Interview: Artist Mimi Allin
Art closes in on the divine.
Shenyah Webb met Mimi Allin when they each performed on the same night in the winter of 2013. Mimi’s performance was an extension of her “Burden of Purpose” performance art piece she was working on in Seattle, WA, which required audience participation. Shenyah was asked to play “the rake” alongside Mimi for this performance and this opened a dialog between the two artists.
NAILED MAGAZINE: You current project, “The Burden of Purpose,” is so intriguing. Can you explain this piece and its process?
MIMI ALLIN: “The Burden of Purpose” is an endurance, performance art piece in a cemetery. This is a joint project with an incredibly expressive and poised performance artist, Haruko Nishimura, also from Seattle. We started on New Year’s Day and plan to continue until we’ve carried 49 burdens. Forty-nine comes from the Tibetan Book of the Dead. It is the number of days it takes a soul to journey from death to rebirth. We work 2-5 days per week at Mount Pleasant Cemetery on Queen Anne Hill in Seattle. Sometimes we work together, sometimes I work alone.
“Burden of Purpose” is a combination of performance, ritual and artist study. We wear long, shimmering skirts, Haruko’s is red and mine is blue. People come to see us and write on our skirts. Some lie down with us, some walk with us, some even sing with us. Haruko and I are studying two ongoing cycles, which we repeat over and over again. Mine is work/rest and Haruko’s is silence/song. I rake leaves until I’m fatigued and lie on the ground until I’m cold. Haruko carries a heavy rock until she’s tired then climbs a tree to sing folk songs until she’s breathless. Effectively, I’m tending graves and cultivating clarity and Haruko is calling and healing spirits, both dead and alive.
Our cycles are designed to be complimentary and put us in relation to one another. They compel us to think about how our work is related, which we write about in letters to one another and post on our blog. Thirty-eight people have visited so far us and we’ve carried numerous burdens for people from afar. I’ve taken the project to the Unchaste Readers Series in Portland, OR and to the Black Box Theatre at Edmonds Community College in WA.
NAILED: How was this project born?
MIMI ALLIN: When the piece was first designed, it didn’t require a witness. It began as a project about my own struggle for purpose in the fall of 2012. I’d been struggling with post “Tahoma Kora” syndrome. “Tahoma Kora” was the life changing performance work I performed on Mount Tahoma (Rainier) in the summer of 2011. I spent 65 days on the mountain, prostrating my way around it while reciting mantras, studying sacred texts and trying to locate the sacred in the landscape. When I came back to Seattle, boom, all the meaning dropped out of my artwork. I was just really lost in every way. I’ve been between projects before, but this was a new and pervasive, drastic feeling that kept me from making new work and kept me from connecting with others. I couldn’t fathom why I’d go on making the kind of work I’d been making, which now made no difference. Everything seemed like a clever overlay atop the important stuff and I wanted to get back to what was really important. I was also afraid of falling back into that where we compete for grants and tackle external spatial problems. So I started questioning my purpose and invented this project to address the situation.
To find my cycle, I began with a question. If I had all the time and money in the world, what would I do? My answer was labor, physical labor. In a very real way, labor defines me. With a bachelor’s and a master’s degree, I still choose to do manual labor. I could use my social and language skills and work in an office. I’ve had many jobs, from landscaping to woodworking to art fabricating to boatyard work. To find the compliment, or the opposite of labor, I tried to think about what feeds labor and what is fed by it. I decided that rest feeds labor and since rest isn’t something I do, I had something to learn from it.
I planned this cycle for a little pioneer cemetery in Kent, WA called Saar Cemetery. It was on a site-specific grant list and I written the grant but didn’t get it. A few weeks later, Haruko invited me for tea. We met and considered working together. I told her about my recent idea and we came up with a way for her to join me. We considered a cycle complimentary to my cycle and came up with silence/song. I saw my cycle as horizontal and thought it was nice that hers was vertical. We added weight to counter the lightness of her song. Haruko brought up Zen meditation gardens where rocks are symbols of meditative silence. Perfect! So she carries a heavy rock and climbs trees to sing folk songs.
