By Julia Betts
Femme Demo is a series of conversations highlighting the insights and expertise of women and LGBTQ2S+ artists. These artists share their creative experiences through discussion and then follow up with a hands-on demonstration of a process related to their work.
Sam Grabowska is a multidisciplinary artist born in San Diego, California in 1982. They currently reside and work in Denver, Colorado. Their installations, which focus mostly on sculpture, grapple with the body’s transformation and endurance in our modern society. The Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art, the Denver Art Museum, the SOO Visual Art Centre, and Rejmyre Art Lab are just a few of the venues in the United States and Sweden where Grabowska has displayed their artwork. Their work has been reviewed by publications such as Southwest Contemporary and The Denver Post. They have a BFA in film, a BA in environmental design, an MH in interdisciplinary humanities, and a PhD in architecture with a cognate in cultural anthropology. Grabowska founded Manifolding Labs, a firm that specializes in trauma-responsive spatial design research and consultation.
JB: Hi Sam, Thanks for talking with me today. How are you doing? Did you have a residency recently?
SG: Yes, I did. I had a six-week residency here in Denver with four other artists. I had a giant studio space, which was very exciting. I asked my friends or colleagues to be models in the space. There were five people who came, and they went into a position that felt protective to them. Then I would heat PVC pipe and bend it around them in three-dimensional form to trace their body position, kind of like 4D drawing. It was really fun, and I couldn’t have done it without that space. (see video demo).
JB: Your work seems to be collaborative and participatory in different ways, such as bending the pipes to match the human forms. Other examples include when you collected hair from audience members in Resztka or solicited responses for AI-generated environments in Intake. What is your process for working with participants? How did you start working with participants?
SG: That’s interesting because when I first think about my work, I always consider it as this very introverted process of me holed up in my own studio, having such an intimate relationship with materials and forms. There are a couple of things, though, that led to bringing in other people.
Going back to my childhood, I was raised by two parents who are incredibly particular people and have radically different needs and desires. I learned from a young age that there’s no such thing as a universal human experience. Even when I was studying architecture, this idea of designing for everyone, this one-size-fits-all thing always seemed completely absurd to me.
In my sculptural process, I’m always thinking about making sculptures that are somewhat interpretative or representational of bodies, even though those bodies are very abstracted. And there’s an intrinsic understanding that my personal needs and positionality, literally and figuratively in this world, are specific to me. After doing one or two sculptures where I am just going from my own needs and instincts, I inevitably have a moment of asking, “but what about other bodies?”
And also getting bored with my own habits, instincts, and ways. For example, my immediate way of getting into a body posture that feels safe to me is the fetal position. Even though it’s a defensive posture, I feel safe in it. But there’s only so much you can do with tracing a fetal position. I admit that I thought, well, if I have another model come in and I ask them to take a position they find protective, they’re also going to take a fetal position. It ended up, of course, not being the case. I think I’ve worked with about 15 different people so far with tracing body postures and never once has anyone else ever gone into the fetal position. I totally thought it was a universal human thing. I’ve even gotten people who stand upright and almost confrontational.
JB: Fight or flight.
SG: Exactly. Fight, flight, freeze, and please. Everyone goes through these different postures, and I trace their bodies with the pipe live in the space. It’s around two hours per single 10-foot pipe to trace, to heat and form each individual segment of the pipe around a person. It’s a really time-consuming process.
And then we sit for two hours, and inevitably something about being in that posture brings up people’s stories of either their childhood experiences or difficult events happening in their life currently. It becomes this thematically shared experience, which I never set out to do. I never set out for these things to be collaborative pieces. I always come from it from a place of function.
Then, there’s Resztka, which is a Polish word for little remains, little leftovers basically. Resztka is a performance in which visitors were beckoned to donate snippets of their hair, which I sewed onto my shroud. An AI-assisted generated video played back memories of my grandparents’ experiences in Poland before, during, and after WWII.
