Nicki Green: creating space for trans identity within the domestic sphere
Nicki Green is a transdisciplinary artist whose work focuses on themes of transgender identity at it relates to Jewish mysticism, domestic objects, and transgender bodies. By conflating traditional mediums and patterns with the iconographies of sexuality, Green’s work creates space in domestic environments for a queer presence. She has generously shared two interviews with DandyCraft, so this is merely the first installment. Please be sure to review the links to Nicki and her collaborators throughout the post. Enjoy!
DandyCraft: Please tell us a little bit about yourself. What was your trajectory to becoming an artist? How did you settle on your preferred medium(s)? What drew you to traditional craft practice as a medium of expression?
Nicki Green: I have always used craft processes as a means of creative output, there was always something very intuitively satisfying about making objects out of low-craft materials, a lot of plaster bandage sculpture, papier mache, rag doll making, etc. My parents put me in art classes at a local museum when I was very young and I think these classes were very formative in my appreciation for hand crafts. I took ceramics for the first time in high school and immediately loved the tactility of it, I continued to study sculpture in my undergrad, settling back on clay for the last couple years, and now I feel like it's my main focus. I think, as a mtf spectrum trans person, “feminine crafts” always felt very affirming. I recognize now how essentialist this sounds, but I think that on an intuitive level, making things felt like an extension of my effeminate nature, and while I did not necessarily read as immediately trans as I do now, making crafts felt like a way to nurture a femme identity.
DandyCraft: Traditionally, there has been a scholarly divide between fine arts, the decorative arts and craft. How do you place yourself on this continuum? How do you define yourself as an artist, artisan, craftsperson, maker, etc.? Are these distinctions meaningful to you and your work or not?
Nicki Green: I think these distinctions are only meaningful based on the history of contention between these divides. I think of the work I do as art making, decorative art and craft. It all feels relevant to the work I make. I think the important distinction I make in my work is the conceptual basis for my work, that it's never simply aesthetic. I think this is the larger connection of visual art for me. I'm not interested in making dishware for the sake of stocking a kitchen. I make dishes, sometimes, but when I do it's to feed a larger body of conceptual work that's say, connected to domesticity and transness and fabrication of objects for a queer home, for example. I'm incredibly bored by the art/craft binary discussion, I think that objects in the world can be as fluid as identity and meaning and perception and it serves us very little to try and identify objects within rigid categories.
DandyCraft: Who are your influences? Who are the other artists or individuals your work is in conversation with?
Nicki Green: I've always felt a deep connection to Louise Bourgeois and am very much interested in the intuitive, ongoing practice of making things as a sort of life's work. A huge inspiration has been transvestite potter Grayson Perry. It's a dream to get to work with him one day. I'd say my work is in conversation with other queer art makers (SF artist Craig Calderwood, Bellingham, WA artist Chris Vargas are two close friends and collaborators) and also the queer and trans elders who fought so hard to give space to younger folks like us making work about our queer and trans lives. We're indebted to them.
DandyCraft: Your work focuses strongly on queer interpretations of traditional domesticity, sexuality and gender. Was this always a facet of your work? How did it evolve? Have you found your work informed by or in tension with the traditional associations or history of your medium? What were the moments in your life that influenced this perspective?
Nicki Green: My work is deeply queered because my life experience is deeply queer. Growing up, I heard a lot of gay folks say things like “I'm gay but that's only a small part of who I am” and I always felt estranged from that mindset, mostly because I've been so preoccupied with gay culture and especially gay visual culture that I feel like my queerness is part of everything I do and integral to how I move through the world. I feel like craft material histories are not explicitly queer (but maybe craft as a concept is pretty queer,) and so my queer subject matter creates quite a tension between me and my work and elders in my field. I think my transness, or say, my androgynousness, complicates, or puts me at odds with cis people in the world, sometimes even puts me at odds with other trans folks. Similarly, I think my fluid relationship to art/craft making puts me at odds with other craftspeople. I recently had large ceramic crocks in a show, one of which shattered in the kiln and I showed it as is (Shattering is a concept in Kabbalah that I'm incredibly interested in) and the gallerist reported back that a ceramics professor came to see the show and was quite distraught to see cracked ceramics in a show. That is really exciting to me!
DandyCraft: Craft is frequently associated and lauded for its strong emphasis on community, in terms of communal production/creative processes in domestic or studio environments, or generating community participation/action around a particular issue. Do you find this to be true with your process and work? What community do you envision as the audience for your work?
