PODCAST:

New York-based sculptor Sasha Fishman’s solo exhibition Lemniscata is currently on display at the Ruffin Gallery through October 9th.

TRANSCRIPT:

Rosemary Cavalier:
You’re listening to WTJU Charlottesville for Arts this week. We chatted with Sasha Fishman, a New York-based sculptor. Fishman’s solo exhibition Lemniscata is currently on display Monday through Friday, 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. in Ruffin Gallery. She chatted with us about the research and creative process that define her work.

Sasha Fishman:
My name is Sasha Fishman. I am an artist, and I’m showing some work that I made recently this past spring at the Ruffin Gallery at UVA. It basically is a fountain that has these forms on it that basically move water back and forth as if the water is breathing, and these forms are called flow forms, and they are things I’ve been researching for a long time. My background is in art, but I also, for a moment, thought I wanted to go into material science, and I was working with scientists. I was trying to develop bio-based materials to replace resin in my practice, and I ended up– long story short, I ended up working a lot with fish, and I started a tank in my studio when I lived in Los Angeles, and I ended up becoming really interested in the the way the water was moving in the tank, and I started to make fountains. And this is kind of an iteration of something I’ve been trying to do over and over, and it’s been really difficult to get the water to move this way, but it does work, which I’m really excited about. And these forms are ceramics that I made at a residency in the Netherlands, and I was there for three months this past spring, every day just making ceramics, and they had it’s at this place called the European Ceramic Work Center in Oisterwijk in the Netherlands. Andyeah, it was my first time spending that much time in Europe, and it was a really intense residency where I had a studio, I worked with advisors, and in the past, I’ve made fountains that are modular, and water will often leak in between the basically tiles of the fountain. And I’ve gotten pretty good at figuring out how to waterproof things really, really thoroughly because I have to install and deinstall these modular components. And when you work with water, it always finds a way out. It often leaks, and so I really wanted to make a giant basin that was one ceramic. And so this residency was really special because they had these massive car kilns where I was able to make a really big basin that’s kind of it looks like a bathtub essentially, and I was able to fire it in one piece. So it’s basically like a 600 pound basin with these forms on top of it that are moving water in this really intricate way.

Rosemary Cavalier:
Where does the title Lemniscata come from?

Sasha Fishman:
Yeah, so Lemniscata is like the feminine version of Lemniscate, which is to basically move back and forth. Kind of, it looks like an infinity, you know, symbol. And so the the flow forms were developed by this artist John Wilkes in the 70s, and a lot of the things he was looking at were eddies in water and how it’s like this moment that almost water like resonates where you get the right form and it the water wants to kind of lap back onto itself and it creates this rhythmic motion, like the breathing that I was talking about. But it’s it really is doing this lemniscate symbol back and forth, and so a lot of the things I’ve been thinking about are just you know related to like hydro feminism and this kind of like you know relationship to the water and femininity. It’s not the core part of what I think about, but it is kind of in the back of my mind. So there’s like you know I guess little clues to that in the titles of the shows.

Rosemary Cavalier:
What were you curious about while creating this work?

Sasha Fishman:
I was working with sturgeon, and I saw in their nostril I had these baby sturgeon that someone had given me. There was this little flower in their nose that was so beautiful, and I I looked it up, and all sturgeon have this little olfactory rosette that grows in their nose, and it’s based off of the water that they grow up in. And so, this central part of the fountain is this kind of vortex shape that’s based off of that olfactory rosette from the sturgeon. And yeah, it’s relating to like the sense of growth and development that comes from water that I think we we can kind of like feel through hearing the water and looking at the water, but we may not, you know, ever be able to understand because we didn’t grow up in water.

Rosemary Cavalier:
Lemniscata is on exhibition weekdays from nine to five at Ruffin Gallery through October 9. You can find more information at arts.as.edu/lemniscata. Arts this week is supported by the UVA Arts Council and Piedmont Virginia Community College. PVCC Arts presents a rich array of dance, music, theater, and visual arts programming. Learn more at pvcc.edu. For WTJU, I’m Rosemary Cavalier.