Interview with the artist Daphane Park,

Artist. Anthropologist. Shaman’s apprentice. Artist Daphane Park’s C.V is pretty full. She recently completed a three month residency at Tasmania’s (or rather David Walsh’s) Museum of Old and New Art which Daphane described as ‘luxurious and dreamy’. I caught up with the artist to delve a little deeper into her life, her work and what inspires her to create her fantastic (in the true sense of the word) works.

At the start of the year you enjoyed some time at MONA, working on a Minnie Mouse/Quetzacoatl installation at the urban community markets; what’s it all about? Daphane’s softly spoken voice drifts down the phone line to explain “The partner of David Walsh, Kirsha Kaechele, she and I have collaborated a number of times in the US, and she invited me to come and conceptualise this summer market – it was essentially like a farmers market – but more rarefied; just really beautiful produce; speciality cheeses, and there were  also some crafts and we had some other things in the market as well.” She mentions ‘magic milk crate massages’ which conjures images of a dread-locked crusty rubbing me down with a crate, but enough of my bizarre fantasies. Daphane continues: “We wanted to use the opportunity of this market on the roof of the museum to make it into an art installation – it’s sort of a strange idea and a bit of a challenge (she chuckles as she says this) and I wasn’t really sure how that was gonna work. But we looked at the footprint of the rooftop of the museum and decided it could take on a kind of serpentine shape and then for me that immediately, I thought of 2012 and the return of Quetzacoatl in the Mayan cosmology, which I’ve studied and I thought it would be fun to sort of take that theme on in my own way, and I combined that with this vision I had of Minnie Mouse – I had this vision of Minnie Mouse as a healer – it’s sort of absurd but after I had that, going into a meditation.” She’s quick to point out that the vision wasn’t drug induced and I ask she gets asked that question a lot; she laughs before explaining that some time ago she “...went down into the subway and it was literally 20 minutes or so after I did this meditation...there was this person in the subway dressed as Minnie Mouse, and this was on the upper-west side of Manhattan - it’s not your wildest neighbourhood or anything like that - so that was just an interesting coincidence.”

And what sort of materials are you working with? “It’s mostly fabric, weatherproof-ish fabrics - not entirely weatherproof - but I did use a lot of bathing suit lycra; stuff you might make a bathing suit from, in these really wild colours and dance lycra. The winged arms that terminate into these Minnie Mouse hands, these white gloves, these arms are made of, I guess what you’d make an umbrella with? Like umbrella fabric? And they’re feathery looking because the Quetzacoatl’s a feathered serpent. And the fabric on the head is this stretchy lycra and there’s a lot of stretched sequined fabric on the ears, which are really beautiful in the sunlight.” Daphane adds that in her installation Minnie Mouse is  “a bit of a gangster as well.” – A ganster healer? “Yeah, she’s coming to steal time, she’s coming to destroy illusion, and usher in a bit of authenticity.” Blimey. I would have thought with 2012 and the end of days coming, perhaps Kali would be a more appropriate image instead of a Disney character? “Minnie Mouse was more fun – and the other layer on top of that is that David (Wallsh)has said, at least once or twice, that he sees MONA as being a bit of a perverse Disneyland for adults. So I thought that was a fun coincidence; the Minnie Mouse healer with her little hands...”, she goes on to explain that “...the hands are made of casting powder coated aluminium - they also act as ballast to hold the tents down - between markets, the little white gloves stay on top of the roof so they have a dual function as little stools that people can perch on, because sometimes the lines [for entrance to MONA] in the summer-time and on the weekends get quite long - and they look kind of cool too – these little hands sprinkled on the roof top. And they may end up in the garden which is being designed by Kirsha later, or on the lawn.” She also adds that “The teeth of the creature are made of gold-leaf ceramic with glass diamonds – she’s wearing a diamond grill like what rappers wear.” Ah! Now I see how the gangster/healer elements come into play...

