually feel different?

SPEAKER_01 18:11

They're almost two different things. The compulsion to make the work in general is always there. And if I don't, if I'm not making the work and it's been a few months, I start feeling like I'm holding my breath. But they're not there at the same time.

SPEAKER_00 18:28

Right. That makes sense. Yeah. Yeah. So there's also a contradiction in these drawings that I really love. They're built through enormous accumulation, thousands of marks, layer after layer, but the finished form feels hermetic, resolved, like almost predestined. It's like you're a maximalist and a reductionist at the same time. What's going on here, Kate? Should we be concerned? That is so such a great yes.

SPEAKER_01 19:02

Um, I think that's maybe the way I look at life. Like it's very messy. You have all these memories, you have all these ideas, and it all pieces together like a tapestry to make this form. And it's nice to be able to tidy things up and make it look, you know, um finished and done. It is nice to have a summary of something, of a piece of your life.

SPEAKER_00 19:34

Yeah. Do you want the labor to disappear into the form? No.

SPEAKER_01 19:38

No. One time I had a person, I I came up behind somebody, this was years ago, and I came up behind someone who was saying, Well, this person has no life. And it was also my then my three kids who were much younger came up, bumped me, spilled their popcorn all over, and I just thought, this is so perfect. It was actually ended up being one of my favorite compliments I've ever had because I thought they see the work, they see what went into it. Yes. And I knew it was not true. I mean, my life was so full at the time. That was the whole point of the work. Right. So um, I want people to see that and I want people to be sort of amazed by it.

SPEAKER_00 20:23

Yeah. I had a lot of people ask me um at the opening, like, are these prints? Yeah. People who don't know us, of course, came off the street, don't know anything. And I'm like, no. Yes. I think they give that. And then they're like, wow, that's because it is remarkable. Just looking at one of these, I'm like, how?

SPEAKER_01 20:43

Yeah. Oh, that's that's a compliment. Yeah. I love that.

SPEAKER_00 20:46

Yeah. So you wrote to me that your new favorite line is art is created somewhere before language, which seems like an important thing to establish before I continue to put an unreasonable amount of language around your work. So we've covered how these forms are made. Now let's look at them from another angle. You have described them as portraits of sorts. Uh, and that in itself is so wonderfully complicated. What makes one of these a portrait to you? Do you feel like their personalities are already there in the form, or do they acquire character once we look at them?

SPEAKER_01 21:26

I think I'm finding their character as I make them, but I do feel like they each have their own personality.

SPEAKER_00 21:33

At the same time, you've described them as vessels, as um, things that might contain memories, thoughts, joy, grief. Do you imagine the outside being shaped by what has accumulated inside?

SPEAKER_01 21:49

Yes, I do. Each line sort of mimics experiences or or things that we go through. It's like every single One is important to create the form that we are. Yeah. And that includes even the boring moments and the days that you feel are well, that was kind of a useless day. I didn't really get much done. All of that forms, creates this form.

SPEAKER_00 22:16

So the idea feels intuitive, right? That we move through life accumulating things. And those things in turn shape us. But meditation has made me a little less certain about where the boundary of a person actually is. When you think of a person as a vessel, what exactly is the vessel? Is it the body? Is it the mind? Is it the self?

SPEAKER_01 22:41

I'm not sure I know the answer in a general way, but I think of these very much as body, like grounded in flesh and shapes that are very tangible and real.

SPEAKER_00 22:57

That makes sense. So you don't have to answer these right now, but I want to leave a slightly provocative string of questions hanging for you and for anyone watching or listening. So if the body is the vessel, is the skin the boundary? If the mind is the vessel, where does the mind begin and end? If the self is a vessel, is the self actually a continuous thing? If it's all three, where exactly is the person? Okay, dropping back into the interview. I'll just leave those there.

unknown 23:37

Okay.

SPEAKER_00 23:38

You mentioned something that feels almost suspiciously well suited for where I'm going next. That it's satisfying to create a solid form, something tangible out of vast emptiness. When you say vast emptiness, what does that emptiness mean to you?

SPEAKER_01 23:56

I think we have this life that we can kind of, if we're lucky, create how we want it. All of our lives or pieces of our lives are a blank slate that we can choose to fill how we want.