Many cultures have rituals around hair cutting, saving, weaving, or burning. To me, there’s something intimate about our hair. Of course, on an almost forensic level, it carries our DNA. I’ve had resistance from certain participants who are worried about leaving a hair that has DNA in it, which I think is a very reasonable concern. They’re wondering, “What are you going to do with my hair? Is it going to be planted [at a crime scene] somewhere?” With those people’s experiences in their lives of being policed, there is an understandable concern about bodily autonomy and control. That’s really intimate and vulnerable. I always respect that, and I never require anyone to do anything. With my next piece involving hair, I’m going to have them put their hair in a mini-incendiary device instead of donating it.
JB: Your practice involves working with people, but also institutions. How does your artwork relate to the space it inhabits?
SG: Because of my background in architecture and my own sensory hypersensitivity, I’ve always been interested in the built environment, and its failure to make me personally feel okay, especially American architecture. The built environment in the States has been at the forefront of my experience, especially made by developers who privilege economics over lived experience.
In my sculptural process, I don’t ever start with a very clear idea or concept. But I’ve always felt that architecture is an institutional failure. How does the body exist and survive in this environment? I also often think of humans as apes in self-captivity. We are self-captive in our built environment. That’s how it feels to me; it doesn’t feel like these nests or hives or the way that other animals create their shelter. It seems like it’s so controlled and hierarchical, not that other animals don’t have that per se in certain places, but it seems like it’s in our human animal hood.
Then, of course, things like walls, floors, ceilings, thresholds, doorways, and windows, those are all interesting architectural elements for me to explore. I think about how a body, a life, and a lived experience relate to those architectural elements.
In my interactive digital installation called Intake, there are different visual and audio components layered on top of another. It is centered on the domains of psychological care and psychogeography. Visitors fill out an ‘intake form’ on a tablet and this input generates a custom mixed-reality environment that projects onto a screen. Each visitor, when they input different combinations of these five elements, will have a unique output so that they can choose their own place to rest or feel safe or play in. You have five elements, but then you have different ways that they can combine, so you have far more than five choices because they multiply into many combinations. The visitors go behind the screen, casting their own shadow. A camera records this shadow play and rebroadcasts it on a monitor at the front of the gallery as an archive of all the people and their custom environments that came before.
JB: I also want to get back to the sculptures that go into these environments. You work a lot with these skin-like surfaces. I was thinking about how skin is a memory holder. It contains history, like scars. It can remind us of past traumas that happen to the body, or wrinkles and age. Skin can remind you of your whole life that’s gone by. What does skin mean to you?
SG: First of all, I think both hair and skin tend to show age and trauma. I’ve always been interested in that since I was eight years old, every time there’s a huge trauma in my life, I get another gray hair. I’ve always had gray hair throughout my entire life. Hair is a symbol of the life being sucked out of you, the color being taken out of the core of the hair, and turning silver or grey.
I think you’re absolutely right about skin. Many difficult experiences in my personal life have involved types of emotional abuse. And there’s also something about trying to seek proof of the damage that was done. When I have physical injuries, there are scars. There is a way to show other people that an event happened. Whereas with things that are more psychological in nature, I think for many of us it’s difficult, especially if it happened at a young age and we were denied our reality. There weren’t any witnesses other than the perpetrators to what was happening to us. In my work, there is this need to get at that proof, or trace of existence.
JB: How did you end up depicting skin in your work?
SG: I came to use this skin-like material in a roundabout way. I was a visiting teacher for a middle school/high school. I was working for a semester with them on a group art class project, and a lot of it was asking what they wanted to do, trying to combine their different material interests, experiences, and desires. As a group, we came up with this project that they wanted to make: a large dress that also dealt with the American dream. I was thinking about material for this dress and about how a lot of these students are underserved and children of immigrants, like I was. What is the readily available material that I can show them? The bag hutch seems to be pretty universal for many people, but especially people who grew up in lower-income families and children of immigrants, where everything is saved and reused a million times. I thought, I bet it’s the same for this generation. Sure enough, they had tons of grocery bags. Our great friend YouTube showed me these craft projects where people are making fabric or weaving using plastic bags. You use these irons to heat plastic bags, and they can make fabric out of it. It was a lovely, interesting project. It ended up being a pretty large installation. During the making of the piece, there was a table full of young men who had a very binary relationship to their gender, and they were resistant to using an iron.
