A Conversation with Artist VADIS TURNER

It's an important time, and Tennessee is an important place to be making art. I think a lot about the behavioral expectations for women and what is embedded within domestic spaces. My studio practice encourages the misbehaviors and transcendence of decorative, functional and structural elements from the home into storied grid-based forms. Aiming to redirect the narrative of feminine folklore, I have created megalithic rock formations out of bedsheets, freestanding figurative windows out of curtains and unruly vessels made with mineral wool and brick dust.

Artist HOLLIS HAMMONDS on Memory, Disaster, and the Hand-Made

As Hammonds + West we have produced several solo exhibitions exploring climate grief while bringing into question our own contributions to the current environmental crisis. Combining images with poems, video, sculptural installations, and sound, we create experiential installations that engage viewers on a visceral level, in an attempt to engage them in questioning their own impacts on the environment. This newest project, however, is based on the idea of "The Great Turning." Through this new body of work, we hope to offer pathways for thinking about an environmental future filled with reclamation, restoration, and positive growth. Of course, this is a difficult position to embody in our tumultuous world today.

Artist SARAH NEEDHAM on the The Ecology of Empathy

I am aiming for a sensory experience that connects to grief and that cycles round within an economy or maybe even an ecology of empathy. When we listen very carefully while holding in our hands material pigments that were once in the hands of or under the feet of or in the clothes on the backs of people from the past, we hold those people and we can hear them. It makes it possible to link from the past to the present in a kind of multiplicity, and to see alternative possibilities in the now. I am currently exploring aspects of grief and liveness by investigating Cave Painting and crows.

In Dialogue with Artist & Writer MELANIE JANISSE-BARLOW

I have a writing and a visual arts practice. I knew I wanted to write from a very, very young age. I published my first 'book' Jim, Jan and Kojan Escape From Spies when I was like, seven. My aunt was a teacher and so she laminated and spiral bound by illustrated book for me. I still have it. So sweet. I started writing poetry in grade school. Not surprising to have wound up with two trade books of poetry. As for visual art, it was when I was in Montreal at Concordia University that I started to take photos. I had an old Contax and an old Yaschica Mat twin lens portrait camera that I was obsessed with. I transferred from an english degree to visual arts, where I pursued photography. It wasn't until later, when I did a second visual arts degree at Emily Carr in Vancouver, Canada that I made the move from photography to painting. I got tired of the paper substrate, and started to experiment with alternative photographic processes, and eventually sort of moved into painting, with the encouragement of some other painters that lived in the same warehouse building that I lived in on Hastings Street in Vancouver. I think that I have had a few times in my life where I have had to question and reconfirm that I am an artist. I keep picking art, and so I feel like it has become a firm realization over time. Art is important to me because it is a site of personal expression and freedom. I can unapologetically explore myself and my reality here, no permission needed. It is mine—an honest and fairly unencumbered place to explore.

A Conversation with Artist ANA MARIA RENDICH

Exploring ideas, art and the creative process connects me to our inner world, nature and rhythms of the earth and our own being, expanding our possibilities, the grow of the soul and contemplation… I was born in Argentina. I was raised in Merlo; at that time, it was a small town in the province of Buenos Aires. I grow up in an extended family. My grandma, my mom and dad created this beautiful environment of “constant moving”, or reading, or helping or playing but I had to do something…that was my first encounter with making stuff… When I was growing up, we received at my home several international students. Through them I learned that the world is more connected that I thought and we were not so different about “unspoken “rules of respect, empathy and the importance of having a supporting family… One of these students had a brother who was a Vietnan soldier and told me about the Vietnan war in detail… He was still mourning the loss of this brother, who committed suicide after he returned from combat. It impacted me profoundly; I was only 12 years old.

I remember another beautiful human being, Vance. He is the son of an American and a Indian- American lady. I loved to hear about his mom all this was unknown, inspiring and open my being and my mind in so many ways…

Artist BATU GÖKÇE on the Poetics of Process

I was born and raised in Ankara, Turkey. I wish I could say that growing up in Turkey—especially as an LGBTQ+ person—had been a positive experience. However, for me, this process was blurry, hidden, woven with fear, surrounded by boundaries, and often felt like an experience where I couldn't truly belong.

