Murmurs of the Deep: Laura Arminda Kingsley in conversation with Rachel TonThat
Photo: © Rachel TonThat.
Laura Arminda Kingsley creates biological fictions drawing inspiration from folklore, literature, evolutionary biology, deep time, and microorganisms creating ecosystems teeming with change and possibility. Kingsley delves into the essence of humanity by drawing upon diasporic mythologies and the history of life on Earth to offer alternative ways of thinking about our existence.
Using her imagination, the natural sciences, mythological references, and our knowledge of the past springs from a need to artistically process painful realities: Kingsley’s works are to be understood as a means of resistance against the advancing pollution of the Caribbean Sea, which she witnessed on-site as a child, as well as the enduring legacy of colonialist notions of race and gender in our society.
A fellow American expat in Zurich, I first met Laura this March at the Kunsthaus Zurich, where we got to know each other over conversations about painting and our many experiences living in Switzerland. Several weeks later, we met at her home and studio in Dubendorf to talk on the record about her artwork, influences, and upcoming performance in Solothurn.
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Rachel TonThat: We’re here after a couple of hours of shooting around your house and studio. Since you were working on one of your sculptures during the shoot, I was curious about the connection you mentioned between cake decorating and the relief-like elements in your work.
Laura: I really like working with textures and structures, and I’m referencing a lot of natural forms that recur again and again throughout the evolution of life on Earth and thinking about the layering of things over time. So yes, technically these new paintings are reliefs. I've done so many different jobs over the course of my life, from helping my mom bake cakes to supplement our income to helping my dad in his veterinary practice. All of those experiences as well as the many different jobs that I've had to support myself inform the way in which I use materials and my whole toolbox of techniques. So yeah, you saw me cut up a bag, then poke a hole in it with an awl, and extrude the material in a similar way that you would do for cakes, but then again, extruding it's very important in ceramics, which is a big part of my artistic vocabulary.
Kindred I, 2023, Acrylic on Canvas, 80 x 80 cm.
Murmurs of the Deep XXIII; I Remember Being You, 2023, Paper Mache, Resin and Acrylic, 58 x 41 x 30 cm
Rachel TonThat: What are the references in your work? Are they mostly from your time growing up in the Dominican Republic?
Laura: The references in my work come from lots of sources, including but not limited to Dominican “Diablo Cojuelo'' carnival costumes, and the Taíno sculptural approach of incorporating seemingly disparate forms and references into one form. Scientific illustrations by Ersnt Haeckel and Santiago Ramon y Cajal, science fiction works of Octavia E. Butler and H. P. Lovecraft and the works of Ana Mendieta, Wifredo Lam, Hieronymus Bosch and the sculptors of Ifẹ̀.
Diabla, She-Devil, 2017 - 2020, Vacuum formed Plastic mask, 48 x 32 x 54 cm.
Growing up in Santo Domingo also had a lot to do with the strategies that I came up with to identify myself in positive ways, in spite of a lot of colonialist ideas about gender and race, as well a complete disregard for the environment in the society I was growing up in, which then, of course, were also present when I moved to New York, and then when I moved to Switzerland.
That's a strategy that I had to come up with back then to think about history, deep time, natural history, and evolution, devouring National Geographic, Discovery Channel, everything I could get my hands on that exposed me to different ways of thinking about what it means to be a living being.
Rachel TonThat: I feel like water, and as we were discussing, seashells are really present in your work, especially with these colors. Do you feel that the colors are coming from a reference as well, or is this because I’m only seeing one body of work? And if so, how has your work developed over time?
Photo: © Rachel TonThat
Laura: Yes, today you’ve seen one body of work. As one of my mentors at CCA said, I produce aggressively. I experiment a lot and much of my work has looked very different throughout the years. This time I'm intentionally referencing the ocean. In 2020, I started thinking about how I could express all of the historical baggage and poetic potentiality that I find in water. Because of my family's involvement with the transatlantic slave trade, and on one side being an Afro-diasporic person, there is this historical trauma that's associated with the Atlantic Ocean. I started looking at a lot of reference photos of underwater archaeological finds, which is where the indigo and bright turquoise patterns and the tonality and colors came from, and also I was looking at a lot of Ernst Haeckel's “Art Forms in Nature.”
Rachel TonThat: Are the sculptures that I was seeing in your studio, with the ears and the face wreathed in shells, and also the figure with a dual face, part of the same series and how does that connect?