So were you living at MONA? “I had been staying there some but I had a place in North Hobart and it was kind of near a studio. There’s this really great artists space called 6a in North Hobart where a number of artists work and I was doing some stuff in there and one of the artists that works in that studio was helping me with the ceramic teeth, and I was making the moulds for the hands there as well, and that was really close to the apartment where I was staying. I’d sort of been going back and forth. Maybe I was a bit of an experiment there? Though it was really fun and cool.”

So how did you enjoy Australia? She enthusiastically responds. “Yeah, I made a couple of trips to Sydney and to the beach at Marion Bay; there was a lot going on here and it was really lively, it was a lively time to be there.”

You work across a variety of medias; painting, sculpture, installation, performance, do you have a preferred media or is there a decision making process for picking one media over another? She ‘umms’ and ‘ahhs’, obviously giving it a lot of thought, before saying “There’s not really one. I’m always sort of painting and drawing and that’s a kind of meditation, in a way in between other projects. I suppose I’ll just start formulating ideas and those ideas lead me to materials that I want to work with and how I choose to execute the entire project, whether it be a big installation, and I work with musicians and I’ll have very specific ideas of the sound I want to go with an installation and they will help execute that. I like to collaborate a lot.” This brings us into a discussion on her collaborative work; speaking about your Superconductor installation, a work inspired by a variety of alternative Western healing technologies and shamanistic rituals. The soundtrack was provided by David Marshall, Rachael Bell, Derrick Barnicoat. Would you say that collaborative work is important for you? Daphane speaks of the freedom she experienced working with these musicians; “I felt that was huge break-through for me, working with those guys...there was something really nice about the way I would have an idea for a sound and the collaborators would compose something and then we’d talk about it and then it would shift and change and get more complex. As that was happening, it was really feeding the ideas for the rest of the environment that I wanted to create.”

Returning to the ideas behind the shamanistic rituals, you went to the Amazon and worked under two shaman dreamers; can you tell me some more about that? “I met one of them, my friend Gloria in ’99 and she introduced me to her teachers, and it’s been kind of an on-going friendship. She’s been teaching me all kinds of things since I’ve known her.” At this point, Daphane becomes vague and elusive but she continues nonetheless. “At a certain point, I think it was 2006, I lost the lease on a studio space – I was working for an organisation that accessed studio space for artists and we lost the building – and the lease on my apartment was running out and Gloria has a really intense life; she organises a lot of indigenous people and communities, sort of single-handedly, like fighting against a lot of petroleum companies and she had a lot of death threats against her at the time, it was around this time that there was a big shift and change in my life in New York and so I went down to escort her to her uncle, to his land, which is really far interior of Peru, she lives in Ecuador. And so we ended up living with him and it really just ended up being a much bigger, longer experience that I expected. I didn’t get back to New York till months and months later so I ended up being in the far interior with them for four months or so.”

How was that for you, physically &and spiritually? “It was physically really difficult because I had to adopt an entirely new diet and I did hunt - I went on a couple of hunting excursions to see what that was all about - but when I was studying with them I was doing a lot of fasting and eating very specific foods and then drinking a lot of tea and plant medicines.” Was Ayahuasca involved? “Yeah, that was a big part of the program.” She giggles as she adds “I really actually liked it. It’s very powerful ...a lot of people have really negative experiences with that plant...I don’t know if it was the time but my experiences were extremely positive. Even if I was being led into a vision that was a little bit dark, it was very enlightening. “ These were obviously profound spiritual experiences  for you. Are you OK talking about them? “Yeah. It’s hard to describe. When you start talking about it too much it seems more and more trivial; maybe that’s not it...” She ponders the best way to explain the experience but concludes “When you try to attach too many words to those kinds of experiences, it’s just something beyond words.”

