Stefana McClure

Stefana McClure works with text in the way that a painter works with chiaroscuro, contrasting light and shadow to create psychologically dense works of art. The first time I encountered her work I was moved by the painstaking skill involved in slicing and knitting the thin strips of paper. As I spent time with the individual pieces [see images 1-3, above], a dark presence slowly emerged, casting its shadow across the intricately woven text. I later learned that they were made from government documents obtained and released by the ACLU, detailing the “enhanced interrogation” techniques used by the CIA on Iraqi and Afghan soldiers. The black ink was redacted text, adding another layer of shock and revulsion. The stark juxtaposition of the exquisite and horrific is a recurring theme in McClure’s work, as she uses language and writing to express the complexity and capacity of human nature. And what better medium to convey its inherent contradictions? McClure finds poetry in the threat of violence when she wraps her Protest Stones in feminist verse, admittedly pointless when you’re on the receiving end of the stone, but wry humor is another important aspect of her work. Indeed, McClure is self-deprecating when describing her process, and is quick to poke fun at the absurdity of her time-devouring studio practice. In her words, “It’s serious work, but it doesn’t take itself very seriously.” She spends weeks and months extracting exhaustive information and condensing it into a single piece, as she does in her Films on Paper. In this series, inspired by her love of foreign films, she copies the subtitles, including the typos and clumsy translation, and superimposes them on a monochromatic field, positioned as on a television screen. The writing is illegible, but carries the energy of the film, just as her wrapped novels carry the intent of the writer. McClure’s love of language is visible in every work, and her fluency in Japanese, as well as her time spent as a translator and interpreter, give her a unique insight into the gap between languages, where much of meaning is lost. McClure doesn’t seek to eliminate the gaps, nor does she deny the threat of violence that is present in much of her work. Instead, she seems to embrace the fissures that exist between cultures and within our collective psyche. McClure’s appropriation and reconfiguring of literature allude to some of our greatest achievements, while humbly acknowledging the darker aspects of humanity.

MH: You grew up in Northern Ireland during a time of prolonged conflict. Did the political climate have an influence on your decision to become an artist?
SMcC: The conflict definitely gave me something to push back against and fight for, which probably influenced my decision to become an artist. I grew up in a province where language could be a dangerous and sometimes fatal weapon, so it’s not coincidental that when I started making art, language became my material of choice.
MH: You later went to art school in London and after graduation moved to Japan where you lived for twelve years. How did that cultural shift affect the direction and style of your work?
SMcC: The experience of living between cultures and languages very much affected my work. I went to Japan with the intention of studying paper making, but I soon realized that I couldn’t study anything because of the language barrier. So I launched myself on a three-year manic study of Japanese and ended up being good enough at it that I was able to work as a translator, and ultimately as an interpreter. At some point I realized that language isn’t neutral, and that realization influenced my work. As Etel Adnan said, “We don't think the same way in every language. Language is a tool that acts on us, collaborates with thinking, is not neutral.”
MH: Your studio practice comes out of your love of literature, poetry, and film. Did an early influence guide you in that direction?
SMcC: My dad was a teacher and the principal of the local primary school where my mother also taught. She prided herself on teaching all subjects through art, and often brought writers into our classroom, such as the poet Seamus Heaney. His reading of Mid-Term Break, a poem about the death of his younger brother who was killed by a car when he was only four years old, made a profound impression on my nine-year-old self. The final line is particularly devastating: “A four-foot box, a foot for every year”.
MH: Next to mathematics, language is our most precise mode of communication. Do you work with text because of its relative accuracy, or do you see your work as more approximate and poetic?
SMcC: Definitely the latter. One of the things that attracts me to language is all the slipperiness, those things that can’t be translated or don’t exist in other languages. It’s not precise in any kind of way.
MH: The first time I saw your work was in 2011 at your solo show, Secrets & Lies, at Josée Bienvenu Gallery. There was a series of text pieces made from declassified government documents, heavily redacted to hide the names and techniques relating to “enhanced interrogation”. You sliced and glued the documents into a thin paper strand, knitting it into exquisite weavings. The black redacted text was at once deeply disturbing and breathtakingly beautiful. Do you often juxtapose psychological elements in your work?
