Protect & What We Want and What We Actually Want

Cynthia Berger

Protect & What We Want and What We Actually Want, mixed media

Interview by C. VanWinkle
October 9, 2023

What was the prompt that you responded to? Can you describe it for me?

It was called “Algo Dysmorphia”. It was a watercolor of a woman looking at a giant cell phone, at all of the different apps and the likes. I liked that because of the heart emoji. I’ve been doing a lot with heart emojis, so that was the thing that I really connected with. I thought about how we are so reliant on that feedback from our phones and that little heart.

That heart seems to be major currency in today's interactions.

Yes. And it's funny that it's a heart, which is stronger than just a Facebook thumbs-up. On Facebook it means “I like it,” but on Instagram it’s more like “I LOVE it.” It feels more important somehow.

Oh, that’s an important distinction! How did you decide to get started on your piece?

In my studio, I've been making lots of these little ceramic hearts, starting around last March, so kind of all year. I have piles of them, these things that I've been playing with, and little elements that I never know when or how I’ll use them. So I already had those around. I've been thinking a little bit about this idea of protecting your heart and wondering how I could visualize that in some way.

Yesterday, I was really worried. “I don't think I'm going to think of anything!” Then all of a sudden, I realized that I could rearrange things and explore how they would really relate specifically to getting feedback from someone else, getting that heart, getting that like. I went about it two ways.

The first one is about that idea of longing, like when you're looking at your social media and feeling insecure, longing for what everyone else has and it makes you compare yourself to others and creates that sadness.

I've been also collecting a lot of quotes that resonate with me. So I looked at my list and I found this quote by Fernando Pessoa:

“The feelings that hurt most, the emotions that sting most, are those that are absurd - The longing for impossible things, precisely because they are impossible; nostalgia for what never was; the desire for what could have been; regret over not being someone else; dissatisfaction with the world’s existence. All these half-tones of the soul’s consciousness create in us a painful landscape, an eternal sunset of what we are.”

We don't want to feel that way, and we don't want to admit that we feel that way when we're looking at social media. “I should have done this,” or “I missed out on that.” That feeds discontentment, but then we get those little likes and we think, “Oh we're great!” I was looking at the dichotomy of the longing and sadness along with that little bit of adrenaline when you get a like. That one heart had a hole in it, and I'd been keeping it because I wanted something to come out of it at some point. It’s that idea of a hole in the heart being a lack or a wanting of something. So I had the little quote coming out of that, like the heart was expressing that feeling.

For the other piece, I had this this little cement pedestal that I had a little heart on, and it was protected from the outside world. I thought of all those likes and all those emojis, so I made a little pile of hearts, like they were outside. And maybe the other heart represents your actual feelings, and you need to protect those from all those negative things. So there’s this black dripping down, those bad feelings, feelings of longing or whatever could be hurtful. So that cloche was protecting one's feelings from all those negative things. And/or positive, you know? It’s just so easy to click, click, click, click, click. You can amass all those likes, but what does it really mean?

Right. You could have all of these hearts as reactions, but is it love? Do you feel loved? Something that really impresses me with these two pieces is that they're not very elaborate. You’ve used some rather minimal imagery to convey something much stronger.

Thank you!

How do these pieces relate to the rest of your work?

Right now, they relate to everything because all of my work has hearts right now. Everything is playing around with the trope of the heart, like “Oh I looove this!” I want to play with that as kind of a cliché. I have all of these hearts in little tins from sardines or any sort of canned, stinky things. They have different quotes that I’ve been collecting that have resonated with me the last couple years. Those tins were about the heart being in a container, and then people would take them because a particular quote resonated with them. They're all a little bit different: some are black and some are red, some are dipped in wax, some have pink tins and some have gold tins, some are small, some are coming out of the tin and some are contained. Something I hadn't thought about until someone mentioned it was this idea of food. A sardine tin contains food, so it's this idea of being fed emotionally as well.

