Julie Schumacher, Artist Programs intern at TAC, got together with current AIR 16 resident Leo Pontius:
Can you tell me about your work and if you worked with textiles before you came to the Textile Art Center?
Leo Pontius: So, I actually started as a spiritual practitioner first. I went to undergrad for religious studies to a really experientially based school where we studied primarily, like, the mystical components of different traditions. I’m very interested in mystery and magic. Over time, I felt like something was missing from my spiritual practices and I began painting. I started using painting as a way to process my emotions. And, the paintings were, like, really complex compositions, and I found that I was just painting over things and painting over things and painting over things. Not because I was like, oh, I don't like what's happening here or getting too perfectionistic about it, but because I was like, this continues. The process didn’t feel complete. So then, I started cutting the paintings apart and weaving them together. Sort of just experimenting. And it started to feel like the cutting the paintings was a letting go of the emotions that had been in the paintings. And reconstructing them as weavings gave a shape that was both more complex and more cohesive. It felt right, like this is what healing or maturation feels like to me.
But textiles, in general—my mom is like a master seamstress. She was a 4-H queen, and she's still a quilter. She's also a ceramicist. And so she taught me how to sew really young, and now I don't know how to anymore. But the idea that you can make things has always been really prominent in our family.
Textiles are amazing to me because they are both universal and have such a strong sense of place. Different communities have patterns and colors that are associated with them that tell stories about the people, the land, the creatures, the beliefs. Textiles are very explicitly connected to this relationship between humans and the earth in a way that really feels important to me.
How do you approach a work when you're ready to start a new piece? And can you share with me some about your process?
I call these [sculptures] "painting weavings."
Basically, the process for the painting weavings is that I take 16 x 24-inch canvas panels primed on one side and unprimed on the other side, and I paint on both sides. For each piece, before I start making it, conceptually, I pick a theme. The theme will be something that is alive for me in real life, that I am processing feelings and thoughts about. And then, as I'm making the paintings, I am tuning into my memories and sensations and emotions that come with that theme and, like, pour that into the painting. And I think of the painting holding that—like, the painting is carrying that emotion.
This [in-process work] is already about 80 paintings, if we're talking about both sides. And the thing that I love about making so many paintings is that there's enough room to hold all of the complexity of the topic.
This piece is called Generation Gap, and it's about the things that are passed down in families, both the strengths and the challenges. There will be two pieces. This is the parent piece, and then there's going to be a chair that has a second, smaller one sitting on it, and they're gonna be connected though parts reaching toward each other.
So, I make the paintings and then cut them apart by hand into strips. That part of the process feels the most like alchemically breaking the emotions down into their parts and letting some of the “charge” of the experience go.
And then when I'm starting to weave together onto the form, there's this reintegration that starts to happen where the same memories start to have a different emotional texture, or I have an insight. I'm able to see something in a different way or hold it, like holding the combination of my kid brain, which was so confused and hurt, with my adult brain, which sees my parents as whole people and understands. This idea that memories themselves change over time as our perspectives change is very interesting to me. So each piece is a tome or living outcome of a process I’ve gone through. And my hope is that when people interact with my work, they can feel that that emotional legibility is there—that something about that translates for them. Because more and more, I've been feeling like I've been falsely equating the idea of something being internal with being individual. But more and more, I don't think it is.
Can you expand on that a bit more?
Just because my experience is happening internally doesn't mean it's in isolation from whatever experience you're also having internally, as we're sitting here together talking right now. I feel like it parallels the idea that the personal is political.
When I think of things like emotions, it’s hard to say that they are purely “internal” or “external.” I am happy to be here and excited to talk to you, and we are sharing some aspect of my internal-felt sense together. The boundary between “inner” and “outer” is actually quite blurry. We are acting on each other, impacting each other. I’m interested in how that can also happen between a person and an object.
Are your paintings all abstractions? Are they sometimes realistic?
They are all abstractions, and sometimes they have words. Sometimes they have a lot of writing, and then I paint over the writing. Sometimes the words are on top. But the words are always coming from the emotional experience.
I think that trying to make something too representational engages a part of my brain with this work that I'm actively trying not to engage. If I were to get to the point where I'm able to make representational work that doesn't do that, then I would love to. But at this point, I don't think I can.
What is the role of color in your work?
Color is really important to me. Every piece has a clear palette that sort of unites these disparate emotions. Also, especially since I paint both sides of the canvas, I can have a lot going on color-wise. But I choose it really intuitively. And so I definitely have the experience of being surprised by what part of the palette ends up predominating as I weave.
I think there's a general idea I have in mind before I start painting of what these colors evoke in me—sort of the combination of, like, sweet childhood moments and difficult childhood moments. Because [in this work] they're a little bit pastel-y, but they're all a little bit muddied.
In the piece Body Spill, I stayed with, you know, tissuey colors, organ colors, skin tones so that it would feel sort of like an organism, or sort of body-ish.
There are so many layers of storytelling that go into your pieces. What else are you mining or reacting to when you’re making?
I’m interested in healing as a family or group legacy. Painting weavings are only one of the types of work I make, but everything I make addresses becoming whole or being real in some way. And that requires a lot of vulnerability.
I think, partially because I’m trans that I naturally call into question a lot of foundational beliefs and assumptions that American culture teaches. Something about being told again and again that I’m something I’m actually not carried over into critical thinking about so much we are told is innately true. Things like individuality, perfection, continuous consumption, being separate from “nature”—basically the same delusions that feel to me like the root of imperialism. All these things feel like layers of barriers to actual connection with this living world.
That includes reckoning with myself about the history of my own family lineage and white people in general. The history of colonization is really uncomfortable, and interrogating the roots of these assumed beliefs that shape the institutions of this whole society reveals such unfathomable cruelty and violence. And, in order to connect with my own ancestors, I have to reckon with that.
And I learn more and more from people like W. E. B. Du Bois and James Baldwin, in particular, about how whiteness is a spiritual illness. So, the intersection of those two things is really important to me. Processing the complexity of that [intersection] is really present in all of my work, too.
I'm learning about how my latest immigrating ancestors were Polish, so I'm [interested in] Polish folk traditions. More and more, I'm trying to bring in more things that are connected to my ancestors because it just lights me up in a totally different way. I think that's what we should be doing. It feels right in my body, it makes more sense, it just flows.
