Only The Bones

Nora Hanasy

Only The Bones, digital collage, 8.5 x 11 inches

Interview by L. Valena
May 14, 2023

Nora, such a delight to have you back! Can you start by describing the prompt that you responded to?

It was a beautiful, long poem. I imagine the author sitting outside and staring at the skies and questioning our existence in the universe. They described pretty much everything beautiful on our planet, questioning how it all works together. There was so much in it! When I first read it, I thought, “Wow, how do I put the whole world and the whole universe into an artwork?” I had to break it down and work out what it was exactly that they were trying to say.

I love camping, I love nature, and I often look at the stars and have these big conversations with my family or friends, trying to make sense of the infinite universe and how our brains cannot actually comprehend when something is limitless. We have all these doors closed in our brains and we are capable of so much more. There are some people out there who do things like meditation, like a lot of Buddhist monks, who have some very special abilities. Reiki, for example, opens one particular door where you can heal with energy and feel things. Sometimes people with autism have superhuman powers that other human beings just cannot understand. So I thought it's something about opening that third eye, which is why I have an eye in my work. It's something about trying to see beyond the ordinary and have this supernatural ability to make sense of our existence.

Cool. And you talk about this stuff with your friends and family?

Yes, we do. Often around the campfire, we start questioning and you're this close to opening that door to understanding, but you just cannot and it's quite frustrating. But we always have the big “What if” questions and “How” questions.

Oh yeah. I meditate and practice energy healing and get into all that stuff, and when you sometimes get those glimpses of the infinite, it’s intoxicating! The idea that there's so much more that we can't even begin to comprehend is pretty beautiful.

Exactly. And so we’re just guessing. In our little human existence, we’re just guessing how it might all have been. We all have our theories and beliefs, but I think everyone's got it wrong. We have no idea what the full picture is.

How could we possibly?

We only come up with ideas limited to our knowledge in a certain period of time. I think we haven't even scratched the surface.

Yeah, and how wonderful is that? So you had this theoretical kind of framework. How did you choose the specific imagery that you ended up going with?

I started creating a collage series on the periodic table of elements. I want to make a visual coffee table book on all the elements. To study each element in depth, to find visual imagery for each of them, was quite an eye-opening experience because I've just learned so much. This particular one I created when I hit lithium. I found that lithium was a drug that was used for psychotic episodes, but it also opened up your mind. I was watching this fungi documentary on Netflix, and they were talking about magic mushrooms and how certain things do make people think beyond reality. So I started thinking, “How could you open up your mind to those things?” That's why my image has this head opening up with this eye inside that. There are ways to open up these doors. Not that I’m necessarily condoning taking mushrooms right now. There are ways to see if we can somehow find an answer to this big question that we all want answered but cannot. So that's how the idea came about, psychedelic expression of these efforts.

Everyone gets there in their own way, right?

Yes. I like to sit by the campfire, stare at the stars, and ponder.

I see butterflies here. I see atoms, maybe. Tell me about these other things.

The butterflies are a symbol of change and renewal and hope. We as humans are always evolving and changing, very very slowly, unfortunately. But hopefully, we will become one and understand each other better.

What are your sources for imagery? What's your process like?

A lot of the things I use I photograph myself. I'm an avid photographer. So I have a massive collection of image banks of just everything, different textures and colors and objects and things. And for images that I cannot photograph myself, I go to sites where I find free images to download. You have to be very careful when you're doing digital collage not to ever use work just off the internet, so I do have a bank of places that I can go where photographers put up their work for artists to use. And also magazines sometimes, like National Geographic. I make a lot of analog collage as well. It's very meditative for me. They don't do this anymore because of covid, but a long time ago, when you’d sit at the doctor's surgery looking through magazines, you might see this image and you just have to have it because it's so good, and then you’re like [coughing noises] while you're tearing out the page because you just need that image! [laughs] Yeah, as artists we do things like that.

I love that! What a rebel!

And you know no one's going to see it or care about it, and for you it's the image that kickstarts the next artwork. So I do make analog work as well. I'm actually an assemblage artist mainly. I use discarded materials and found objects to create sculptures and two-dimensional work. I guess it’s the same concept with collage. I absolutely love finding all these separate pieces and bringing them together to create a new whole, a new image, something better than what it initially was. Maybe it's part of my personality. I'm very much a fix-it kind of person. I'm probably not the best person to come to with a problem because I can't just listen and say, “Aww, I understand.” I'm like, “Well, you can fix it like this and this and this and this…” People don't want that. People don't want to know how to fix things. But I think that's why I am doing the art that I do. I take things that are broken or unwanted, and then I repurpose them to create something absolutely beautiful. So I think that's how my art practice has evolved.

