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Living With Art
For a working artist, the creative process is deeply personal, intimate, and unique to their practice. While we, the viewing public, might experience the end result of the process, rarely comes the chance to look beyond the studio door, to learn how that art is made.
To find out, we sought out three Louisiana artists, each of whom taps into a specific sense: sound, scent, or sight They answered questions about their creative processes and how they utilize their own bodies, often in unexpected ways, to generate something profound.
Consider their unique perspectives, then plan to visit one or more of the exhibitions and showcases landing at area museums and galleries this summer—a visual banquet that extends from contemporary portraiture to the history of Newcomb pottery.
Kim Meadowlark on Sound
CR: You experience the neurological phenomenon known as synesthesia—wherein the activation of one sense triggers another. Tell us about your earliest memory of your synesthesia manifesting.
KM: I remember when I was about ten years old, I was listening to Mazzy Star's album, So Tonight That I Might See. It was already such a heavy and deeply confusing time in my life, trying to navigate traumas with what little life experience I had.
CR: Can you describe how you’ve translated synesthesia into your art practice?
KM: For me, translating synesthesia into painting is less about creating something specific, but more about documenting an experience I've felt and seen through my senses. When I hear music and feel those emotions, it naturally arrives in my mind as a color or movement. My process starts by paying attention to those instinctive reactions to sound and acting on it.
Manon Bellet on Scent
CR: In recent years, your work as an artist has dealt in the realm of scent. What is one scent you have used in your artistic practice, and why do you return to it?
MB: One of the first scents [I] identified was that of the earth near the bayou after a storm. The smell of “wet earth” after rain is called “petrichor.” It is produced by the release of geosmin (a compound generated by soil bacteria) and plant oils when raindrops strike dry ground.
Scent affects the body on a different level than other modes of knowing the world. We can’t smell something without becoming it a little, taking it into our bodies and being transformed in ways we don’t fully understand.
Ben Depp on Sight
CR: Your aerial photographs, taken above the coastal regions of the Gulf South via paraglider, are some of your best known works. What perspective does a camera—wielded from the clouds—provide that traditional photography can’t?
BD: The landscape here is flat, so the view from a boat or the ground in South Louisiana is often either open water or a wall of marsh grass. It’s hard to have perspective on how this landscape is changing.
From an aerial point of view, I can observe how human engineering and natural forces (like hurricanes) are changing the coast. From the air, subtle changes appear more dramatic. For example, I can see how land is fragmenting apart and see sediment moving in the water as the coastline is washing away.
