Interview #133 — Chloe Smith

by Matt Chun

Chloe Smith is a multidisciplinary artist of Chinese and Papua New Guinean heritage, currently based on the South Coast of NSW. Working primarily in textiles—under her pseudonym I Make Soft Food—Chloe makes meticulously crafted and often darkly humorous soft-sculptural replicas of the mundane.

Chloe’s delicate objects and still-life tableaux have been exhibited across a variety of platforms throughout Australia, and in Japan. In both subject and material, Chloe’s work offers a reflection upon cultural items of the everyday, challenging the limitations of arts-institutional orthodoxy.

Chloe Smith speaks to Matt Chun about felt, fakes and fires.

Towards the end of 2019, you were sharing part of my studio on Yuin country, a beautiful stretch of the coast. However, the various crises of 2020 have taken many people in unexpected directions. I’ve relocated temporarily to Canada. You and your partner have now adopted my Australian studio as your home. I’m curious, what does life look like there now, amongst the anxieties and restrictions of Covid-19?
To be honest, daily life hasn’t changed too much here. Moving from a big city to a regional area already meant I was far from a lot of my friends and family so the social distancing didn’t feel like a huge leap. I’m lucky to have access to wonderful gardens, the beach, the bush, and ‘chook TV’. I’m very privileged to have not been hugely affected on a day-to-day basis.

Before I left Australia, you were busily working towards some significant exhibitions. Has has the widespread shut-down of arts venues affected you professionally?
It’s been disappointing, for sure. A couple of shows I had planned for this year have been pushed back to 2021 or cancelled. In many ways the ideas I pitched for those shows don’t really feel as relevant to me anymore. It feels like the last several months were several years. I’m really trying to take this time as an opportunity to make more experimental work, using different mediums and exploring more tangential ideas which I always struggle to carve out the time for on my own. I’m sure there are many people feeling the same way.

Yeah, I feel that way precisely. And at the beginning of this year, we both experienced unprecedented Summer fires, which destroyed nearby towns—and came dangerously close to ours. We both evacuated for a time. Has this encounter with the violence of anthropogenic climate change impacted your relationship with Australia, and with regional Australia in particular?
I really doubled down on my commitment to this area. It felt like when you go through something really heavy with a partner you only just started seeing. You haven’t really had enough time to tease out how you would deal with something big. All of the romance and lightness is stripped away and you’re sort of examining the bones of your future relationship in a way that requires you to be either all in or all out.

The relationship really shifted from my life being this extended coastal holiday to being emotionally tied down to the area and the community here. There was—and continues to be—a community-wide mourning. I think I used that to cocoon myself away from Australia as a whole, from the broader anxieties of the environmental and political horror and inaction. I remember crying and feeling a great sense of shame for how we have let this land down, whether I felt this as a fire-fleeing resident, an Australian, or just a human, I’m not really sure.

How are you looking after yourself during this time?
I’ve been writing a lot more which has been great to get back to after a long hiatus. I’ve also been pickling the heck out of all our summer stragglers and trying to stay away from the news as much as possible.

Oronamine Drink by I Make Soft Food — Oronamine Drink by *I Make Soft Food*

Mandarin by I Make Soft Food — Mandarin by *I Make Soft Food*

And, of course, we’re fortunate to have the constant preoccupation of art. How did you come to felt as a primary medium?
There were a few different things that led me to felt and textiles. I started making some small felt cockroaches as a sort of immersion therapy. I liked the idea of making soft versions as an investigation into things I don’t like very much. I’m quite obsessed with tangibility. I love the sensual nature of textiles and the tricks they can play on us in the unexpected ways things can feel, the form they can take. From there, I started experimenting with more complex pieces, and started to imagine how lots of things around me would look made out of felt. I started to think about the process of how I would actually stitch something to make those ridges, or those sprinkles or get that golden brown baked look on something. Once I started down that road I became pretty addicted to pushing the limits of what the medium is capable of, it started to become more of a compulsion and from there I guess I haven’t left.

I think that sense of ‘compulsion’ is palpable in your work, in the way that you obsessively replicate the subtle textures or gradients of more ephemeral subject matter. In that sense, I assume that you’re playing within the tradition of shokuhin sampuru. You’re also clearly delighted by the universe of retail packaging—and by the kitsch, suburban food culture of 70’s and 80’s Australiana. But I know from our previous conversations that—for you—this isn’t just an exercise in wry nostalgia. Can you tell me why you make these things?
Sampuru works have inspired me a lot. I have always loved the slightly sinister nature of fake food. There is an initial sense of playfulness when the viewer realises that the model is fake, a kind of excitement in being ‘in’ on the illusion. But then this shifts into a kind of suspicion and questioning of reality. I really like that moment of shifting and unsteadiness, particularly when it is layered upon something as mundane as an egg sandwich or a plate of grilled meats. I think this idea about the suspicion of illusion interacts really interestingly with consumer culture, and the suburban dream particularly as it has manifested itself in Australian culture. There’s a real darkness to that nostalgia.