SPEAKER_00 24:11

So I I asked because that word is doing something quite different in a line I came across and I loved, and then I later learned it comes from the Hard Sutra. Um is emptiness, emptiness is form. And the first half clicked instantly for me. The fact that forms have a presence, they exist, but they don't have some fixed essence, right? That's something we assign to them. Then the second part of the statement took me embarrassingly long to grasp because I was thinking of emptiness as literal empty space. And what it actually means is that the very unfixedness of the form is emptiness appearing as form.

SPEAKER_01 24:58

The whole thing is like a mind puzzle.

SPEAKER_00 25:00

Exactly. It kind of means the same thing from two different angles.

SPEAKER_01 25:04

Yes. Yeah. Yes. But and it's almost like as humans, it's a tough one for humans to grasp because we work in such a tangible way that, and this is where I start feeling like almost on a spiritual level, I could understand that in a way that if I sit down and think about that quote, my mind becomes a little tangled. Yes. But I feel like emptiness is formed. This is the way I would think about that. I kept thinking about these walls that I have at home that I left empty for a really long time. And I just thought, well, there's always the possibility then. If there's emptiness, there's so much possibility. And maybe in that possibility, it would create the form.

SPEAKER_00 25:57

Yes.

SPEAKER_01 25:57

Brings back to why I love simplicity so much.

SPEAKER_00 26:00

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 26:00

Or like keeping my materials very straightforward.

SPEAKER_00 26:05

With the title of this exhibition, holding form, we were thinking of two meanings: a form that holds, something with a literal, metaphorical, symbolic capacity, but also holding form as something we actively do. The effort to maintain a shape, an identity, a sense of separateness. What side of the title feels um more alive to you?

SPEAKER_01 26:30

I think the first one.

SPEAKER_00 26:31

A form that holds. A form that holds. Yeah. Yeah. That makes sense to me now. Yeah. Based on everything you've said, of course. Oh, yeah. Interesting. All right. So to wrap things up, I would like to take the same Kate, same temperament, same basic creative instincts, and insert her into three different speculative lives.

unknown 26:55

Okay.

SPEAKER_00 26:56

So first, we have Kate, born in 1978, but she never had children. What changes in the work?

SPEAKER_01 27:04

I think I would be an artist no matter what. I think I was there's just a compulsion there. Yeah. But I really have no idea. However, I will say I look back at projects that I did in college where the possibility of doing something a lot in a in a faster and sort of easier way came up. And I chose to do it a really slow way. For instance, we did had a paper weaving and um project, and I chose tiny strips of paper as opposed to like some really wide pieces of paper that would have made the paper weaving go a lot faster. Every single strip of mine was tiny, and that was prior to having kids.

SPEAKER_00 27:47

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 27:48

So I think there has always been um an urge to do tedious things.

SPEAKER_00 27:55

Now, Kate born in 1578, when the kind of artistic life available to you now would be unthinkable. What do you think she would do with her hands?

SPEAKER_01 28:06

I guess I would be needlepointing, embroidering.

SPEAKER_00 28:10

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 28:10

For sure.

SPEAKER_00 28:11

I could see that. Yeah. Now let's imagine Kate born in the year 2178, when making thousands of marks by hand has become almost eccentric and probably devotional. You know, does she still do it?

unknown 28:28

Yes.

SPEAKER_00 28:29

Yes.

SPEAKER_01 28:31

I think so.

SPEAKER_00 28:32

So across all these cates, including the one sitting here, what is the thing that survives?

SPEAKER_01 28:38

Just the need to make and use my hands and have color and pattern and texture and in some form be creating.

SPEAKER_00 28:47

Yeah. Okay, so we started with a hive card that eventually stopped holding form. Um, a piece of paper temporarily persuaded into having an inside. The contents are still here on the table in this little arrangement. And I'm curious, after our conversation, does the arrangement still feel true to you?

SPEAKER_01 29:10

Yes, I think so.

SPEAKER_00 29:12

Well, thank you again for being here today. It was my pleasure. Thank you, Allie. This is so nice. If this conversation resonated with you, follow the show wherever you listen and find me on YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, and Substack at RusiHive. If someone came to mind for the hive, send guest suggestions to guests at rusihive.com. And if you just want to say hi, it's hello at rusihive.com. Original music and sonic identity for the Rusi Hive by Ant Food. Until next time, let your life be a creative act.