Laura: Yes, that's part of the same series. I started thinking about the ways in which we identify fossils as animals. There is the case of Dickinsonia Costata, which is one of the oldest multicellular cellular animal fossils on record from the Avalon explosion, when animals looked more abstract. Back in the Avalon explosion, there were different types of symmetry, but I decided to focus on bilateral symmetry because that is what we immediately recognize as an animal because we are bilaterally symmetrical. And that's how I started experimenting with mirroring these shapes. But I originally started this mirroring back in 2008, when I was in the basement of Hunter College.
Rachel TonThat: Were you there for a residency? I've been to the basement because a friend of mine was a ceramics resident there. So funnily enough, I can picture this basement very clearly when you say that.
Laura: I did my bachelor’s at Hunter College and that basement brought so many amazing people into my life. Sana Musasama was my mentor there and Matt Nolen, my first ceramics teacher, told me that you have to be unstoppable. I took that to heart. I also met Simone Leigh before her well deserved success; I used to hang out with her at night. It's so inspiring to see somebody you know who has worked so hard do so well. At the time, I was working full-time so that I could pay tuition at Hunter College. I had no days off and, when I was finished with class or with work, I would go to the basement and hang out with my friend Jose Arias and make ceramic sculptures until it was way too late.
Rachel TonThat: It sounds wonderful. Maybe not great in the moment, but something you look back on fondly. Can you describe a bit about your move to Switzerland and if the move changed your work? Or going even further back, how did the move from the Dominican Republic affect your work when you came to New York?
Laura: Whenever you change location in such a drastic way, it definitely changes your perspective on yourself, your culture, and almost on humanity. I'm someone that's always been very intersectional from the beginning. My parents are Dominican: my father is from Puerto Plata, and somebody who has African American heritage which is why I have this very British last name, and my mom is from San Juan de la Maguana, which is a totally different ethnic group but also very mixed. I was born in Columbus, Ohio, which made it possible for me to move to New York after growing up in the Dominican Republic. New York changed a lot of my discourse around identity and really influenced my work. In the Dominican Republic, similar to how it is in Brazil, we have a multifaceted rainbow of options for racial identification, which is also problematic in its own way. There are many names according to how white, black, or Asian you are, or if you’re part Lebanese or part Turkish. But when I moved to the ‘States, where the one drop rule still dictates a lot of how people think about race.
Rachel TonThat: Meaning to say that if you have any trace of color that you are a person of color.
Laura: Yes, it doesn't matter how you look, if you have any African descent, then you're Black. I actually felt very comfortable with that description in some ways, because I had always identified with figures like James Baldwin and Maya Angelou and looked up to many African American intellectuals like Bell Hooks, Audre Lorde or Toni Morrison. There was this pride in their Africanness or their Blackness that felt right to me. Being even more open about identifying with my African heritage influenced my work. It was never a secret, because if you look at me, you will see it, but it really made me be even more conscious and proud and intentional about it.
Rachel TonThat: And then moving to Switzerland?
Laura: When I lived in New York, I lived in Afro-Caribbean Brooklyn. I was so lucky to live there and to land at Hunter College when we had Afro-Caribbean and African literature classes. Then I moved to California to do my master's, and I was living in Oakland for two years. But moving to Zurich was a huge shift. It was a very different way of thinking about race, still dictated by colonialist ideas, and yet a very different way of interacting with it.
Kindred II, 2023, Acrylic on Canvas, 70 x 50 cm.
When I was making art in New York and in California, I knew my audience had an awareness of racial issues as well as Afro-Caribbean or Afro-Dominican culture. When I moved here, I was in an environment where, because of the geographical location as well as power structures in the world, people just weren't as aware of Afro-diasporic culture, or even about the ‘States, since I had this Dominican-American identity. People had really negative views on the ‘States, and didn’t have a grasp of the diversity of opinions and people in that very, very large country. So that was a challenge. It was one of those things that are not necessarily what you want, but they're good for you.
Rachel TonThat: How so? And to bring it back to your art, you said that in the U.S. you had an audience that understood and shared some of your experiences. How did you adapt this work when you arrived? Or did you find your community here?
Laura: Well, here's the thing: I started making work referencing a lot of very specific, Afro-diasporic, American contexts—and when I say America, I don't mean just the U.S., I mean the continent—but then I realized that a lot of these are mechanisms of rethinking what it means to be human. Reconsidering ways of identifying outside of social norms would also be useful and pertinent to people who had a totally different background, such as Swiss people, since every society has some level of rigidity to it or some level of cultural constraint. If I was reconsidering what it means to be human, then I was trying to speak to as many humans as possible, regardless of their background. My work has been made by me, and is very much informed by the environment in which I developed and lived, but it still has reflections, and I hope, different gateways and information that anyone can connect to.