Yes, I’m curious about this interplay of authenticity and fakery in your work.
There is definitely this uncomfortable self-reflexivity that I have found in making fake food. I’ll try and tease it out a bit because it can be hard to explain. I’ve struggled a lot with feelings of authenticity as an artist as I know many other artists have. You have these feelings that you are a fraud and someone will suddenly call you on the phone and be all like: “ohhh, yeah, we thought you were the real deal, but we were mistaken about that, your work is really phoney and derivative and you should probably quit what you’re doing”.

And then if you think about what it’s like to have those feelings when your art is actually illusory like mine—fake, replicas, whatever you want to call it—it can feel impossible to argue with that someone. I find myself in this giant absurd mess where it’s hard to tell where the art begins and ends or whether art is replicating life or life replicates art.

I love the sensual nature of textiles and the tricks they can play on us in the unexpected ways things can feel, the form they can take.

Antipasti by I Make Soft Food — Antipasti by *I Make Soft Food*

But you know, in that sense, all art is illusory. If we look at something like an old Dutch still-life, we’re never compelled to say ‘that lobster is fake food, its actually oil paint’. Likewise, we don’t refer to a figure sculpted in marble as a ‘fake person’. Do you think there’s something particular about your medium that evokes that ‘uncomfortable self-reflexivity’ around authenticity?
Wow, yes, this is super interesting. That's a good question. I think a lot of it has to do with the canon of artwork and mediums that are acknowledged as worthy of making art from, as well as subjects that are worthy of making art about. Maybe there was a time when people thought ‘look at that fake person’ when viewing a marble statue, but I think because those artworks now belong to a canon of acknowledged art, it doesn't seem to bear discussion anymore. But there isn't really a canon of replica foods made from wool (that I know of...) so, yeah, I think that you are forced to be aware of the conversation occurring between the medium and the content a bit more than you otherwise would, because of that unexpected nature of the medium.

Maybe that ‘forced awareness’ also comes from the physical softness of your medium, which almost strays into the visceral. Or because you’re making these small representational objects which, as viewers, we’re obliged to imagine putting in our mouths?
For sure, I think you either feel disgusted by the illusion, or enchanted by it. I really enjoy that it can go both ways.

Do you have any advice for emerging artists who may want to contribute to your imagined canon of wool replicas?
While it’s a good way to maximise space while working from home, sewing in bed is a real safety hazard for yourself and your partner.

Good advice! What are you listening to currently?
Yasuaki Shimizu on Spotify and The Beef and Dairy Network podcast.

How about books? What are you reading?
After Claude by Iris Owens and always dipping in and out of Lynda Barry for inspiration.

What does being Asian-Australian mean to you? This is something we’ve discussed on previous occasions, so I’m anticipating some mild ambivalence to the label.
I spend a lot of time not feeling Asian enough, likely in the same way that I don't feel like enough of an artist, or enough of a woman, even though myself and others would certainly define me as all of those things. I’ve always had this paradoxical feeling that I will be a complete version of one of those things at some point, and then, I can speak about what it means to me. Ridiculous, I know.

Who are you personally inspired by?
That’s a big question. Today? A contemporary dance duo called Aguyoshi, who mould their bodies to urban environments in really fun and playful ways. They make you look at the bollards and concrete stairs you pass each day in a completely new light. Elevation of the mundane is an ongoing obsession for me. Other artists who play with this include writer Nicholson Baker. In his book The Mezzanine the main character spends several pages talking about the bubbles that attach themselves to drinking straws when placed in a can of coke. God. I love that kind of stuff.

I love that stuff too! The ‘elevation of the mundane’ is also a really interesting aspect of your own work. I’m thinking of a couple of my favourites: a mouldy white bread sandwich in a plastic ziplock bag, or a used bandaid stuck to a kitchen dish sponge. They’re genuinely beautiful, skilfully crafted and also... disgusting.

Of course, through the act of elevating such abject domestic items, there’s an implicit de-elevation of ‘high art’. Is that a conscious motivation for you?

Absolutely. I'm interested in an elevation on the one hand: via the objects I choose to make. I want people to be able to see a bleach bottle as a piece of art because some bleach bottles are really beautiful and art should be about discovering new ways of thinking and being, for both viewers and makers. But with the elevation of something that has constantly been maligned as "craft" not art, there is a counter de-elevation of ideas about what constitutes worthwhile art. I've always been interested in chipping away at those ideas. It was a real motivating force in one of my shows a couple of years ago which focused on office lunches. Why can't art be about eating a tin of tuna alone in front of your computer?