Oh interesting! I had seen some of your work already and I'd seen some of your hearts, but I didn't make the connection between the prompt and your work until you said it. It was just a happy accident that you got this piece.

Yeah, it still took me a week to think about it and then one day I just said, “I'm going to figure this out today.” I was looking around in my studio, thinking, “Should I paint something? Draw something?” And then I just started messing around with what I already had, and I came up with these. What resonated with me from the prompt was that kind of longing for something else, for connection or being someone else or being liked for something that maybe you aren't.

So you paint and draw in addition to ceramics?

Yeah, I’m more of a multimedia person. I have a degree in sculpture, and then when I became an art teacher, you just do everything, right? I had all my phases of being a photographer, a screen printer, a painter, whatever, all those phases. But I never really had a phase of being into ceramics. Everyone would say, “You're an art teacher! Don't you love ceramics?” And I was like, “No, I hate it.” Then I went away on this residency for two years at Cleveland Art Institute. I was doing all this stuff and they said, “You should just try. Just do it with clay, just do it with clay.” I was like, “I hate clay so much!” And now I've been doing clay for two years. So that’s how that came to be. It was the best medium for the thinking that I was doing. It wasn’t because I love the medium; it was the right medium for that synthesis of idea to outcome.

I see! I’m glad you two worked things out. Do you work with text much?

A little bit. I work with other people's words. I often read something and think, “Exactly. I couldn't have said that better.” I’m a great admirer of people that write well, which has always been a struggle for me. I just was listening to something on NPR and they were talking about some poet. They said that he gives words to people who can't express them, and maybe that's the role of great writers and great poets and great thinkers. Some of us have a hard time articulating all of that, so someone else can articulate our same thoughts, and that's how we connect as humans. So I'm always gathering all those things that make sense to me.

How did you feel about working from a prompt?

I loved it. I'm also an art teacher, so I do that with my students all the time. I'm always trying to get them to make things from something that might be strange. It might be an object or a theme. It's kind of fun to do that.

And now it was your turn.

I sometimes do it too. I’ve made these little boxes. During the pandemic, I found in one there was a little certificate that said it was a Certificate of Conformity. And I just loved that. Why would you get a prize for being a conformist, right? So I just held on to that. I didn't know what I was going to do with it, but I held on to it. Finally, I figured it out. I had been making all these hearts, so I filled up a macaron container with them and put the definition of ‘conformity’ on the top. The hearts are all very handmade, so they look alike but they aren't exactly alike. They are not conforming to any sort of factory standard. So I do do that. I have a lot of boxes. I have a box of Celebration, a box of Hurt. Sometimes I see them as little diaries. I did one maybe a year ago that was a box of Pink. A long time ago, I did a box of Fears, that I've since lost and I kind of wish I still had it. Maybe that's a metaphor. [laughs]

Sounds like a good thing to me! Now that you are on this side of this process, what is your advice to a new person getting their prompt today?

Have fun. It's a wonderful time to be playful and have fun. Think of all the connections you can make. In my mind, I just started connecting and connecting, and then saw where that took me. But I had to think about it for a while.

Yeah, you said you sat with it for like a week?

Yeah. And then I just did it quickly afterwards. I woke up and thought, “This is what I'm going to do.”

Sometimes two weeks is not enough time to do anything and sometimes two weeks is very generous, depending on what people do and how they do it. I was a little worried that you might not have enough time because I knew you work with ceramics and that can be a time-consuming process.

Yeah. I couldn't have made something from scratch, so I was lucky to have a whole pile of all of these things that I’ve made. I have collections of things and I thought, “I don’t know how, but I'm going to use these in some way.” Being a bit of a hoarder, making a lot of things and having them around, is useful because I can play with that.

Call Number: C108VA | C110VA.bePro

Cynthia Berger is a multi-media artist working in St Paul. Her recent series of work has included paintings, small heart sculptures in tins, and ceramic pieces of hearts on cake stands.