This June, Glasgow’s CCA hosted everything is borrowed, Clay AD’s series of carved sculptures – an exploration of heaven and hell, good and evil, and how these terms morph our everyday realities. Drawing on their Christian upbringing, Clay examines what narratives they have taken with them into adulthood, and the subsequent battles they impart on the subconscious. Clay works with the living material of wood, side by side, like a peer or a friend, letting the medium guide the art. We spoke on how approaching art in this way can connect you spiritually to a piece that is just as much alive as you are.
How did the show come about?
About three and a half years ago I got a studio for the first time in like ten years, so I started making sculptures again. My brain enjoys the puzzle of it – I was using a lot of found objects like I did in art school. Last year I had a gear shift and I really wanted to make chainsaw art – I really got into watching videos of it and the process seemed really satisfying.
Can you explain what chainsaw art is?
It’s when you take a log or a big piece of wood and carve it as if it’s a stone. It’s a reductive process where you take parts out to make the object. It’s also hilarious because they have competitions for this, seeing who can go the fastest. It has this sort of American, man-in-the-woods flavour – and I find that gendered side of it quite interesting and funny. Not to fetishise it, but it’s a weird form of masculinity, and there’s also a pleasure of something coming from nothing.
Anyway, I started doing woodworking at GalGael, which is a community woodworking space in Govan. My entry point was this strange macho chainsaw art and then I learnt more technique and started to appreciate the wood as a living material. I worked out how to allow it to guide you because of its grain, or how it’s shaped.
Sculpture is so different to working with something like a pen and paper, because you’ve got materials that might not cooperate with your vision.
Yes exactly – my dad is an amazing woodworker and because of that he’s very precise. It was always around me as a kid and he still does it, so following the material made more sense in my brain.
A sound designer that I’m working with, Hang Linton, made a sound to go with the pieces using exciters. You can put them on any object and they sort of vibrate depending on what the material is. All the sculptures will have their own speakers, and they’re all having this conversation throughout the space. I liked adding something that was moving through the space, and that slowed people down as well.
How did you decide on the theme of the show?
What I like about making art is that the theme usually finds you. I feel like my brain is quite literal, and I really got into trees in a sort of personal, spiritual kind of way. I was visiting this one specific oak tree in Queens Park a few years ago – I was really into oaks at the time because they have incredible diversity within single trees. They grow all sorts of moss and plants and are homes to lots of animals. They feel like their own little planets. At the same time, I was looking at images of family trees, and had my own journey whilst understanding my ancestry and lineage.
Thinking about your ancestry and family tree, how does your practice speak to your past as opposed to your present and where you’re at now. Has it changed?
There are a sort of Christian influences in these stories, that I maybe picked up as a kid and dealt with as I got older. I’ve realised that I’m still carrying that stuff around.
Back where I’m from in Indiana, I attended some church services where gay people were being really demonised. Watching the recent [UK] Supreme Court ruling, I realise it’s the same thing in a different outfit. Something that has come up in my work is the idea of who the devil is, and the phrase ‘scapegoating’. In the Book of Leviticus the Israelites used to ritually hand over their sins to a goat, which would then be released into the wilderness. That would allow the community to release their sins, and that’s where ‘scapegoating’ comes from. Now, it’s become a term for a person or a group of people blaming others for something they didn’t do. It’s interesting that it comes from the idea of handing over one’s own sins to another.
For myself, how did growing up Protestant get into my bones? How has it generationally made me, and imparted upon me things that I don’t agree with and don’t want to carry? How do you leave those things behind, let them go, and rewrite?
Where does the title ‘everything is borrowed’ come from?
Last year I was doing a guided meditation, during what was a quite intense period of grief for me. I’d had two friends pass away, which was a huge loss to the community and was quite shocking. So I was doing the meditation and in my head I was on this mountain, looking at a big pile of stuff. All kinds of stuff, like a junkyard but with rocks and plants too. On top of the mountain was a crow with something shiny in its mouth, and as I was looking at it, it said, ‘Everything is borrowed’. I guess what I took from that is that the end is not the end, and that the physical life is like a borrowed state, almost on borrowed time. The physical body is like a borrowed experience. That information gave me some peace. Even if we don’t go anywhere else or we just get composted into earth, that’s still a borrowed state – our matter is becoming something else. That concept of owning something that’s yours – that was completely upended for me, in a nice way.
For upcoming exhibitions at the CCA, visit cca-glasgow.com.