Nicki Green: These days, I tend to work in an isolated fashion, I like just being focused on my work, and I use openings and speaking engagements to release any ounce of extroversion. That said, craft processes have traditionally been centered around socializing and the master/apprentice model. It's only recently that the internet has eliminated the need to interact with other people in person in order to pass along information. Like I said before, I think my queerness makes it difficult to connect with straight/cis/square craftspeople, and that alone makes me feel very apprehensive to seek out this apprenticeship model. I think this shift away from human, in-person interaction democratizes the dissemination of information and is incredibly important – it's been huge socially for queer people in that the internet's ubiquity has begun to make obsolete the “i'm the only one” narrative – young queer people have access to each other immediately and I think this is huge for the development of young people's senses of self. Similarly, using, say, youtube as a way to learn craft skills creates an immediacy and almost universal accessibility that has not existed before. There's something really romantic, though, in the process of passing skills down interpersonally from one person to another, so I haven't quite given up on the power of this yet. I've been thinking a lot about the way that queer people reproduce – I mean, it's always been possible for queer people to reproduce sexually giving birth to other humans, but more so the way queer politics are reproduced. I think about how the dissemination of information has always been either oral story telling or literature-based, and the power of creating intergenerational relationships as a way to further the queer population/communities. This is a significant overlap in my thoughts about Judaism (Jews are obsessed with reproduction as a means of preserving the Jewish culture and practices, for good reason, but as a queer and trans Jew that cannot reproduce sexually, how can I pass on the practices and histories or other queer and trans Jews?)
DandyCraft: The last decade has brought significant societal and political change for the LGBTQ community with the advancements in marriage equality, but there are still important advancements to be made. Have you found your work addressing or evolving in light of these the social and political changes? What do you see as the new front-line for the LGBTQ community and do you intend to address it in your work?
Nicki Green: I think the most major change I've noticed in the evolution of LGBTQ politics is visibility and accessibility. The way this has impacted my work is mainly in its wider cultural significance. I think we still have such a long way to go politically, I think we need to center intersectional politics when we think of front-line movement, the idea that the liberation of queer and trans people is intrinsically connected to the liberation of people of color and particularly black lives, and these politics are intrinsically connected to the abolishing of the prison industrial complex, immigration reform, etc. I have faith that we're moving in the right direction, but to be queer is to be engaged with the experience of otherness, and we have to choose to utilize our individual privileges to support others in their fights for liberation as well.
DandyCraft: Please tell us a little bit about yourself. What was your trajectory to becoming an artist? How did you settle on your preferred medium(s)? What drew you to traditional craft practice as a medium of expression?
Nicki Green: I have always used craft processes as a means of creative output, there was always something very intuitively satisfying about making objects out of low-craft materials, a lot of plaster bandage sculpture, papier mache, rag doll making, etc. My parents put me in art classes at a local museum when I was very young and I think these classes were very formative in my appreciation for hand crafts. I took ceramics for the first time in high school and immediately loved the tactility of it, I continued to study sculpture in my undergrad, settling back on clay for the last couple years, and now I feel like it's my main focus. I think, as a mtf spectrum trans person, “feminine crafts” always felt very affirming. I recognize now how essentialist this sounds, but I think that on an intuitive level, making things felt like an extension of my effeminate nature, and while I did not necessarily read as immediately trans as I do now, making crafts felt like a way to nurture a femme identity.
DandyCraft: Traditionally, there has been a scholarly divide between fine arts, the decorative arts and craft. How do you place yourself on this continuum? How do you define yourself as an artist, artisan, craftsperson, maker, etc.? Are these distinctions meaningful to you and your work or not?
Nicki Green: I think these distinctions are only meaningful based on the history of contention between these divides. I think of the work I do as art making, decorative art and craft. It all feels relevant to the work I make. I think the important distinction I make in my work is the conceptual basis for my work, that it's never simply aesthetic. I think this is the larger connection of visual art for me. I'm not interested in making dishware for the sake of stocking a kitchen. I make dishes, sometimes, but when I do it's to feed a larger body of conceptual work that's say, connected to domesticity and transness and fabrication of objects for a queer home, for example. I'm incredibly bored by the art/craft binary discussion, I think that objects in the world can be as fluid as identity and meaning and perception and it serves us very little to try and identify objects within rigid categories.
DandyCraft: Who are your influences? Who are the other artists or individuals your work is in conversation with?