Part of this whole exercise of reconsidering my position in the world was also understanding that if I wanted to think about myself outside of this racialized reality in which I’ve lived, I had to think about what connects me to people who might seem like opposites in this system of categorization that we have come up with for people.
Rachel TonThat: That’s a really good point, especially because we're living in a society that has always been obsessed with race, and as a backlash we’re now forming alliances on the basis of race to support our communities. It's important to pull out and reassess. And speaking as a longtime expatriate, when you live abroad you often find yourself around people who you would never spend time with normally, but you find commonalities with them nonetheless. I’m curious, are there any exhibitions or projects you've done here where you feel like you've connected to the Zurich art scene that was a particularly successful moment of making work that could be for a specific group of people, but also reached a wider audience?
Griottes, 2023, Performance with Plexiglass Window, Duration Variable.
Laura: I've had some exhibitions in Switzerland, where I've gotten feedback from people who are of a very different background than me who really connected to the work and it felt great to know that this connection is possible. Right now I'm preparing to do a day-long performance for Les Jours de Éphémères in Künstlerhaus S11 in Solothurn. There, I will be performing as a Griotte, an oral storyteller in the tradition of my Wolof ancestors. In this performance, I have a plexiglass arch in front of me, and I have water soluble chalk on my hands. I draw on the plexiglass as I'm telling stories about the evolution of life on Earth, about how flowers evolved on the feet of Cretaceous Period dinosaurs, and wondering what’s evolving under our feet now, as we are at the top of the food chain.
I’m also part of the Advisory Board and participating as an artist and arts educator in the upcoming exhibition opening in Fall 2023 Stranger in the Village: Reflecting on Racism with James Baldwin at the Aargauer Kunsthaus in Aarau. This exhibition starts with Baldwin’s experience of racism in the small mountain town of Leukerbad in Switzerland and builds on the work of Swiss and international artists to explore questions of belonging and exclusion.
Murmurs of the Deep, 2021, Digital print on vinyl,
Mural left 400 x 1700 cm, right 400 x 2500 cm. Public artwork at the bottom of the escalators in the Leadenhall Building as part of the 10th edition of Sculpture in the City. Photo: © Nick Turpin
I can't say too much about other projects, but I'm very excited to be working on a public art piece also opening in the Fall of 2023 incorporating animation and poems through augmented reality in collaboration with the technology company freisicht for the public art space TABLEAU ZURICH. I like taking the opportunity to engage people outside of the institution, and I want to make work that connects with a broader audience. Don’t get me wrong, I love the museum-going audience, but I want everybody to have a chance to connect.
Laura Arminda Kingsley was born in the USA in 1984 to Dominican parents and grew up in Santo Domingo. She lives and works in Dübendorf, Switzerland. She holds an associate degree in Fine Arts from Chavón, a bachelor of science from The City University of New York - Hunter College, and a masters in Fine Arts from California College of the Arts.
Exhibition participation includes Sculpture in the City in London, the 22nd Grenchen Triennale in Grenchen, the CICA Museum in Seoul, Suspended Matter at the Berkeley Art Center in Berkeley, as well as the exhibitions Art as Connection at the Aargauer Kunsthaus and shared spaces in change at the Kornhausforum in Bern. Her work was awarded the Dorothy & George Saxe Fellowship in 2012 and 2014, the Kunstatelier-Stipendium of the city of Dübendorf, and the LOCUS Micro-Grant 2021 award.
Rachel TonThat is a conceptual artist and writer working with narrative structures around the themes of climate change, memory, and space-time. She is part of the art book duo, Oreades Press, and was a curator of the Zurich offspace Egg from 2021-2022. In 2022, she was selected for the She Who Has No Master(s) writing mentorship through the Diasporic Vietnamese Artist Network, and her climate storytelling project, Impermanent Earth, was awarded funding from the International Project Fund of Zurich University of the Arts where she completed an MA in Fine Art. She has been a resident at Wassaic Project, live.make.share and A. Farm in Vietnam, and the yearlong What’s Next Compass studio residency in partnership with the city of Zurich. Her writing has been published in Sine Theta Magazine, Diacritics, and more.