Harrison Wayne interviewed by Kate Greenwell
Harrison Wayne in his studio. Photo provided by De'De' Ajavon, 2022.
Harrison Wayne, INTERVIEWED BY KATE GREENWELL
Harrison Wayne is a working artist from Atlanta GA, with a degree in chemistry. Harrison uses his background as a chemist and his experiences emerging from the South as a guiding hand to his artistic practice.
Kate: Harrison, you’ve described yourself not only as an artist but also as a chemist and a poet.
How do you feel these three identities form your practice?
Harrison: Yeah, the longer that I practice, the more I develop this understanding that having a creative output or studio practice is ultimately taking the skills that you've learned throughout your life and applying them to whatever obsessions or preoccupations you have naturally. And so, for me, these mixed identities of poet, chemist, artist, and even southern woodworker are all tools I gained throughout my life experiences. I try to coalesce them in the studio to tackle whatever problems I'm confronted with or whatever objectives I want to complete in the studio.
For me, they're identities, but they're also positions that give me a unique set of tools.
Chemistry gives me a perspective on material interactions, and it gives me a unique body of informal knowledge that I can draw on whenever I have ideas for sculptures or concepts that I want to express with those chemical materials. The identities of the poet and southern woodworker are similar. If I had a concept in my head, I intuitively would have because I have those experiences in my life that have given me these tool sets, gone to those identities, and tried to figure out how to tackle these concepts.
K: I feel like poetry and woodworking come together in your cross pieces a lot. Can you tell us a little bit more about that?
H: For me, crosses involve the methodical action of joining two pieces of wood at a perpendicular intersection point and repeating the process hundreds of times to make hundreds of crosses. My practice began with the cross in the traditional form of the Christian Baptist faith, a cross with two intersecting bars, but it began to expand into batches of more expansive cruciforms.
Creating these crosses started to have a rhythm to it and that rhythm reminded me of poetry. At some point throughout the process of making these wooden multiples, I started assigning them poems.
Two images from: Untitled, (Bulgakov, 1917) label on cedar, 60” x 14”, 2023.
K: Are these cross-installations site-specific?
H: No. I like to install them very intentionally on outside sites or field installations. The pieces aren't conceptualized or executed with a particular site in mind. Usually, I'll make the piece, and I'll carry it around for a while; sometimes, my trunk is just full of them. And then, when I'm out and about, if a site calls to me and it resembles a certain poem, I do an installation and document it. I consider them sculptures. But, like a lot of my sculptures, they usually don't exist in a gallery context. I try to take them to other places.
Untitled, label on cedar, 70” x 5”, 2023.
K: It seems like a part of your process is to live with the works and let them develop alongside you.
H: Yeah, 100%.
K: Another work that seems to relate to them developing alongside you is the wedges. Can you tell us more about that? I know that it began with your time at Stove Works.
H: Yeah, it did. I came here with a very emotionally charged project that I wanted to start, but I was hesitant to begin developing it. I began to notice that this building was beautiful, but so many of the floors were uneven by the nature of being old and a renovated building, so I started making shims, just very simple wooden shims that I had seen my grandfather make for cabinets over the years, just to level out the furniture in the room.
K: And your grandfather is a carpenter, right?
H: Yeah. My grandfather learned the basics of carpentry from my grandma's father and has been teaching himself and learning from different sources for the past four decades. When he was 35, he and my grandmother owned a house, they had my mother and my uncle at the time and they had to repair things around the house. He would pick up skills along the way to solve the problems at hand, essentially.
I've seen him make shims to balance furniture, for antique sales, or for whatever it is over the years, so I started making shims. Then, my door in my studio wouldn't stay open properly, so I scaled up the shim, but I recognized that it was the same object. Similar to the cross pieces, it became an obsession with multiples, especially wooden multiples. The landscape of the material is comfortable to me, because of my woodworking background, it's definitely a preferred material.
Harrison Wayne and his grandfather Wayne Meers in Meers' basement workshop in Stone Mountain, GA. Circa 2011, photo taken by Wendy Meers.
H: The more that I worked with the wedges, the more I realized they were initially intended to be purely structural stability for my swinging door and my wobbly nightstand, but they also have a second life. Objects that can be played with and rearranged on the workbench. I started leaning into the poetic aspect of a wedge being the archetypal shape that drives things apart but also stabilizes things. A close buddy of mine commented on the wedges, saying that “they keep doors open,” and I started thinking about the poetic quality of the wedges. Ever since then, I've been obsessed with making them. The process is incredibly simple; it is very similar to the cross in that it’s made with one repeated action. Once you get that action down, you can iterate a plethora of forms. For the wedge, it’s just a single cut in lumber, and because it’s so simple, it becomes a vessel to project into emotionally or narratively.