It seems that your work attempts to transcending time, space, and culture? I mention that it seems as if she’s trying to ‘get everyone in the hammock’ together, a reference to her work Hammock Mother, a part of the Superconductor installation.  Again, Daphane laughs. “Maybe. I haven’t really thought about it that way but I am sort of mixing it all up a little bit but hopefully in a really playful kind of way. I like to do a lot of research; study things and look at things from many different perspectives, and I guess I do try to draw the similarities between things.” Themes of energy and meditation seem to be repeated in your work; the reconciliation of opposites  also seem to be important areas to you. Do you see yourself as modern day alchemist/magician or artist-shaman? I making her laugh a lot and she struggles to define herself: “I wouldn’t want to use those words...I wouldn’t give myself those titles...” I push onward, so what titles would you give yourself? She’s laughing a lot now. “I don’t know...that’s tough because I think I’m not someone who likes to be pinned down. I don’t want to feel limited. I think because of my background, growing up in a really conservative and highly controlled environment, I just don’t like labels and I just don’t like to feel limited by them.”

She’s happy to talk about her past and we dip into this time in her life. Tell me about your child-hood. “I grew up in a really conservative place; in Indiana, and I never really felt like I was from there. I get along with my family; they were just extremely protective and it was a very highly controlled environment so as soon as I could I just kind of took off and began my own adventure, and for me, the first really big one was hitching a ride to the border and then just travelling through Mexico and Central America.” Did you have any aspirations to be an artist as a child? “It wasn’t like I just decided I was going to be an artist but I was always drawing; that was actually my freedom; with drawing and painting. When I was in grade school I had this little studio area in the attic – and later, in the basement – of our house. My neighbours and different people would give me art supplies, which was really nice. They were very encouraging.”

Around the period of 1992 and 1993, you received a Creative Research Grant from the Honours Division at Indiana University, producing work derived from the study of the modern/contemporary political cultural environment AND ancient Mayan cosmology in Meso-America. That’s a heady mix. “Yeah, they were the two things I was studying at that time. I went back to Mexico and Central America - there were still lingering wars going on in Central America - and I visited quite a few communities; we went to refugee camp in Southern Mexico, a Guatemalan refugee camp, and helped support some of those people back into Guatemala for the first time. They hadn’t seen their families in quite a long time so I was looking at both those things, they were both interests at that time; the ancient and the contemporary political situation.”

Did you find the refugee camps to be places of the dispossessed – that whole loss of identity with people no longer in their home towns? “No, I found that it was incredible how the community that I visited had really maintained a sense of who they were and a sense of family and they were really very clear; they didn’t even really want anything from us, the visitors. They just really wanted us to tell their story so other people would know what they had gone through, and they were incredibly resilient and resourceful. The camp was full of all these instruments that they had hand made out of found objects and reclaimed wood. It was pretty incredible.” Her voice fills with warmth at these fond recollections. She also still sounds amazed, all these years later.

Getting back to some of your more recent work, the 2005 The True Originals exhibition; for me this work seemed to be full of elementals, sprites and totems – a heady vibe of anthropomorphism – yet in a lot of the reviews the word ‘sexual’ kept coming up. Do you see this as reviewers imposing their own headspace on your work or was it a conscious act on your part? “No, I don’t think it was a conscious act on my part; I think that people always want to talk about sex so it’s probably more the reviewers.”

When I was researching for this interview, I found that there’s a large chunk of your life and work that’s work undocumented – why? “I guess it’s because I haven’t made a huge effort to take all of the work that I made, slides and all that, and transfer it to digital; people wrote about my work in South America but I think it’s all in Spanish and it’s not something I can make links to online. I think it was all before the web...” What?! A world before the inter-webs?! That’s crazy talk...

And finally, what’s next for you? “I’m heading back to New York and I have a couple of projects that I’d like to see happen; a kind of a big meta-collaboration with Rachel Bell, we’ve been kind of construing something together.” The elusiveness creeps back into the conversation. “I’m not being really articulate about this because I don’t know how much I want to reveal...but basically we’ve got a project brewing but we don’t really know where we’ll go or where the venue will be...”

Elusive. Fun. Playful. Just a few words to describe Daphane Park and her work – but just don’t try and make the labels stick.

Note: Daphane recently exhibited at AnnaKustera, New York, at the Never Ever Ever Land exhibition, curated by Natalie Kovacs.