interviewed by Bridget Conway | Visual Processes | Spring 2019
Bridget Conway for Wilder Voice: Give us a brief introduction to your art. What themes and ideas do you work with? What materials?
Eva Kocher: Since starting at Oberlin, I’ve really been driven by my identity. I have been making work that relates to my Blackness and my struggle to find a place as a biracial person who comes from a displaced Black heritage. But my personal story is what I usually tend to draw my inspiration from. Dealing with these different struggles, I’ve had to find my own voice in art history and I think a lot of when I first started making work I was doing all the photography and making art that spoke to that very explicitly.
In my junior year, I decided that I wanted to take a step back from creating images that felt a little bit too obvious or heavy-handed. I wanted to go back to working with my hands and try to evoke the same sort of visceral reactions that I was trying to do in my photography through physical objects. Finding this abstractness in this relationship to Blackness. When I was first beginning to make work I related it to my history, my Blackness and my identity as a woman of color, specifically a biracial woman, and existing in this world, but also in Oberlin College––I felt like I really needed to prove myself as an artist.
There’s just so much pressure to create work that talks about my identity, so I wanted to step away from that and create work that just spoke to me. I trust that it all has to do with who I am and the experiences that I have, but it isn’t trying to prove anything to anyone else. It’s more about an experience of catharsis for myself, a rebuilding and recontextualization of my history and where I exist in history. I began making more sculptures and, in my junior year, I started working a lot with hair, as you can see here. I am going back to that this year which I’m really excited about. Hair for me has always been this very charged thing.
My mom is African-American, my dad is white, blonde. I always was told that I grew up with “good hair,” that’s just a term that’s used a lot in the Black community. Being biracial, I had looser curls and I was told to love my natural hair. There are all of these ideas of class and gender and femininity wrapped up in hair. My mom has a lot of struggles, a lot of internal conflict. She grew up in an upper-middle-class Black family, so there are all of these things that she hung on to. She was trying to live vicariously through me, her light-skinned biracial daughter. Me and my mom are super close and so I always hung onto every word that she said and I really wanted to always be the best for her. Once I came to college I connected to the Black community here and found myself in that community in a different way––separate from my own family. I was thinking about ways in which I could exert my own autonomy by changing my hairstyles: getting boxed braids and getting extensions with synthetic hair and using that as a way to connect myself to this culture that I was always told I couldn’t be a part of.
My work is very process-based and a lot of the work that I make comes out of a very long contemplative process. Creating work and going through the ritual is doing these certain things which will then ultimately lead to the final production. So, I started off doing a lot of braiding with various materials––I was using a rope, I was using synthetic areas, using real hair and making these long braids. I was doing that because the ritual of braiding felt very important. It felt very connected to this history of braiding in the Black community, which is something I wasn’t really exposed to in the same way that a lot of other Black people were. But not having done that disconnected me from something. I started doing that and was creating a lot of different sculptures with hair. I created a few prints using hair and seeing how I can insert myself this thing that I wasn’t really a part of.
I also did a photography project with my mom during junior year where I had her dress up in different traditional styles, like hairstyles that are a part of Black culture. I had her wear a wig, I had her wear a durag, I had her hair natural, I put a scarf on her head and wrapped her hair, and took these portraits. They were these very raw depictions of her. That was really important for me moving forward this year. Work in the past has often been very emotionally taxing for me––constantly making work that is meaningful. I was kind of trying to step back from that, so I started doing a lot of drawing this year, going back and making things that were more abstract.
I started thinking about the other ways I’ve been empowered as a woman of color. I started thinking about sports: expressions of aggression and movement and music. I was forcing myself to trust my intuition and trust that all these things are a part of me. Creating art as a woman of color in itself is a revolutionary act, and Black abstraction is not something to stray from. In a lot of ways, it has been even more empowering to be able to make work that is inherently tied to who I am but doesn’t have to speak explicitly to my experience. Or translate that experience for the viewer and create work that feels good and is coming from a very real place.
Coming into my final thesis exhibition, I wanted to go back to making work that didn’t speak very explicitly to my experience. I’m working a lot with generations. Something that was a huge part of my family history was tied to Martha’s Vineyard. My mom’s family was one of the first Black family to own property on Martha’s Vineyard and my family’s been going there for the past seven generations. I’m the seventh generation, and so the number seven is coming up a lot in my work. A huge part of my displacement and disconnection from the outside of my family is because there’s a complicated history resulting in my family having to give up a lot, and not really being able to continue that connection to Martha’s Vineyard. A lot of family trauma has been caused by that and that has been like a really really difficult experience that I’ve grappled with for a very long time. I’m trying to go back through it and recreate my own, I don’t want to say history, but try to create a future that feels less tied to trauma and more about rebuilding in the way that I know how to. I am trying to focus less on the things that I feel detached from and I tend to dwell on the negative parts of my history. But I want to focus on my history in a way that’s meaningful for me and not for anyone else.
BC: I’m really intrigued by your charcoal drawings. Can you explain what you’re referencing and your process for them?
