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Q&A With Swoon

Known to her friends and family as Caledonia Curry, this artist told Scholastic Art what inspires her

Caledonia Curry portrait: Bryan Welch.

Caledonia Curry, who is also known as Swoon

Scholastic Art: When did you first know you wanted to be an artist?

Swoon: When I was 10, I went to a painting class that I didn’t realize was for adults. It was a bunch of retirees in Florida doing Bob Ross-style painting. At the end of the day, I had this beautiful painting. Everyone was like, “Wow, you painted that.” Even though I had done it with so much help from my teacher, it still made me believe in myself and other people believe in me in this way that was really special. And I just kept going from there.

Caledonia Curry (b. 1977), Edline, Indonesia, 2015. Wheat paste. Courtesy of Swoon Studio.

Swoon met the subject of this work, Edline, in Haiti. Following an earthquake in that country in 2010, the artist and a group of her friends helped a community there rebuild. They also started an after-school program. The students made shadow puppets, like the one of the sun Edline holds in this portrait.

SA: Where do you find inspiration?

Swoon: Kind of everywhere. I’ve traveled a lot. I look at everything. I read stories. I watch films. I explore, and I like to look at nature. I’m just constantly taking in as much as I can. I do a lot of meditation, and during my meditations, ideas just bubble up to the surface.

SA: SA: How do you develop portraits, such as Edline, above?

Swoon: Each portrait comes from a different place. Sometimes it’ll be a friend or a family member, or even somebody I see in passing. Other times, it’ll have a complex history like the portrait of Edline does. I draw mainly from photographs. I’ll pull from different sources of inspiration, and then I’ll make some sketches. I lay out a bunch of linoleum on the wall and make a huge charcoal drawing. I concretize the drawing in marker, and then I carve it out, ink up the block, and then I print it. Once it’s printed, I cut it out, paint it, and paste it to a wall. It’s quite a journey to make a piece like that.

Caledonia Curry, Healing Begins With Connection, The Road Home, 2018. Mural. Photograph courtesy of Steve Weinik and Caledonia Curry.

Why does Swoon believe works like this have the power to reach so many people?

SA: Why have you chosen to show so much of your work in public places?

Swoon: I grew up in a place where there wasn’t a lot of art. And when I first started to go to museums, I remember feeling like, “Oh my gosh, are they even going to let me in? Is this for me?” Yet I loved the boisterous city. I wanted to make art that people could see, even if they didn’t feel welcome in a museum. Even if people don’t think they care about art, they can stumble upon it and go “Whoa, you know what? I actually really connect with this.”

Caledonia Curry, Tumaini, Tunisia, 2014. Wheat paste. Courtesy of Swoon Studio.

Describe the process the artist follows to make a work like this.

SA: Do you think artists can inspire change through public art?

Swoon: Culture is something that happens through big institutions like government and law making. But it’s also something that one person can affect through art. A lot of change has to happen at an emotional level before change can happen at a legislative level. And so when I think about the ways that art can make change, I think about the ways art helps us feel our feelings. It helps us think and speak and understand each other and communicate. In that way, it slowly does inspire change.

"When I think about the ways that art can make change, I think about the ways art helps us feel our feelings."

—Swoon

A Message from Swoon

 
Hi young art makers!
 
Can I tell you a secret? Art is actually a secret vault to store magic in. And magic is real, but you knew that already. The best part about the magical art vault, is that the magic goes in once, and then it never stops coming out. Some pieces of art are still transmitting their magic hundreds of years later.
 
Here’s how it works. Think of a feeling, like, how excited you felt when you first went down a water slide, or how sad you were when your dog died, or the special way you felt when your best friend gave you a really thoughtful present.
 
Now connect those feelings to other things like shapes, textures, and colors. Are the feelings squishy like wet clay? Prickly like a cat’s tongue? What color are they? What kinds of movements do they make? Jumpy? Splooshy? Very, very still? Do they sink or hover? If they were an animal what animal would they be? What flower? What ordinary object?
 
Or flip all that and take a look around you. Do blue cars make you feel safe? Do long empty hallways make you feel bored? Or trapped? Is there something about the new haircut of the person who sits in front of you in class that makes your heart feel dizzy? What does your dizzy heart want to draw? The haircut? Or something that seems unrelated but still the dizziness points you in its direction? Sometimes dizziness in my heart makes me want to draw flowing fabric, or stars falling slowly, or light through water.
 
If you do this lots of times and in lots of ways—jump from feeling to color, from color to material, material to subject, and back to feeling, you’ll start to carve out a little space in the world.
 
That’s the vault.
 
Somehow those thoughts and feelings, the odd stuff that makes you you, the parts that don’t have an already-known way to be expressed, they’ll make their way into that vault. And others will see them and their hearts will awaken with strangely familiar truths. You will have used inert material to send feeling across time and space in a little package called an artwork, and you will be a magician.
 
May you make lots and lots of magic.

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