JB: Oh, it was too feminine to them?
SG: It’s a domestic feminine task to them. I was trying to explain to them that it’s literally a power tool. It is plugged in. It works at a higher power than you could ever do with your hands. I told them to play with it like a power tool. In trying to demonstrate to one another that they didn’t have an ounce of whatever they were viewing as feminine care or grace, they were slamming the iron down full heat onto the plastic bag and melting it. It took a couple of days for them to get comfortable with one another and with the process to start to not burn the hell out of it, which is also an interesting experiment in and of itself. I wasn’t making the experiment. They were cultivating the experiment with themselves. In this burning, I was looking at it and I thought, oh this looks crazy. It looks like skin tears. It reminded me a lot of the culture of alien cosplay, or skin gashes from comic books, where there’s this really over-the-top mutated skin. I was thinking, “Is this a material I could control and make otherworldly? And have the material turn into something that would be uncanny?”
After that whole semester was done, I started playing with plastic bags in my studio with a lot of different heat-treating processes and trying to figure out what I needed to control and how to create this skin-like texture. Then it was about figuring out what form it wanted to be. So, it was a material-first discovery. It was very much seeing the material, being curious about it, working with it, and being attracted to it. It was this highly synthetic thing that is toxic to skin and bodies. I need to wear full PPE during the process of heating the plastic. It is so foreign to our bodies and yet I can cut it into approximating an object that has a visceral connotation of being bodily.
JB: There are all these different pushes and pulls that you’re discussing, these contradictions that really interest me. I think there’s a lot of attraction and repulsion happening in your work.
SG: Yes, there’s attraction and repulsion. There’s a lot of what I call yuck and yum. I often do that.
If you’re out camping without showering for awhile and you rub your finger behind your ear, there’s such an intense smell. It’s disgusting, and yet it’s so you that there’s a narcissistic attraction to the smell. You’re totally enamored at the same time because it’s so intimately you. Or when I brush my cat, she loves smelling her own fur and will try to eat it. I feel like there’s something weird, cannibalistic, or obsessive about that.
It’s a foreign substance. It’s the bacteria that’s making it smell a particular way. It’s very much out of the environment of your own body that produces it. It becomes intimate because it is particular to the way that your own psychology and body have processed that thing. It becomes distinctly yours even though you didn’t necessarily choose it. It has this seductive quality because it has been processed through you and is so related to you, however foreign at the same time. There’s something magical about that. I’m not a parent, but when I think of the process of carrying a child and birthing a child, the child is very much of yourself, while also a separate thing. There is an obsessive adoration of that thing, of that person, of that entity. It is absolutely 100% of you and 100% foreign at the same time.
JB: Another contradiction that your sculptures make me think about is resilience versus fragility. Your sculptures are fragile and torn, yet they also have survived so much. Those qualities can be both physical and psychic, trauma can take place on both the mind and the body. It reminds me of how trauma can build resilience but also be debilitating. Is that something you are also considering?
SG: Absolutely. Recently, one of my dear friends, Katie, and I were discussing what if I had been born in Poland?
My parents are both from Poland. They came over here, and then the borders closed behind them because of Communist occupation. They couldn’t go back, so then I was born here [in the US], not in Poland. My dad had to find a job and had to get a visa under complete duress and political emergency. By the time the borders opened, my parents had already had to start this new life here in the States. I often think about what it would have been like had I been born in Poland. The year that I was born, it was martial law. There were curfews in place for everyone in the whole country. The city, Wroclaw, where my parents were from, was completely under lockdown, patrolled by an army in the streets. My grandparents and my parents had to adapt to it. You were saying, there’s resistance, and then there’s a lot of adaptation. It’s survival. And also, the maladaptation. It’s a survival mechanism at first, and then it starts harming you.
Katie and I were having a dream session imagining who we would have been if our families and childhoods were different. Or do the obstacles make the person? There are myths that who we are is innate and will come out regardless of whether or not we have adversity or not. It’s a chicken or egg question that a lot of people consider.
