Tag: Arthur C. Clarke

An Interview With Meliors Simms

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Meliors Simms is a contemporary landscape artist, radical crafter, a science fiction poet and an old-school blogger. She makes icebergs, islands and even whole continents from vintage blankets, wool and thread. Her sculptures look like cuddly landscape features yet carry serious environmental messages about the impacts of our everyday choices on the world around us. This August she is exhibiting art about mining in Melbourne and about Antarctica in Hamilton, where she will be reading poetry as well.

Meliors’ poem Ponting’s Genius was the Tuesday Poem on my blog this week.

The photo above shows Meliors with a work called Sastrugi. Photo by Jody Saturday

Meliors, a simple question, but one that may have a complex answer: why are you so interested in Antarctica?

It is mysterious, dangerous, vulnerable and beautiful. The lack of flora and fauna (and pigments) focus our attention onto patterns and textures of snow and ice, sky and sea which I find very exciting to interpret visually. Its short, intense human history and its long, surprising natural history both provide thrilling stories that bear endless iterations. And ultimately at this distance, it’s a blank canvas for the imagination.

If you had the chance to visit Antarctica, would you?

Um, this is tricky, because if I was offered an opportunity to go I would probably accept. But really I’m ambivalent. On one hand it would be amazing, inspiring and unlike anything else I could do. But on the other hand Antarctica is an incredibly vulnerable environment about which I am intensely concerned. I don’t think Antarctica needs me as just another tourist, although I’m willing to be persuaded that I might have something of value to offer in exchange for a free ticket.

I spend a huge amount of time thinking about Antarctica and my imagination seems adequately fed through second hand sources. The compliments about my work that I treasure the most are from people who have spent time in Antarctica, who tell me I’ve captured the essence of the place.

And besides, its jolly cold and a bit scary down there.

You are both an artist and a poet, and for the Imagining Antarctica exhibition in Hamilton, you are giving a poetry reading / artist’s talk as well as exhibiting visual art. How do the practice of art and the practice of poetry work side by side – and for that matter, how on Earth do you find the time to do both?

The Imagining Antarctica exhibition at ArtsPost

Ha! I don’t really find time to do both. The past months of intensely preparing my exhibitions has been a poetry drought. Writing seems to be woven through my creative life in an irregular abstract way rather than as a disciplined practice. There are times when I write a lot, but more times when I write little or nothing. Last year was very productive though, and most of the poems I wrote then relate to the art I am showing now, hence the poetry reading and artist talk event.

Reading and looking at the entries on your excellent blog, I am struck by the hours and hours of work that goes into creating them. Can you describe your process of making them, such as the icebergs?

Most of the work I make these days starts with an old woven wool blanket which I cut into contour pieces. I needle felt each layer with a nice plump cover of unspun wool and then attach the layers together using blanket stitch. The icebergs are three dimensional, sculptural pieces so there’s a lot of layers and a lot of needle felting to get the three-dimensionality.

I use a similar technique to make wall relief pieces which may use only a couple of layers of blanket and little or no felting, but can be much bigger and even more time consuming to make. My biggest work, ‘My Antarctica’ a scale relief map of the entire continent, took me about eight months to make. I can make a little iceberg in a week.

Meliors standing in front of My Antarctica. Photo: Marion Manson (ArtsPost)

Over time I have perversely chosen to make my stitching cruder (even though hundreds of hours of practice has made me a better stitcher). I want my work to look unmistakably handmade. With some of my earlier embroidered pieces viewers would assume it was machine stitched, and I decided I didn’t want any ambiguity about that. I ‘d rather have people saying ‘I could make that’ and so to consider what it means to stitch something by hand. I want people to contemplate the hours and hours that go into my making.

Why did you choose the craft medium, and these crafts in particular, to make your artworks (and, does the wording of that question imply a dichotomy that doesn’t or shouldn’t exist?)

Contemporary art is a very broad field in which there are lots of interesting craft practices to be seen. I choose craft as my means of creative expression both for the pleasure and the meaning of my making. Slow meditative hand stitching is very sensual and satisfying. By choosing hand made rather than machine made, and doing it myself rather than farming the work out to low paid women in Asia, my work implicitly critiques the economic as well as environmental impacts of industrialised consumerist culture.

You were recently in Melbourne for the opening of the “F**k Your Donation” exhibition, which includes your installation “Spoil”. How was that experience, and is this part of a continuing involvement in the Australian arts scene?

Meliors’ installation “Spoil” at “F**k Your Donation”

Melbourne is a fantastic city for the arts, and especially for craft practices in contemporary art. It is a real thrill to show in a gallery there for the first time, and have such an enthusiastic response to my work. I hope to go back for more soon.

One thing I know we have in common is our love for Kim Stanley Robinson’s writing, and in particular his Mars trilogy. What’s so great about those books?

Well, KSR’s novel Antarctica turned me into a fan of Antarctica as well as speculative fiction when I first read it some 15 years ago. That book, and the Mars and Washington trilogies resonate with me as extremely plausible near-future-histories that aren’t dystopias. I like his strong, complex female characters; frustratingly rare in the genre. I reread all seven novels reasonably regularly and I appreciate the detail as well as the broad sweep of his vision. But mostly because he’s very good at making it seem possible that we 21st century humans could dig ourselves out of the dreadful mess our species has created, and I often feel the need for that spark of hope.