Growing up in a homophobic household created a need to establish a safe space where I could express my emotions. At this point, art became a refuge for me. When I'm painting or creating something, I enjoy turning inward—both to my own experiences and to invisible lives similar to mine. This introspection stands at the most honest place in my production.

A Conversation with Artist BRITTANY MILLER

I don't remember ever not wanting to be an artist. One memory that sticks out, though, is buying a book of optical illusions from a book fair. There were pages of black and white kinetic optical illusions that looked like they were spinning and vibrating on the page. It felt like magic. I thought it was so powerful that images could tell stories, change the way we feel, change the way that we see the world. Images can create revolutions and make people believe in things they didn't think possible. For me, making art is and was compulsive, but I have always wanted to participate in the visual art world in any way possible.

A Conversation with Artist, Writer & Filmmaker LEOPOLDO GOÛT

Making art has always been my most natural state—the only place I feel truly at home making it, even when it's painful. I walk, I wander—I try to slip into the zone. To disconnect from the constant noise of the world. My work is built on memory, on scent, on private rituals I’ve developed over time to access the deeper layers—the ones that live beneath language. The ideas that circle in my head aren't linear; they come in waves, fragments, pulses. I often feel like a custodian in an ancient library, flashlight in hand, checking on the fragile machinery of thought. The work defines the process. The act of making sets my rhythm, shapes my thinking. I don’t impose ideas—I respond to them. It’s the same in film. Most of what I create arrives uninvited. I just try to be present enough to catch it.

A Conversation with Artist ALEXANDER BÄCKMAN

I grew up in a small town outside of Stockholm called Västerhaninge. It was a community marked by things like poverty, alcoholism, substance abuse, violence, and racism. I believe all of that shaped how I see and move through the world. Lately, I’ve been deeply focused on the gaze—particularly the gaze turned away. There's something about a half-turned face that fascinates me: a cheek seen from behind, the ear, the nape of the neck, eyelashes looking outward toward something—often nature or other people. I try to capture these brief, fleeting moments from everyday life.

This is often contrasted with more chaotic, dreamlike imagery. There’s a movement in my work between the dream world and the waking one. A lot of it centers on the body—how we navigate the world through it, and how experiences and relationships imprint themselves over time. The body holds so much: awkwardness, discomfort, shame, and memory.

I’m interested in how these feelings manifest physically—our protruding bellies, drooling mouths, itchy ears, sweaty armpits, folded skin. Lately, this focus has started to appear more in interior scenes as well—around the dinner table, in bed, on the sofa. There’s a growing emphasis in my work on observation and on the body’s desire to simply exist in the world.

A Conversation with Artist ETERI CHKADUA

What emotions do you aim to evoke through your art?
For me, painting is like visual poetry—a silent song—where I’m free to express my thoughts, vulnerability, and emotions, sometime I don’t know how to deal with. I devote a great deal of time to shaping the facial expressions of my characters, trying to capture the emotional essence of each painting’s theme. My hope is that viewers will form a connection with these figures—that something in their gaze or posture will stir empathy, or reflection. I am glad to see people standing in front of my artwork, quietly observing every detail for long minutes, even when the subject matter is disturbing.

A Conversation with Artist MIE OLISE KJRGAARD

I grew up partly on an island in Denmark and on a big wooden ship. I was often so bored that I would shout it out to the ocean. That made me start drawing and making up stories for them. I had a big inner life, and drawing made sense in order to make new space in my head. Exploring ideas, art, and the creative process connects me to a timeless world of energy, that for me is the reason to jump out of bed in the morning. It’s how I connect to myself and the world. Feel very privileged and grateful.

A Conversation with Artist CULLEN B. WASHINGTON, JR.

The setting is Alexandria, Louisiana in he early 70’s. My dad was a theologian, minister and a chaplain, and my mom, an educator and two older sisters. My home environment was scholastic. My dad had two libraries in the home, and he would transliterate Greek and Hebrew in the mornings to get a deeper understanding of the scriptures to prepare his sermons. At the age of 3, He would put me up in the highchair next to him and I would watch him write or what I thought was draw pictures but these were actually letter forms or glyphs that communicated both languages. I would mimic him, I would write/draw those things, and I just never stopped doing it. My mom, the educator, would facilitate my imagination, surrounding me with encyclopedias and books of anything that I was interested in, and also buy me art supplies. Both my sisters also supported my interests whether it was encouragement or comic books.