JB: I really feel those influences in your sculptures. Would you agree?
SG: Yes, I very much hope so. I think it is something that I’m always thinking about.
But also, when I’m making work, I’m always worried about the work being too literal or being taken as one thing only. When I’m in the process of making something, if it feels too grotesque or too violent, then I’m going to immediately ease back off or add another component to balance or contradict. If an object is becoming extremely grotesque, then I’ll add an aspect that is alluring, beautiful, intimate, or shiny in it.
I also wonder about the term “trauma” in talking about my own work, too, how much it is used and how people use it. It is an element of my work, but I’m also worried about it being a primary vocabulary word.
JB: It’s a really loaded word. Whenever someone hears the word trauma, people tend to just directly talk about that, and they won’t discuss other things happening in the work.
SG: Yes. Thank you. It can be a useful shorthand, but many people use the word in very different ways. I think, in this current zeitgeist in particular, trauma seems to be a weird, loaded term. I still am using the word trauma. I’m trying to think of all negative experiences or abuse. I haven’t found a poetic way to necessarily recapture the gist of what I mean when I think of trauma in the body or emotional trauma.
JB: Speaking of unclassifiability, I noticed this dynamic between figuration and abstraction in your work. The materials remind me of the body, but the forms are very open-ended. It reminds me of the unclassifiability of the body in that they don’t have these specific identity markers. It reminds me of body fluidity. Is that something that you’re also thinking about?
SG: Yes. That goes back to fear of being too literal or too figurative. I do like the more subconscious projection of a body into the sculpture, where you might not see the body that I trace. I think there’s something subconscious and proprioceptive that happens in our bodies where you immediately intuit that you could fit inside it or understand it’s to your scale. In terms of the body and abstraction, I have an allergy to having it look like one body because my body cannot stand in for anyone’s body, and no one else’s body can stand in for mine.
I used to work a lot in photography for a decade or so. When I would take photographs of installations and they had humans in it, they always had to be nude to me, because as soon as there was clothing on it, there was time and subculture. There were so many things layered into clothing. I wanted the nude form as something that was human and out of culture.
At the same time, with these sculptures, I was also thinking about race, identity, and culture, and that’s important in my work. And yet it takes place behind the curtain. It’s behind 20 curtains. Because I don’t discuss it in my artist statement. I don’t talk about it on title cards, and things like that, either. However, all of the models I choose come from historically marginalized identities or an intersection of many of those identities. When I’m tracing their body postures, the body postures they choose seem particular to the person and their gendered, racial, class, and cultural experiences. Nevertheless, I understand it’s so abstracted that I would never expect a viewer to see or feel their specific identities, nor do I necessarily want to tell the viewer to inform it. It’s odd. I don’t quite know where that starts to layer in yet, but I feel like the unique particularity and the identity of the people who I trace is very important.
JB: The abstractness of the sculptures relates to the fluidness of identity. Identity can’t be controlled or pinned down. It really supports that.
SG: I love that. There is something weird about anonymity, where it can go either way.
It can be a universal erasure, making everything to the experience of the European man, everything is at that scale and experience. There’s a great deal of violence that comes out of the idea that the universal human is the six-foot-tall, white, Vitruvian man.
On the other hand, anonymity can be so incredibly freeing because so many of us want to be ourselves- our weird layers of infinite variables – and not be perceived or judged. We’re this weird accumulation of millions of atoms and an odd configuration due to our particular course in life.
There’s something again annoyingly twofold with anonymity. I do hope that there is something about the extreme abstraction of my work that hopefully opens the door to anyone. I hope that the intense intimacy in the process of making and forming it will subconsciously connect to that extreme reality of experiences.
JB: What would you like to do for your demo?
JB: Thank you for speaking with me today!
Check out more of Sam’s work on their website and Instagram. See their work currently on view in the group exhibition “The Search For Radiance in the Grotesque” at Zane Bennett Contemporary in Santa Fe, up until April 4th.
