221A Interview Series: Sena Cleave

I'm often responding to things that I encounter in everyday life, using materials that are readily available around me from places like hardware stores and sewing shops, or just things that I find in my neighbourhood or my day jobs that no one's going to use—which become the basis for my sculptures. I've been working with weaving and weaving-like structures, which comes from a deeper interest in materials mutually supporting each other. If you look at the most basic structure of a traditional weaving, it’s all made from loose thread. If you don't tension it, it will fall into a pile, become knotted or impractical. But once you organize those threads on a loom, then they hold each other in place and become a structure. I was interested in that support between different materials, so I started off with this plasticky thread that I could find from hardware shops, then, later, I started weaving pine needles into chicken wire. This relationship between materials makes me think about the relationships that humans have with each other and with the materials in the world around us. How does writing fit into this? I think that I write when it doesn't make sense to make an object. My writing and art-making complement each other, but sometimes there's language that is more interesting to me than a material.

I've had multiple family members over the past decade, who either have been sick for a long time or whose deaths I've had to face. That's been a lingering experience of mine that I've been witnessing and reacting to. Similarly, I was working with the idea of diaspora in my initial thread weavings because I was interested in alternative ideas of support, which have to do less with permanent structures and more with temporariness and making-do: you don't always have the resources that you’d prefer to have, or the support in the exact ways that you need it. With these silk pieces behind me, I'm thinking about floods––I started making them in the fall when Vancouver started to have more rain, and particularly in Chinatown where we are, the city infrastructure sometimes isn’t robust enough for the rain, and we get flooded streets or enormous puddles. I was thinking about that attempt, through city infrastructure, to keep ourselves dry, and how that attempt fails. I was interested in that failure. This ties into my silk work through the dye method, a [Japanese] technique called shibori––you take the fabric and scrunch it, or fold it in different ways to create patterns. The pattern I was using specifically is called arashi, which means “storm” in Japanese, creating messy diagonal lines that mimic the way water falls, like how rain falls in a storm. The dye carries that storm idea into these pieces. 

At the same time, I was also thinking about this folktale of two lovers: a weaver woman and a cow herd, falling in love; but because of their love, the weaver woman, who's super skilled, falls out of practice and is no longer laboring in the way that her father, a deity, would like her to be. He decides that she's been distracted by love, and in my memory of the story, he tells her that in order to be with the cow herd, she has to weave a basket that's so tight that it can cross a river. Then he creates this big flood. She attempts and fails to create a basket that's woven tightly enough for her lover to cross the river to meet her. On one hand, it's a love story, but what I'm interested in is this thought of labouring and failing. What does it mean to ask someone to labour in this way? With the idea of feminine or feminized labour, what happens when women or feminized people fail? What does that failure mean? It ties back to the attempts at making our world work one way and not being able to do that.

I come from a Japanese household with a bit of Shinto and Buddhist beliefs. In Shinto, sonaemono is a practice of offering food to spirits, but I was interested in the Buddhist version of it, where you offer food to your ancestors, daily or on special occasions. At the time I was thinking about what it means to reciprocate care to someone who's passed on, who’s looking on and after you. There’s a specific time of year in Japanese culture when we celebrate their lives and spirits––kind of like Día de los Muertos––called Obon, when you would offer food to those who have passed as you would to any other guest. I was thinking about reciprocity and tying that back into the weavings where the threads kind of manifest or materialize reciprocity, too, and holding each other up.

I think a lot of it has to do with my interest in food. They’re a very accessible kind of material that constitutes the life I'm living and the people around me. If you think about food broadly––maybe this is kind of a corny comparison––the ideas I'm taking from the people whose work I'm reading are also a type of sustenance, just like food. And I think it's like a way of referencing back to the labour, the care work that people do and the care for yourself.

Pine needles specifically, though, are part of this East Asian motif that I am interested in, which is used in ceramics, woodworking, textiles, and all sorts of things that have been deemed crafts by Western art. The trio of pine tree, the plum, and the bamboo together symbolizes resilience, because each of them weathers the winter in different ways: pine is sturdy and strong; plum is among the first to bloom at the end of winter; bamboo symbolizes flexibility. People think about them as hope at the end of a difficult time. But, I'm using pine needles in a way where I don't think they look very sturdy, where they need that support, where I’m thinking about resiliency but also precarity. They're so delicate and breakable in my pieces. I was drawn to them as an interesting alternative to thread too, because part of the nature of working with pine needles is having to do a lot of labour to process them. They often come with dirt and grime and sap that I have to clean off, so I soak them and wipe the grime off one by one, and then place them individually into this mesh. It takes a lot of time, and I don't want to say it’s meditative because it doesn't always feel meditative, but there's something about the slowness of that labour that draws me to it.

I was looking for a studio when I had finished school. One day, I walked into Access Gallery and Katie Belcher, the former director, pointed me to 221A because Access Gallery had also been a tenant. I've been here ever since!

I feel kind of like an outsider and a guest in the neighbourhood, and I feel very lucky to be working here. For my day job, I work in the Downtown East Side at an arts festival, and I also went to school not too far from here. There’s also the historic Japanese neighbourhood called Paueru-gai, which is now part of the Downtown East Side. I spend so much time in these places, and I feel like I owe a lot to the neighbourhood as I continue to work out of here.

I'm really getting into cycling lately, and I do a lot of textile stuff just for fun too. I try to create a distinction from the textile work I do for my art practice––I like to knit myself sweaters, embroidering pillows, just for fun. I think I have pretty basic hobbies, like watching movies, hiking, all those sorts of things. I also work in a garden.

It's a funny story. I used to work at the Contemporary Art Gallery and when I left, Phil, the technician there, offered me work in his garden. I didn't know anything about gardening when I started, and I didn't know if I would enjoy it. I was just like, why not try this? So once a week, I work a day in their garden. [There’s] so much stuff growing: flowers, produce, big pine and fir trees––and it's been really, really wonderful.

I’ve thought about it, but it’s a different species of pine, and they are not quite long enough for what I'm wanting to do.

Yeah, it has to be very big trees for the needles to be the length necessary for my work. I have this mental map of where these trees grow around town, and I don’t want to take too much from one tree.

Thank you.