SMcC: With the redacted drawings it was a conscious decision to take that horribly disturbing information and make it into something beautiful. People were drawn to the work in spite of themselves, and then discovered that it was made from records of “enhanced interrogation” methods. Another piece in that show was a folded shroud entitled Manner of Death: Natural. This was made from autopsy reports of Iraqi and Afghan soldiers who had been tortured to death in U.S. custody, and in all cases their deaths were deemed “natural”. I downloaded hundreds of pages of autopsy and death reports and knit them into a long, folded burial sheet. It was a very powerful piece to make because it took many months, so I spent a lot of time with it.
MH: In an ongoing series, you slice an entire novel into sentences, join them into a continuous length, then wind them into balls, similar to balls of yarn. I get the impression that you love the process of repetitive labor, as well as the physical contact with books. It’s like you just want to touch them, handle them, be in contact with them.
SMcC: Yes, I call these sculptural drawings, and they’re deconstructed books, often lengthy ones, such as Moby Dick and The Odyssey. I slice them apart sentence by sentence, then reconfigure the pieces into a continuous length of string. The process gives me long lengths of time to spend with the book, and I often reread it as I go along. For this reason I only use books that I absolutely love and want to spend time with.
MH: Do you ever feel like you’re ingesting the book?
SMcC: Yes, absolutely. It becomes part of me in some way. Right now I’m working on a series of circadian novels, which take place over the course of a single day. Ulysses by Joyce is an obvious one, also Mrs. Dalloway and Between the Acts by Virginia Woolf, and After Dark by Haruki Murakami. I’m drawn to material that’s so compelling that it represents a whole world unto itself.
MH: An important aspect of your work is that it is scrupulous, complete, and faithful. For example, when you wind a novel into a ball, you use the book in its entirety, from the copyright page to the appendices. And you don’t cheat by using a tiny ‘starter ball’, which would be so convenient, and who would ever know? Why is this level of integrity critical to your work?
SMcC: It’s conceptual work, and the idea behind this series is that it’s faithful to the book. Take for example Moby Dick; the book in its entirety becomes the big white whale. It wouldn’t make sense to leave portions of it out, because as a conceptual piece of work, it has to be the whole thing. I also structure them so that they start at the end of the book and work towards the beginning, so on the outside you see the beginning of the book rather than the end.
MH: Many of your pieces have a subversive quality, much like the books from which they originate. Others possess the threat of violence, like the text-covered stones that were part of your childhood experience in Northern Ireland. Would you talk about the aggressive potential of your work?
SMcC: The protest stones started out as an installation of eight children’s jackets, with a pair of stones in the pockets. Each pair of stones is covered with the text from a single poem that referenced the Troubles, the thirty-year conflict in Northern Ireland. For the text I used poems from Seamus Heaney’s anthology North, first published in 1975. I collected stones from our back yard in Brooklyn, covered them with his poetry, and knocked off their edges by hurling them at the stone walls of our basement. The idea was that the words of the poems gained some extra weight by the threat and anticipation of violence.
MH: What you describe sounds really powerful, like you were imbuing the stones with a heightened energy or force.
SMcC: Yes. As kids we carried a stone in each pocket, and the idea was that we could throw them at army vehicles, or we could use them to gain extra time to get away from any trouble. As I continued making these weapons, the stones started to become more lethal, so I moved on to making hurling weapons, the kind used to take down an animal by entangling its legs. When I started making these, I turned to the works of feminist poets like Emily Dickinson and Forough Farrokhzad, clothing the stones in their poetry.
MH: Books have been weaponized throughout history, either to persuade or justify violence against perceived enemies. But they also express the profound depth of the human experience, and your work seems to embrace both capacities, sometimes within a single piece. Does this dichotomy create a tension that feeds your process?
SMcC: I like to have that tension there. It gives life and purpose to the work. But I bring poetry and nuance to the fight, engaging in a form of poetic politics. Words are my weapons and my tools.