From the beginning, Haruko expressed an interest in witness. She said much of her practice is solitary and she wanted interaction. We devised a way to include the witness as participant. Now people come to us and we work with them directly. They bring us burdens to carry and lay things to rest with us. We do this by staying in our cycle and having them witness us in a specific way. While we’re playing a big part in what happens, it’s really the witness who does the deep work. It’s like we’re ceremony masters facilitating an experience. Our witnesses create the project along with us. And they’re invited to step into our cycles and to dialog with us afterwards and, if they wish, to invent a cycle of their own and to come back and perform with us. We feel immense gratitude for every visit. We’ve learned so much from everyone who’s come and shaped the project. We’ve also learned a lot from one another and from the cemetery too.
NAILED: Do you ever feel “off” after laying a burden to rest, as if you are carrying a part of the burden? Does negative energy ever invade your own energy or mood?
ALLIN: This is one of those projects that doesn’t leave residue. It happens while it is happening and when it is done, it is done. It exists whenever it is taken up and, as it is taken up, gains power and meaning. It solves the problem of purpose and uses burdens as its means.
When I am struggling with my own energy and emotions, I find it harder to go into then come out of the cemetery. I question, who am I to help others when I cannot help myself? When I am in the cemetery, I am carrying and releasing my own burdens as well the burden of others.
Beautiful things happen in the cemetery. Blessings are bestowed. It is nothing like reading Tennessee Williams. It is wholly expansive and healing. The burdens are only taken up and carried for a short while. It’s up to the witness what happens after that. Can the burden be released or is it taken back? Some find they can’t even give up their burden. Some decide it’s pointless to go on carrying theirs. Some find a way to accept their burden as a part of who they are. Some find themselves thinking differently about their burdens.
This is ongoing work. It’s not instantaneous. We are offering a platform for dialog. A friend of a friend contacted us in January and told us not to do our cemetery project. I asked why and she explained the energy in the cemetery is not good for us. I brought this news to Haruko and several colleagues. The responses were varied. Some disregarded it, some found it frightening, some wanted more information.
I feel good about what I am doing and how I am doing it. I am tending graves. My labor is respectful. I’m helping maintain a shared, historical landscape. I feel as if I work there, alongside the other grave tenders. We never asked permission to do this project and we were never told to stop. Haruko was respectful of the spirits. I felt as if I was getting to know them.
One of our participants brought us stones to absorb the negative energy. During his visit, he let Haruko wear his hematite bracelet. As the project progressed, Haruko brought in other ways to protect herself. Here is one way, in her words, “Since the spirits are always present in the cemetery, some unrested and perhaps looking for a vessel, I asked Mimi to write on my skin, each burden. Soon it will completely cover my face. I will be protected, unseen by the wandering ones. It is definitely a blessing being protected by the letters of each burden, full of each person’s strong energy behind them.”
It is March. We’ve carried 49 burdens. We’ve met our goal. We’re thinking about the next step. We think it involves burial, transformation and rebirth. We think we need to spend a night in the earth and consciously take on the role of the healer artist.
NAILED: So much of your work involves healing. You offer the gift of healing others, alongside healing of the Self. And most of your art contains performance, some form of interaction, oftentimes quite laborious. Your self-portraits, however, seem different to me. Are they a tool for healing also? What is your process with your self-portraiture?
ALLIN: Like Tarkovsky, I believe life is about finding our way back home and that we use art to do it. Art closes in on the divine. My art is about healing because I need to be healed. My art is about connecting because I need to be known. To get home, I need everyone’s help.
Perhaps the self-portraits seem different than my public projects because the viewer and viewed have agreed on something and so the product is self-contained. The self-portraits have been growing confident in the solitude of a studio. Do they seem solid to you? They seem as if they’re made of light to me. They seem intangible.
My first attempt to see myself came in 2006. Those images were taken with a film camera and printed on a contact sheet. They were cut out with scissors and viewed through a magnifying lens. A little over a month later they were cut into pieces and thrown away.
I still don’t recognize myself in the portraits. The person I see is more beautiful, sacred and sensual than I. Thinner and softer than I am.
The self-portraits are about healing, of course they are. This work has been ongoing since 2008. Whenever I have time in the studio, they surface. They’re part of the work I feel compelled to do and they ultimately make me feel healthy and whole.
At the beginning, they insisted themselves on me. Now they’re more polite and ask me nicely. Though they can be patient, if I’m not able to work on them for a long time, I’ll eventually feel unbalanced and agitated.