KSR’s writing has had a huge influence on my visual, textile arts. For example I’ve turned again and again to his descriptions of the textures and colours of Antarctica as I’ve stitched. He’s a wonderfully visual writer. In more direct homage, I once made a series of small embroidered ‘Mars gardens’, visualising the greening of the red planet as practised by Sax Russell and others in his trilogy.

Three of Meliors’ “Mars Gardens”, after Kim Stanley Robinson

Do you have any writing projects on the go that are separate from your art projects, and how do you see the balance between your art and your poetry developing in the future?

Right now I don’t have any particular writing projects. Rather, I’m content to let occasional poems arise spontaneously, most often in very close relationship to the visual art I’m working on, particularly at the early, conceptual stages.

Are there particular artists and poets whose work you enjoy that you’d like to encourage readers of this interview to check out?

I’m pretty excited about sculptors Ruth Asawa (http://www.ruthasawa.com/) and Mandy Greer (http://stonemandy.wordpress.com/). I also recommend the photographs of Edward Burtynsky (http://www.edwardburtynsky.com/), and the fantastic video about his work called Manufactured Landscapes. Two of the poets I am enjoying most at the moment are Janis Freegard and Bernadette Hall.

Where people can see Meliors’ work

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What Is Interstitial Fiction?

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A couple of months back, I made the bold claim that my short story collection Transported is an example of interstitial fiction. “Ah-hah,” you might have thought to yourself, “I must get down to my local bookshop and raid the interstitial fiction shelves at once!”

Or, more likely, you wondered what on earth I was talking about. An understandable response, because “interstitial fiction” hardly trips off the tongue. But interstices are gaps or cracks, in this case gaps or cracks between genres, and much of what I write falls within those cracks. Things that fall through the cracks don’t always get much attention in this cruel world of ours, so this post is here to wave a flag – a multicoloured freak flag – on their behalf.

The concept of interstitial fiction, sometimes called slipstream fiction, is an American invention. It began to be used within the science fiction field in the mid 1990s to describe stories which tended to be published in certain science fiction magazines and anthologies, but which it was difficult to classify in conventional terms as SF.

These stories often used the traditional materials of science fiction – space ships and aliens, time travel and alternate histories – for non-traditional ends, with emphases closer to literary fiction than genre fiction as it had been previously written. Alternatively, they treated mundane materials in science-fictional ways. A parallel development occurred in genre fantasy, often bringing it closer to magic realism than had previously been the case.

Meanwhile, especially in the US, fantasy and SF elements were increasingly being incorporated in mainstream fiction. For example, the novels of Michael Chabon are marketed as literary fiction rather than SF or F, yet most of them have elements which bring them within one or both of those genres in a formal sense. Margaret Atwood, so vigilant against any claims that The Handmaid’s Tale or Oryx and Crake are science fiction (although, as stories set in an imagined future which extrapolate aspects of our own world, they clearly are), nevertheless wrote The Blind Assassin, which interleaved mimetic realism and pulp science fiction within the same novel.

And that’s what interstitial fiction is: fiction that mixes genres, in particular, fiction that interleaves the realistic and the fantastic.

Transported qualifies as interstitial fiction in two ways. It contains a mixture of literary fiction and speculative fiction stories in the one volume (together with some surrealism and flat-out weirdness), and it contains individual stories that mix genres. The paradigm example, and one of my own favourite stories in the book, is “Win a Day with Mikhail Gorbachev”, which mixes science fiction, travelogue, celebrity profile, political history, literary criticism, and the early short stories of Arthur C, Clarke, and comes out with – well, with interstitial fiction.

You can read “Win a Day with Mikhail Gorbachev” as part of the New Zealand Book Council’s Read at Work promotion (although there’s a couple of paragraphs missing from this version), or in Transported. You can learn more about interstitial fiction at the Interstitial Arts Foundation. And you can take the wildest ideas you have, mix and match them without regard to genre, and end up with a story that can still find a home with receptive readers.

UPDATE

Helen Rickerby has posted a long and thoughtful assessment of Transported on her blog, which references this post and various others from “Books in the Trees”. Thank you, Helen!

You can buy books by Tim Jones online!

Arthur C. Clarke, 1917-2008

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In the late 1960s, when I first became interested in science fiction, I came across frequent references to the “ABC of science fiction”: Asimov, Bradbury and Clarke. Of the three, I never had much time for Bradbury’s brand of ornate nostalgia, but in my late teens and early twenties, I devoured many novels and short stories by both Asimov and Clarke.

These days, I find Asimov hard going, but I can still re-read Arthur C. Clarke’s early fiction with great pleasure. Clarke is often thought of as a hard SF writer, and indeed that is a strong component of his work; but unlike Hal Clement, Clarke’s work makes room for both the rational and the transcendent. My favourites among his books are the early novels Against the Fall of Night/The City and the Stars and Childhood’s End, and his first short story collection, Expedition to Earth.

In these books, his writing is at its most flexible and affecting. These novels and stories are full of regret for worlds and people lost, and wonder at what is to come: if the best of Bradbury and Clement had been blended together and then filtered through a distinctively English sensibility – a sensibility no less attuned than J.G. Ballard’s to the dying of the light of Empire – these books are what might have resulted.

For these books, for his later peaks – 2001 and Rendezvous with Rama – and for his continuing engagement with the world, I will miss Arthur C. Clarke.

(You can also read a eulogy for Arthur C. Clarke by The Ninth Hermit, which features a fine picture of the man himself.)

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