Wedges in Harrison's stove works studio - lumber, latex paint, various collected objects in built box on top of built furniture dolly, 2024.
K: Back to what you said about the wedge as a form, it can open up doors and separate things. I think a lot of your practice has to do with reflection but also destruction, in a way.
H: These two ideas of preservation or destruction are present within a lot of my projects, including the wedges. The wedge does divide, and the other side is keeping the door open. They have a similar double life to the chemical jars in that way.
K: Yeah, can you tell us a little bit more about the chemical jars, how they function, and how you make them?
H: The jars that I've been creating for the past year and a half are typically antique canning jars. I fill them with different objects, objects that have personal sentimental value for me or for my collaborators. Then, after I fill these cannon jars with these objects, I'll fill the remaining volume of the jar with industrial hydrogen peroxide at various concentrations. Then, I situate the jars carefully and set them up to allow for pressure regulation as the oxidative process progresses.
The performance evolves for however long the jar is sealed. Typically, any kind of object that goes into the jar, the organic component of that object will be oxidized violently but very softly at the same time over an extended duration of time. Oftentimes in gallery contexts, these jars exist for two to three months at a time, they're full of say flowers or photographs, and those objects evolve very slowly, day by day. For me, I think that these performances do emulate these ideas of preservation and destruction because a lot of the objects that go into these jars are objects that typically someone would want to preserve or save or hold on to. But I'm trying to explore these notions that the act of holding on to the object is maybe less important than the energy of the object. This idea is that you can have an important family photo. You can hold onto that for the rest of your life. It has important values, but I like the idea that instead of centering the object, you can have a moment of monumental importance by destroying the object or getting rid of the object very intentionally. I think that just comes from the Southern American identity of hoarding and collecting.
Untitled (Collective Telling), January 2024. Industrial Concentration Hydrogen Peroxide, canning jar, images shared by exhibiting artists. Dimensions variable.
K: It seems like you're not only collecting things to make your art, but you're collecting a community while you make them. There's a specific project where, and this is the first time I have ever met you, you asked me to sign a piece of paper.
H: I think that what's crucial to that project is realized by anybody who goes through a monumental loss. The networks of social relations that we exist within often feel very permanent or very steadfast, but they can dissolve very rapidly. People move on, people move away. The project started when I realized that a lot of my friends in the emerging art ecosystem in Atlanta were constantly talking about moving to other places to seek opportunities where their practices would be better supported. I became very aware of the fact that the network of relations that I exist within as an emerging artist in Atlanta is very tenuous. It could change at any time. So, the sentimental artist in me and the sentimental person in me wanted to capture these very imperfect recordings of moments when we're all together.
The project is organized by a very simple rule. Whenever I'm in a room with peers, I ask anybody in the room to sign a sheet of paper. I like the fact that it becomes a drawing, and I'm just setting the conditions for the drawing to happen. It's a way of collecting, but I like that it has an unbiased nature, a very flawed and imperfect way of collecting. There's no context as to why we're together, and sometimes people don't sign the paper. There's no record of where you were or when you were there, but it is a sentimental way of trying to document the relational networks that exist within the art ecosystem of Georgia. And now that I'm in Chattanooga on residency, the project has shifted to be a representative of the networks that I find myself in here.
Four excerpts from Qualitative Observations, created during Harrison's first month in residency at Stove Works. 2024.
K: How has your time in residency at Stove Works changed or furthered your practice?
H: I think it's important to say that I'm somebody who has had to nurture my practice alongside a full-time manufacturing job for the past five years. The opportunity to come to Stove Works and be here in a phenomenal environment and practice in this studio and to have access to these workshops and this incredible equipment 24/7 has completely shifted the way that I create. I've never before in my life had an opportunity to wake up, walk into my studio in the morning, and work on a project and not be interrupted by regular day-to-day routines of life and work. Being in a community where I didn't know anybody coming into it and being surrounded not only by the thriving arts system of Chattanooga but also by artists coming in from across the country and across the world has been such a phenomenal experience. I think it's really important for artists to experience what it's like to work with peers, have studio neighbors, or even lose mentor figures in my life. As somebody who's somewhat of an outsider artist, it's been a phenomenally enriching experience and has also just given me a way to improve myself and my practice.
Harrison and the rest of the February Stove Works cohort enjoying a gourmet dinner, photo provided by Waffle House Employee. 2024.
K: Is there anything exciting coming up with your practice in the next few months that we should be aware of?
H: I will be wrapping up my residency with an exhibition at Stove Works called A Joy That Could Not Be Replaced on the weekend of April 20th. Open studios are also on April 20th, so it's a phenomenal day to visit Stove Works.
Harrison Wayne Self Portrait, Taken on Galaxy S21, 2024.
You can follow Harrison’s practice through Harrisonwayneworks on Instagram or www.harrison-wayne.com