Underground Dwelling

Alison Arens

Interview by L. Valena

November 20, 2021

Can you start by describing the prompt that you responded to?

The prompt I responded to was a piece of music by Darth Presley called A Miró On Which To Dwell. It’s electronic, theramin-driven, which is neat. Minor key, going into a warmer feeling. So I started by just listening to the song over and over again, and trying to get a picture in my head of what was going on with the music. Between the theramin and some of the synth in the background, I thought about dripping water and caves. The underground. I felt this real sense of being underground, looking for an escape, looking to move upward. The music kind of rises toward the end of the song, and the instruments get added back in. I was doing some sketches and pulling some fabrics. Because they referenced Miró in the title, I started looking at some of Miró’s work to try to think about how those things connected.

What happened next?

From there, I had a few initial sketches, an idea of the movement I wanted through the piece. A lot of my work is abstract, and I didn’t really want to do a very simple thing about caves. So I began pulling out fabrics that I thought kind of fit the feeling of the piece, and the mood, as well as threads. I had some dark browns, and some of this really old muslin that’s sort of slowly falling apart, that I really enjoy working with. Some black silk. And then the red. My favorite piece by Miró is one of his lithographs that has two red circles connected by some black lines. I really wanted to incorporate that.

More recently I’ve been working with thrifted or found materials. That’s where the muslin and the silk come from. I’d been thinking it would be fun to use one of the thrifted bags I have lying around. There’s this sort of 8-bit feel to the music, a kind of video-game feel. And none of that ended up working out. I have a bunch of process photos holding it up to various bags, and nothing really seemed to be fitting with what I wanted to do. So I was really focused on getting some brown in the to piece. Underground makes me think of darker colors. I had a very soft scarf that I had come upon. So it’s actually a double layer of this rayon scarf with some fabric over the top of that.

I started completing some of the components separately because I wasn’t sure how they were going to come together. I was re-listening to the song, creating representations of these moments in the song.

That’s cool. So particular parts of this piece are related to specific moments in the song?

Yeah. And just following the notes up and down. There’s this repetitive sequence of notes, three ascending and three descending notes, and I started stitching/making marks along with the music to incorporate some of that.

It sounds like there was almost a performative aspect to this. Like you were playing the music into the piece with thread.

Yeah. I was also really taken with the piece. I really enjoyed it. I wanted my piece in response to have a little bit of a story. The music is telling a little bit of a story, and moving into a visual medium, I wanted it to have a story. So I started thinking about things that live underground. What would it feel like to be a person living underground? A lot of my work incorporates some of these human hybrid figures, like the star-nosed mole. So that kind of came out of this idea of the transformation of being underground. Going along with the music. That’s where that figure came from.

Did you say it’s about transforming to being underground? So it’s like something becoming an underground creature?

Yeah.

Cool. And you also mentioned the star-nosed mole. Is that an animal that makes its way into your work a lot?

Well, a lot of half-human, half-animals find their way into my work. People with animal heads, that sort of thing. I ended up here with a figure in a very human fetal position, with the head, hands and feet of a star-nosed mole. It has kind of burrowed under there. In another spot, I have part of the nose... I got really side-tracked by star-nosed moles at that point. Looking at their noses.

They’re fascinating. I would love to hear more about this litho by Miró that you love. Can you talk a bit more about that?

It’s just such a simple print. It’s just a perfect abstract. The main form is this squarish shape with a couple of crosses, and it’s in the middle of the page in this big expanse. I think because my work is so dense so much of the time, really minimal abstract work really speaks to me. I always think that the direction I’m going to go, and I end up with this explosion. Something about how the spots are placed on the page, and how the lines were made. Everything was very precise, and it wasn’t representational in the slightest. It was just what it was, and it was beautiful that way and perfect. I incorporated the dots from it because I kept thinking about that and coming back to it.

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

I think it’s more of a combination of some of my more recent work, which has been very abstract, and these figures that I keep coming back to. How far can I push a form before it’s really unnatural looking or off-putting? I like making these human figures with animal heads that also look like they belong there, that they should be hanging around and part of their environment. I have been recently playing more with textures. It’s kind of hard to see in pictures, but the mole figure in the corner is on black wool. Rather than stitching everything down flat, which I’ve done a lot of in the past, lately, I’ve been allowing things to sit more, float on top of the piece. This black silk piece in the middle has some real volume to it -- it’s puffed up away from the backing. So I think it really continues with that texture exploration. And that small stitching/mark-making, which pops up a lot. I incorporate a lot of running stitch, which is that over-under-over-under stitch and attaching smaller fabric scraps.

Is there anything else that we haven’t talked about?

I’m usually really into cutting things up if they don’t work. That’s where I feel like some of my best pieces have come from, and that happened with this one. It was secured to something completely different and ended up being cut up and replaced. It was also much longer at one point. But it wasn’t working. I try to not be afraid to keep pushing things, and see if it happens there.

When you look at this piece now, separate from the prompt, what does it say to you?

I think separated from the prompt, despite the figure kind of covering its face, I think it’s a lot more of a joyful piece. It has more of a bright feeling than I thought it did when I was working on it. I really enjoy that. I thought while I was working on it that it was slightly threatening, but now I think it looks a little more calm and happy.

Call Number: M42MU | M44VA.areUnde

Alison Arens is a textile collage artist working in the Twin Cities, in Minnesota. She creates quilts and other textiles utilizing thrifted and recycled materials. Her work explores the borders of what is natural.