Welcome To Rosa’s Kidney Party

Christine Tierney

Interview by C. VanWinkle

September 1, 2022

Can you describe for me what the thing was that you responded to?

It's a handcrafted mug and it is very cool. I love it. It's homey and it’s very Van Gogh-y! They are playing around with The Starry Night. I'm actually a big Van Gogh fan. I feel like this coffee mug is Van Gogh if he wasn't a schizoid drunk. This is sober Van Gogh.

If he’d had a better life, maybe.

Yeah, this mug is the nice, laid-back Van Gogh. It's got lots of patterns with stars, and they're using the blue and a bit of the yellow. And inside is the little surprise: two buttons are glazed inside and one's a little heart. It's very cute! It's also propped on top of a tree stump, which is kind of lovely. It made me think of your happy place with your warm cup of coffee, just feeling good.

How did you get started?

I had to just put it away and think about it for a while. I was thinking about how much I like Van Gogh and how I'm a big sunflower fan. I've been writing poems about sunflowers for years and years and years, but I usually write about the ominous nature of sunflowers. So this is the happy side of sunflowers.

I went back to the mug and decided to make some sort of digital collage piece. What really attracted me was the pattern, the checks with little designs in each box. I don't work with pattern because it intimidates me and I feel afraid to use it. I always just go off on my own bizarro trail. So I thought, “Let me play around with pattern and see what I can do.” Of course, I thought, “Nooo I can't do it, I'm not good enough!” This mug just seemed so perfect and I couldn't be like the person that made this mug. But then I looked at a close-up of the image of it and realized, “Oh, this isn't perfect. There's lots of little imperfect stars and swirlies and things like that. I think that I can do this.” I’d set out to do pattern without trying to make it totally perfect. So I did!

I started with the background. I knew I had several pictures of kidneys, and… [laughs]

Why?

Because I had a kidney transplant in 2017.

Oh wow!

Yeah, I've been trying to embrace that more these days and talk about it more. I actually wrote a book about it, a book of hybrid poetry/creative non-fiction/fiction, but I've been afraid to send it out. I thought this would be a good opportunity to somehow tell my story and really feature it in the work, rather than just as a little sidenote.

This particular kidney picture was black-and-white, and I decided to go black-and-white against a bold color. That's something I was afraid to do as well. But I made a pattern out of these black-and-white kidneys. I worked on the background forever; it was so much fun. And I changed my mind about it several times, and I loved it and hated it. I was so worried it wasn’t going to look right.

I think a lot of people can relate to the pressure to be perfect.

I worked with kids for 29 years at an arts-based after-school program in Cambridge. Going through this process, I was thinking of them and working on art projects with them. They're not afraid of anything. I was always the one that could teach kids to go off and do your own thing and just get weird. That was our whole motto: Get weird. I really did always admire those kids that could just make a little pattern and work with it and make things look a certain way. So I channeled that as well.

That's great. Now where did this other imagery come from? We talked about the kidneys, but there's more.

There's more! So I've been into this whole online collage community. I'm very new to social media, by the way. Have you ever seen Maria Bamford’s show, Lady Dynamite? The show’s theme song says, “I don't know what I'm doing more than half of the time.” That's my motto. [laughs] Anyway, I'm starting to work in this online collage community all around the world. They have these little collage challenges. They'll say, “Use a mushroom in something,” and then a billion people across the universe come up with something really cool with a mushroom in it. So that's where that came from.

During lockdown, I taught myself all these crazy programs and figured out how to work my Mac that I’ve had for a thousand years. And so that's how this all started. I’m using these funky, free apps and my crappy little camera from an old iPhone to create all of my pieces.

I had just been to the Franklin Park Zoo and the giraffe is so cool and weird and beautiful.

Yours is covered with this beautiful pattern.

And you know what? I created a lot of that! I tried to do pattern throughout. There's two little curls on the bottom of the mushroom, so the bottom of the bow got two curls, too. With the ears, I did some curls underneath. Part of my goal was to try to stay with various patterns throughout.

Where did the title come from?