MH: Tell me a little about your film subtitle series. It’s more subtle than the work with books, and more difficult to comprehend. You mentioned that you copy the subtitles of foreign movies, sometimes in several languages, and superimpose them as they appear on a movie screen?
SMcC: The series is a direct result of spending those twelve years in Japan, watching a lot of foreign movies and reading the subtitles. As I became more fluent in the language, I wondered what impression a Japanese person would have if they didn’t know the original language of the film. The subtitles, especially the dialogue spoken by strong Western women, were often dumbed down, translated to be softer and more culturally appropriate. My Films on Paper—drawings that consist of the superimposition of the subtitles, closed captions or intertitles of an entire movie—address this phenomenon. To make the drawings I watch a film frame by frame, systematically inscribing all of the subtitles on top of one another on a ground of transfer paper. The process is subtractive: the surface of the paper is slowly eroded as successive layers of information are transferred off. Hours of translated dialogue are reduced to a ghost form, dense in the middle, fading towards the edges.
MH: Whether you’re working with books or film, your process is incredibly meticulous and time-consuming. You mentioned that your audience has a wide range of reactions, including raw anger. Why do you suppose your work would expose a person’s anger issues?
SMcC: I think some people are incensed that anyone would have the luxury, as they view it, of putting so much time into a piece of work, especially a piece that at a glance looks minimal. For some reason the film series seems to evoke this reaction. Condensing time and information into a piece is what my work is all about, but I think some people can’t wrap their heads around the fact that anyone would choose to spend their time at such an effort.
MH: Artists spend countless hours laboring in their studios, attempting to bring a piece to a reasonable level of satisfaction so they can let it go and move on to the next piece. Beyond engaging in creative expression and satisfying handiwork, do you ever consider that we’re working out something on a deeper level?
SMcC: I hope so. I think on a certain level our work is a form of meditation, of close, quiet time. I hope we’re working out something a little more profound in our heads.
MH: I think of all the women who came before us, sitting in their parlors doing their fancywork for hours upon hours, and I wonder if it had parallels with our daily studio practice. Working with their hands, aligning something deep within themselves, and bringing a kind of equanimity into the greater world.
SMcC: Maybe. I love what Virginia Woolf said: “Knitting is the saving of life.”
MH: You have a series where you hired a professional typist to copy a poem while wearing gloves with type wheels attached. [see video below] My interpretation of these hilariously awkward and ungainly performances is that you’re underscoring the blundering, clownlike aspect of humanity. We try so hard to do what’s right or reasonable, but we’re eternally ham-handed. Was this part of your concept?

SMcC: I love your interpretation, so I’ll say yes. I was aware that it was hilarious on some level, because obviously you can’t turn a poem into an exact image, and it was a ridiculous form of translation. The gloves had IBM golf balls attached to the end of each finger and thumb, and the idea was that any of those 88 characters had a chance of being represented. I’m very attracted to obsolete technology, and there is a lot of humor in the piece. All of my work has a level of humor, but people don’t always recognize it. It’s serious work, but it doesn’t take itself very seriously.
MH: Many of your pieces deal with injustice, violence, and cruelty. Do you have faith that humanity will pull through this challenging time, or has human nature irrevocably shifted toward darkness?
SMcC: I have to maintain hope that we can pull through. Hopefully what’s going on right now isn’t irrevocable. As artists, we have to believe that we can survive through art.
MH: What role, if any, do artists have in maintaining the decency and goodness of humanity? Or is our creative endeavor a form of escapism?
SMcC: I don’t think it’s a form of escapism. Art has the power to change how people think. That’s huge. As long as we can make meaningful work and get it out there, it has the potential to make a difference.
MH: I don’t know if any single artist has the ability to make that shift, but as a collective effort, maybe a shift is possible.
SMcC: Right, but we’re talking about incremental shifts; at some point there’s a critical mass. As Annie Dillard said, “How we spend our days is how we spend our lives.” We’re choosing to spend our time engaged in a studio practice that brings meaning to our lives, and hopefully to the lives of others.
MH: What’s the best part about being an artist?