Nicki Green: I've always felt a deep connection to Louise Bourgeois and am very much interested in the intuitive, ongoing practice of making things as a sort of life's work. A huge inspiration has been transvestite potter Grayson Perry. It's a dream to get to work with him one day. I'd say my work is in conversation with other queer art makers (SF artist Craig Calderwood, Bellingham, WA artist Chris Vargas are two close friends and collaborators) and also the queer and trans elders who fought so hard to give space to younger folks like us making work about our queer and trans lives. We're indebted to them.
DandyCraft: Your work focuses strongly on queer interpretations of traditional domesticity, sexuality and gender. Was this always a facet of your work? How did it evolve? Have you found your work informed by or in tension with the traditional associations or history of your medium? What were the moments in your life that influenced this perspective?
Nicki Green: My work is deeply queered because my life experience is deeply queer. Growing up, I heard a lot of gay folks say things like “I'm gay but that's only a small part of who I am” and I always felt estranged from that mindset, mostly because I've been so preoccupied with gay culture and especially gay visual culture that I feel like my queerness is part of everything I do and integral to how I move through the world. I feel like craft material histories are not explicitly queer (but maybe craft as a concept is pretty queer,) and so my queer subject matter creates quite a tension between me and my work and elders in my field. I think my transness, or say, my androgynousness, complicates, or puts me at odds with cis people in the world, sometimes even puts me at odds with other trans folks. Similarly, I think my fluid relationship to art/craft making puts me at odds with other craftspeople. I recently had large ceramic crocks in a show, one of which shattered in the kiln and I showed it as is (Shattering is a concept in Kabbalah that I'm incredibly interested in) and the gallerist reported back that a ceramics professor came to see the show and was quite distraught to see cracked ceramics in a show. That is really exciting to me!
DandyCraft: Craft is frequently associated and lauded for its strong emphasis on community, in terms of communal production/creative processes in domestic or studio environments, or generating community participation/action around a particular issue. Do you find this to be true with your process and work? What community do you envision as the audience for your work?
Nicki Green: These days, I tend to work in an isolated fashion, I like just being focused on my work, and I use openings and speaking engagements to release any ounce of extroversion. That said, craft processes have traditionally been centered around socializing and the master/apprentice model. It's only recently that the internet has eliminated the need to interact with other people in person in order to pass along information. Like I said before, I think my queerness makes it difficult to connect with straight/cis/square craftspeople, and that alone makes me feel very apprehensive to seek out this apprenticeship model. I think this shift away from human, in-person interaction democratizes the dissemination of information and is incredibly important – it's been huge socially for queer people in that the internet's ubiquity has begun to make obsolete the “i'm the only one” narrative – young queer people have access to each other immediately and I think this is huge for the development of young people's senses of self. Similarly, using, say, youtube as a way to learn craft skills creates an immediacy and almost universal accessibility that has not existed before. There's something really romantic, though, in the process of passing skills down interpersonally from one person to another, so I haven't quite given up on the power of this yet. I've been thinking a lot about the way that queer people reproduce – I mean, it's always been possible for queer people to reproduce sexually giving birth to other humans, but more so the way queer politics are reproduced. I think about how the dissemination of information has always been either oral story telling or literature-based, and the power of creating intergenerational relationships as a way to further the queer population/communities. This is a significant overlap in my thoughts about Judaism (Jews are obsessed with reproduction as a means of preserving the Jewish culture and practices, for good reason, but as a queer and trans Jew that cannot reproduce sexually, how can I pass on the practices and histories or other queer and trans Jews?)
DandyCraft: The last decade has brought significant societal and political change for the LGBTQ community with the advancements in marriage equality, but there are still important advancements to be made. Have you found your work addressing or evolving in light of these the social and political changes? What do you see as the new front-line for the LGBTQ community and do you intend to address it in your work?
Nicki Green: I think the most major change I've noticed in the evolution of LGBTQ politics is visibility and accessibility. The way this has impacted my work is mainly in its wider cultural significance. I think we still have such a long way to go politically, I think we need to center intersectional politics when we think of front-line movement, the idea that the liberation of queer and trans people is intrinsically connected to the liberation of people of color and particularly black lives, and these politics are intrinsically connected to the abolishing of the prison industrial complex, immigration reform, etc. I have faith that we're moving in the right direction, but to be queer is to be engaged with the experience of otherness, and we have to choose to utilize our individual privileges to support others in their fights for liberation as well.