How does this piece relate to the rest of your work?

Well, this piece is hopefully going to be part of the series that I'm working on for the elements. And a lot of these collage pieces do fit very well with this poem. Hopefully I'll start creating coffee table books of all my works.

And you’re thinking about using this image for the lithium piece? That’s so cool. I feel like it’s easy to forget that lithium is an element since it has all these different applications. We have lithium batteries and it’s also something that people take to help balance their brain chemistry.

It's easy to forget that those are made of the same thing.

Yeah, when you start looking at the elements in depth, it’s quite interesting how everything is connected. It’s really opened my eyes. I love science, but science on my own terms, you know? I was never really good at science in school, but I am fascinated. I do find myself constantly going toward science when I'm researching something. I don't know if this was true or not, but I saw this propaganda poster that said, “Don't trust artists, they talk to everyone” or something like that. And it's because artists are curious creatures, and we don't have prejudices. We do talk to everybody: all classes, all races, all religions. We don't care. We’re gatherers of information and we are interested in everything. As an artist, you have to be. You know, history, science... You have to have a vast range of knowledge. Otherwise you can't really create, can you? So yeah, don’t trust artists, they know too much.

I love that so much! I'm going to track that propaganda poster down. That sounds really good. How did you get interested in the elements? Where did this project come from?

There was this thing on social media called Huevember. There's a color associated with every single day in November and you had to use mainly that color in your work each day. It goes across the spectrum of a rainbow. I thought it was a fun little thing I could do; a digital collage every day wasn’t going to take too much time. When I finished that series, I took it to Big W and printed out a book for myself. When you flip through it, it's like a rainbow of images. And it gave me this kick! I thought, “What other series can I do? The periodic table of elements would be cool.” There’s like 121 of them, not including all those human-invented elements. I'm just going to stop with the original table because the rest are all silver and boring and there's no difference between them and I can't get imagery for a lot of them anyway. I decided to create a beautiful coffee table book.

I printed the iron one on a piece of metal just to see what it would look like. My plan, other than the coffee table book, was to print them all on metal and have them on a wall. I don't know, maybe some university science department might be interested in purchasing it one day. But it's a quite expensive feat because just to print it on metal is very expensive, and then when you times that by 120… But here is the iron one. [shows Lu the metal print].

It's beautiful!

It's weatherproof, so you can have it outside as well. You know, Mars is made up of pretty much just an iron ball. The atoms and everything to do with iron is in here. This little thing is an iron knife. I read that in the Middle Ages people believed that if you bury an iron knife in front of your front door, it stops all the evil spirits and the witches coming into your house.

Oh wow!

I do try to put a lot of information into these.

That's awesome. Well, is there anything about your process or about this piece that we didn't talk about?

I really liked the sentence in the poem that said, “Can you hear what I cannot speak?” That was the whole idea of what we don't know and the questions that we have. I just thought it was a beautiful, beautiful poem. Absolutely gorgeous. I hope the writer gets it printed somewhere. I really enjoyed it and I really enjoyed making this for it. So thank you for the opportunity.

Oh, my absolute pleasure. Actually, I wondered if you ended up listening to it.

Yes! It was a lovely experience. Listening to it was so beautiful and meditative really.

Well, you've done this a couple of times now. Do you have any advice for someone who might be approaching this for the first time?

Just do it! It's fun. When I get a challenge where I’m restricted to a certain thing, it really helps me push boundaries and come up with new ideas. I just love restrictions as far as art is concerned. Being given a poem that I have to respond to is exciting, and straight away my brain starts firing off ideas and that's such an exciting time. The creation is nice too, but that initial “What can I do?” is just such a good feeling. So my advice is to go for it.

It pushes you into areas that you may not have even thought you wanted to go. When I did this with you the first time, that analog collage became a study for a painting. You just don’t know where one little thing like this could end up taking you.

Call Number: M73PP | M75VA.haOnly

Nora Hanasy: I was born in Budapest, Hungary in 1974. I came to Australia as a ten-year-old and this beautiful country became my home. As an artist, my practice falls under collage and assemblage art, combining found materials, papers, magazine imagery and photographs by deconstructing and reconstructing to create new narratives. Finding and gathering society’s cast offs, everyday items, broken or old objects is always an exciting time and the beginning of a new work. My collage work is a meditative activity for me and I have many images already cut over the years to work with whenever I am in the mood. My Periodic Table of Elements was a project I started a while ago using Photoshop.