Rosa Ruby is the name that I gave to my kidney that I received. After I received my transplant, I was in the hospital, and I was on shitloads of drugs. Mostly Dilaudid. You hit this little pump and in seconds the pain medicine just takes over and you’re out of your mind. I remember I was suffering in pain when I was in the hospital, and I didn't realize that the little gadget would give you drugs whenever you needed them. You just got an organ put into your body! It's kind of a major surgery, so you're free to use as much drug as you want. I remember that day, my husband said, “Christine, don't suffer. That's what that little gadget in your hand is for.” You know, I was so out of it, I was like “What?” He said, “Yeah, hit it.” So I hit it, and it’s instantaneous. I was like, “Oooh man, that's great.” So in a drug-induced haze, I was holding my new kidney, and I said, “I love her! I'm gonna name her… Rosa Ruby!” And my husband said, “That's her name!” I feel like I'm finally starting to pay tribute to her.

That's great! I guess you haven't been together for that long, but you're very close.

Yeah. We're very close. Very close.

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

You know, this is no lie, my first Bait/Switch piece just opened me up to all these other possibilities. I was taking pictures of this little egg cup girl and I was into it, and at that point I was ready to just move on. And I really did start to branch out after working on that piece. I started to get into digital art and look people up. I've been into the Surrealist movement, mostly Pop Surrealism/Lowbrow, for a long, long time, but I just hadn't really done it myself. I would just think, “Oh if only I could do that.” And now, I’ve found a way to do that without having to have mad painting skills, because I can't really draw or paint to be honest with you. So this piece relates in that sense.

How was doing this a second time?

I was not as nervous, and I was more open to being more open. The first time around, I was so nervous and, you know, am I going to get this right? And then this time, I felt like I could just dive into this. I could take my time with it.

By the way, I didn't know sunflowers had an ominous side. Can you explain that to me?

Do you know Dorothea Tanning? Have you seen any of her sunflower depictions? In one of them, there's this ominous sunflower. It's black and I think it has a little bit of yellow in it and I believe it's looking in a mirror. One of her famous paintings has this staircase and these two weird, underfed girls, and there's this sunflower that looks like it's almost alive. I was looking at her artwork and it occurred to me, “I think sunflowers are really ominous.” And then I started to look at them differently. Up close, they're sticky and weird and angry and gross and kind of beautiful. They’re everything I like about art: gross and beautiful and angry and happy and all of that.

When I was still working as an after-school director, I brought one in and put it in a little plastic cup. It was one of those big, ginormous sunflowers. I had these little girls, my little artsy girls. I had them look at the sunflower and I asked them, “What do you think when you look at this?” They were like, “Yeah it’s a sunflower, it's cool.” And I said, “No, really look at it. Look into its face.” They started to have all these weird reactions to it and one of them was like, “Ugh, they’re not really that pretty after all, are they? It's kind of freaking me out, Christine! Yo dude…” [laughs] I had other kids look at the sunflower, all these different, wild personalities. “Look at these sunflowers and react to them.” Some of them said they still thought they were great, but a lot of kids were like, “Wow, look at the stem. It is kind of prickly…”

You have quite a relationship with sunflowers. I see a couple behind you, and you just ate some [sunflower butter]. How long has this relationship been going on?

I never even thought about it. 15 or 16 years maybe? It's definitely about their ominous nature. I started buying them incessantly from Trader Joe's, I would set them on my kitchen table, let them rot, and just look at them in all these different stages. And I don't like the little happy and pretty ones. I like the giant Russian and the mammoth. I like the really big faces.

Now that you have done this two times, what’s your advice to another artist possibly approaching this project?

Well, I did recommend it to a friend and now she is participating. You know, when you tell anybody anything, they're like, “Yeah, whatever, who cares?” This particular person, I love her, she's so great. I’m in a little writing group with her. She dabbles in all kinds of things; she's very eclectic. I kept telling her about Bait/Switch and how much she was gonna love it. She loves people, she loves to find out about other people's artwork, and now she's excited about participating in it. So I think the advice is: listen to someone when they recommend something! [laughs] GOD DAMN IT, LISTEN TO ME!

Call Number: C78VA | C80VA.tieWe

Hailing from Boston, Christine Tierney is a digital photoartist, poet, flash fiction writer, music lover, certified life coach, and wannabe comedian. She holds an MFA from The University of Southern Maine’s Stonecoast Writing Program, and a BA in film from Emerson College. Her first book, chicken+lowercase=fleur was published in 2021 by Lily Poetry Review Books, and her writings and artwork have appeared in Bait/Switch, Fourteen Hills, Poet Lore, The Tusculum Review, Sugar House Review and other fab places. Visit her website at christinetierneypoet.com to find out more.