I’ve been dialoging with my close friend and peer artist, Vanessa DeWolf, about the differences between practice and project for some years. Much of my public work is project-based, but what underlies that work is my practice, which is ongoing. I never know what the exact outcome of a project will be. I start with an objective (a kind of map) and head for the borders. My projects typically involve work and communication in the public realm. While a practice cannot fail, a project is meant to. If I don’t fail, I haven’t found the edges. My self-portraits happen alone and involve work on the self in a private realm. They result in a byproduct or documentation I can share with others.
A practice can give the viewer an idea of how an artist sees the world. A project can give the artist an idea of how the world views them.
What actually happens in my practice of self-portraiture is play. It’s like trying to learn the language of an object, color or mood. I lock the door, open the curtains, set up a tripod, set my camera on automatic timer and undress. The unclothed body seems honest to me. I find an object that interests me (bottle, dress, sweater, bag of flour, mop head, nautical flags, wig, bag of kale, fishing nets, tiny boat) and begin to play. Oftentimes the object comes from my project work, which gives me a chance to view it out of context. For instance, when I was artist-in-residence at Tent City 3, I brought in a tent and tarps and photographed myself wearing oversized coats. The portraits are about unveiling and seeking my sacred self. I suppose in a sense they are also about achieving a kind of unbiased outlook, of becoming naïve, of losing the jade.
NAILED: When was the last time you nailed it?
ALLIN: I nailed it last summer with Surrogate and the year before with Tahoma Kora and the year before with Walking in War & Peace. These are examples of what it means to me to nail it. I base that on two things: (1) on the responses I get from my audience and (2) on the way I feel about the work myself (both during and after the piece). It’s happened both ways. I’ve had sponsors and witnesses say what a great event I produced and have left feeling exhausted, lost and dissatisfied myself and I’ve had a work feel great and yet be overlooked or simply not responded to by my audience or sponsors.
An unresponsive audience is the worst. I performed a piece at an open poetry reading in a library and felt invisible. I performed the same piece for an intimate group in an art studio and for a seated audience at a theatre and the connections were profound. Nailing it is when both parts work, outside and in, when the artist and witness are both enriched and when the sponsor, if there is one, is somehow present too.
I do interactive and solo performance work so nailed can be many things. Nailed can be when things take off and start working on their own and when all things funnel through one focus. Nailed is when I continue to be interested after a year or two and keep learning and finding new pathways. Sometimes it feels like you’re nailing it more when you get press, but that’s just a way of nailing it with approval. The added audience isn’t bad, but a critic doesn’t really nail down any feathery project.
Some of my nailed works will never be seen by the world, because they weren’t written about and, fortunately (or not), either weren’t documented or weren’t documented well. But I learn from all of them, from the nailed and the un-nailed (the freely roaming), about what works and what doesn’t. I keep a mental list of those things and refer to it when I create new work.
Because I work in and with the public, I’m never wholly in charge of what will happen. Sometimes the venue is wrong or the day or the weather. Sometimes it’s too early or late. I find waiting is a good tactic. Stand out of the way. Let them come to you. But my audience can’t really be counted on to respond in a particular way or at all at all. That’s part of the point (some may say problem) of my art, to feel for and find the lines of engagement. Will they respond? Won’t they? Can they see me? Can’t they? What do they want? What do I need? Where will we meet?
I’ve learned to build self-care into my projects. I go into them understanding that I might not be seen and I might fail to communicate. I make sure they have enough work and mental food in them to sustain me. If they sustain me, my audience has a greater chance of meeting me in them. Typically, I find, the audience does find me and does meet me, not everyone all the time, but many people much of the time, so I have left off worrying too much about it and have come to trust myself.
When I perform in public, I keep in mind that I can’t always know the impact of my work. No matter how much planning or forethought I bring to it, I can’t be sure what or how people see me. Sometimes my work invites people to respond directly to me, to tell me how they’re being affected. That clears up the matter for sure. People want to be engaged. When they are, it’s clear to me that my work is working, that I nailed it.
A K Mimi Allin has twice crossed the Pacific Ocean by sailboat, has worked as a climbing ranger on Mt Rainier and has served in the Peace Corps. She holds an MA in Writing from City College of New York. In 2012, Mimi wrote all of Shakespeare’s sonnets in the sand at low tide out at Kalaloch Beach on the Pacific Coast and let the surf wash them away. This winter she performed a 49-day work/rest cycle in collaboration with Haruko Nishimura at Mount Pleasant Cemetery in Seattle. Visit her website here.