SMcC: Art making, especially when it focuses on resistance and repair, is a truly human endeavor. It helps us explore the world and understand it better and provides us with material and a framework in which to think. And, as John Cage said, “We make our lives by what we love.”

IMAGE LIST
  1. Redacted (Waterboard), detail, 2010, knitted paper, 25.75 x 25.75 inches
2. Redacted (Enhanced Techniques), 2010, knitted paper, 25.75 x 25.75 inches
3. Redacted (Top Secret), detail, 2011, knitted paper, 25.75 x 25.75 inches
  4. Manner of Death: Natural, 2011, knitted paper, 7.4 x 3.7 feet
  5. Manner of Death: Natural, detail, 2011, knitted paper, 7.4 x 3.7 feet
  6. Silenced Voices: Forough Farrokhzad (The Wind-Up Doll), 2021, Moleskine notebook, perforated archival ink-jet print, pearls, 10 x 15 x 1 inches
  7. Silenced Voices: Forough Farrokhzad (The Wind-Up Doll), detail, 2021, Moleskine notebook, perforated archival ink-jet print, pearls, 10 x 15 x 1 inches
8. Whammo Bricks, 2017, vintage clay bricks wrapped with poet Öyvind Fahlström's "whammo,” an invented language based on onomatopoeic expressions in American comic strips, 8 x 3.5 x 2.25 inches each
9. Riot: a poem by Gwendolyn Brooks, 2020, 2 poetry-wrapped stones, left stone: 4 x 5 x 3 inches, right stone: 3 x 5 x 3 inches
10. Protest: a poem by Ella Wheeler Wilcox, 2020, 2 poetry-wrapped stones, left stone: 3.5 x 5 x 2 inches, right stone: 4 x 5 x 1.5 inches
11. Rebellion: poems from an anthology by Forough Farrokhzad, 2021, poetry-wrapped stones, Italian ruby spring twine, cut nail, 6’ 3" x 7" x 7"
12. Rebellion: poems from an anthology by Forough Farrokhzad, detail, 2021, poetry-wrapped stones, Italian ruby spring twine, cut nail, 6’ 3" x 7" x 7"
13. Protest Jackets, 2018, eight jackets, ten wooden pegs, 16 poetry-wrapped stones, 28 x 80 x 7 inches
14. Protest Jackets, detail, 2018, eight jackets, ten wooden pegs, 16 poetry-wrapped stones, 28 x 80 x 7 inches
15. The Hunting of The Snark: a poem by Lewis Carroll, 2023 – 2024, cut paper, 19.5 inches circumference
16. Ulysses: a novel by James Joyce, 2020, cut paper, 20.5 inches circumference
17. The Odyssey by Homer, translated by Emily Wilson, 2021, cut paper, 18.5 inches circumference
18. Map of the World (Central Europe), 2006, cut paper, 22 inches circumference
19. Brief Notes on the Art and Manner of Arranging One’s Books, 2006, still from 36-minute single channel video
20. A Postcard from North Antrim: a poem by Seamus Heaney, 2018, Teflon mounted on notebook cover, 13.75 x 20 inches
21. Rage For Order: a poem by Derek Mahon, 2018, Teflon mounted on notebook cover, 12 x 17.75 inches
22. Scrapple From the Apple, 2007, detail, Teflon mounted on museum board with soundtrack, 3 panels, 13.25 x 13.25 inches each
23. Studio View: The Simpsons: The Complete First Season and Parasite: English subtitles to a film by Bong Joon-ho
24. The Simpsons: Season 1, Episode 1, 2014, yellow transfer paper mounted on rag, 10.6 x 12.5 inches
25. Gaslight: closed captions to a film by George Cukor, 2019, graphite transfer paper mounted on rag, 19 x 27.5 inches
26. Tokyo Story: English subtitles to a film by Yasujiro Ozu, 2015, wax transfer paper mounted on dibond, 40 x 60 inches
27. Wonder Woman: Japanese subtitles to a film by Patty Jenkins, 2018, transfer paper mounted on rag, 7.5 x 9.75 inches
28. Studio View
29. Modeling the modified gloves
30. Studio Portrait