EK: I’m really inspired by the work of David Hammons. He’s incredible. He’s a Black installation artist, activist and performance artist. He has these pieces that are whole-body prints. In some of his earliest works, he covered certain parts of his body in oil and printed basketballs and stuff like that. That’s a body of work that is really inspiring to me, especially when I was first working with hair. So I have had these boxing gloves for a while. As a woman of color, I often feel like I’m defending myself and having to find ways to feel empowered within myself. I’m working with the ideas of protection and femininity. I am also thinking about the exertion of anger. I’m highlighting the beauty and light in anger and aggression- -not just as a woman, but specifically as a woman of color. I am thinking about that a lot. There are lots of associations with boxing and African-Americans. So I have these gloves, and they are making me think about a lot of things.
Outside of that, I was really fascinated by how they’re cracking. It reminded me a lot of human skin and self-preservation. I was wondering how I could I find a way to print this because I really wanted to use this texture. Originally, I was going to paint a page and print it. But then I realized that wasn’t going to work. I was like, maybe I could use charcoal. So I covered that original piece of paper with charcoal and tried to put my fist to it, but it didn’t show up. Obviously, it didn’t work out at all. But then I wondered how I could get the charcoal off of my gloves, so I punched another piece of paper to just try to get it off and I really was fascinated by the way the charcoal came off of the paper. When I punched it, it just felt really beautiful. It felt like a performance in a way that felt really empowering to me. So I started making these prints, and I was like, what if I was able to capture this action on a piece of paper? And what if you were able to see the vibrations and see the power that I put into this, and find some sort of like beauty in that? So, I started creating all of these prints, and every time I did it, I would do a different combination. They feel really serious, but they’re also very playful. I was like, okay, I’ll frame them to give them this reverence, but in this very playful way. Every time I did a different combination, I would write what I did. I was thinking of the titles as a way to explain the way that each one made me feel. I decided to tie it back to who I am rather than the actual icons of boxing because boxing is something I don’t really have any experience or history with. But this act was really meaningful and a huge part of my process and my thought process in this whole project that I’ve been working on like this whole body of work it just felt really essential. I felt like there is a need to sort of just like put my own personhood into the pieces and it’s kind of like what the newer titles are related to.
BC: Could you talk about the various pops of color around the studio? How does color figure in your work?
EK: In my house, there is a lot of African art. My great aunt was a figure in the Harlem Renaissance. She had a lot of pieces with a ton of color in them. That was my first inspiration and my first example of a successful Black female artist. I think just having these big pops of color have always kind of like brought me back to that. I’m thinking about the history of African art and work from West Africa. I was also inspired by the colors we considered in class with Matthew Rarey. So I started doing a lot of investigation of that. I was also part of a group called Dance Diaspora which is West African dance. It was one of the many ways that I was able to really find community here among other students of color. I was very inspired by the prints that we wore in the performances. Those colors are important to me. The color red has also always been important–it’s in the American flag, and to me it symbolizes blood and pain. It’s also in the Swiss flag. I always go back to red. I’m always attracted to red. With the black and white, I don’t really know if there is a reason. I’m really attracted to like very simplistic things, and there’s always been this like cleanliness and order associated with like just like black and white images for me.
BC: Who or what do you count as inspiration for your work?
EK: It’s hard to say, honestly. I have so many inspirations. My first and foremost inspiration is my mom. She’s a part of everything I do, every work I create. And by extension, my grandma (my Nana), who passed away when I was eleven. She continues to be a huge part of who I am. And then my dad, and my family in general. I’ve always been really really close to them and they shaped me into who I am. They are behind everything in terms of my artistic inspirations. I am also inspired by David Hammons, as I mentioned earlier. One of my hugest inspirations ever. And he continues to be. And Johnny Coleman is one of my greatest inspirations and mentors. There’s like a lot of different artists I’m inspired by that I haven’t mentioned. I kind of go in waves of who’s inspiring me at the moment.
In my house, there is a lot of African art. My great aunt was a figure in the Harlem Renaissance. She had a lot of pieces with a ton of color in them. That was my first inspiration and my first example of a successful Black female artist. I think just having these big pops of color have always kind of like brought me back to that. I’m thinking about the history of African art and work from West Africa. I was also inspired by the colors we considered in class with Matthew Rarey. So I started doing a lot of investigation of that. I was also part of a group called Dance Diaspora which is West African dance. It was one of the many ways that I was able to really find community here among other students of color. I was very inspired by the prints that we wore in the performances. Those colors are important to me. The color red has also always been important–it’s in the American flag, and to me it symbolizes blood and pain. It’s also in the Swiss flag. I always go back to red. I’m always attracted to red. With the black and white, I don’t really know if there is a reason. I’m really attracted to like very simplistic things, and there’s always been this like cleanliness and order associated with like just like black and white images for me.
BC: Who or what do you count as inspiration for your work?
EK: It’s hard to say, honestly. I have so many inspirations. My first and foremost inspiration is my mom. She’s a part of everything I do, every work I create. And by extension, my grandma (my Nana), who passed away when I was eleven. She continues to be a huge part of who I am. And then my dad, and my family in general. I’ve always been really really close to them and they shaped me into who I am. They are behind everything in terms of my artistic inspirations. I am also inspired by David Hammons, as I mentioned earlier. One of my hugest inspirations ever. And he continues to be. And Johnny Coleman is one of my greatest inspirations and mentors. There’s like a lot of different artists I’m inspired by that I haven’t mentioned. I kind of go in waves of who’s inspiring me at the moment.
Wilder Voice Magazine 