Interview on KBAC Santa Fe radio with host Honey Harris, September 16, 2014
Interview on KSFR Santa Fe radio with host Mary Charlotte, September 18, 2014
http://www.santaferadiocafe.org/sfradiocafe/2014/09/18/margaret-denney/
Craig Smith Interview for the Santa Fean Magazine,
June/July 2012
Craig Smith:
Houses and food – what’s the attraction? Artistically, what fulfillment do you find in making your “edible” set pieces, or your fantastical houses in their many incarnations and on their many fascinating plots of “land” or sea?
Margaret Denney:
Well, they’re both everywhere, but how often do you really look at them? Most of us experience them every day. They’re considered necessities of life.
The food work grew from a couple of different sources. One was my interest in early Egyptian culture, in particular grave goods, those items the Egyptians wished to accompany them into the next life. They believed the representations they created were as genuine as the real thing. I wondered what those food items would be in our culture. This got me thinking about the representation of food, the sort of perversity of it (the perishable nature of food versus the near permanent representation of it) and the nature of representation itself. I wanted to simultaneously arouse and frustrate desire, much like Galatea before she came to life, but with food rather than a sexual object. Food is more universal, and simpler. Objects of sexual desire take countless forms, but just about everyone wants a piece of chocolate when they see it. A bronze chocolate, though, will break your teeth. Hence the title ‘Cold Comfort’. In that piece, I’m referencing the different stages of life and the forms of oral gratification associated with them. With the passage of time and individual maturation, one form of comfort replaces another, but all are ultimately futile.
The houses seem an inescapable subject for me, given my work in architecture and the fact that I simply love houses. I like playing with the layers of meaning the house has, from a place of a physical shelter to metaphor for the physical body and realm of the spirit. I think a sense of home, beyond physical shelter, is a fundamental human need and I’m fascinated how people manage to create that for themselves in places and spaces which seem virtually indistinguishable from one another. I’m also fascinated by human settlement patterns, how they morph over time, and the social implications of these shifts.
Craig Smith:
Your houses look very much like the Monopoly houses and hotels. Was this an influence with you?
Margaret Denney:
Of course I played Monopoly as a child, but a greater influence was the suburbanization of the D.C. area while I was growing up. My parents bought a house in a Levitt development after visiting a row of model homes put up in the middle of a Colonial plantation in southern Maryland. (It was at that time a horse farm) We would drive out every weekend to see the progress- first the grading, then the streets, then the slabs, framing, roof, etc. It made a great impression on me, and that development was typical of what was going on throughout the country. Everywhere you went was farmland being torn up and converted into housing tracts. Without realizing it, I was being introduced to mass production, consumer culture, and the concomitant illusion of choice. These are themes which still interest me.
The simple house shape in some of my work has more to do with using a universal ‘house’ image that crosses culture and geography than with referencing Monopoly, although people make that assumption. But if you look carefully at the Monopoly house, you’ll see it’s quite different, more of a ranch house with a shallow pitch, overhanging eaves, and a weird circular chimney in the middle. If you look at children’s art, you’ll find that many young children, living in areas where the domestic vernacular is different, still draw the classic pitched roof profile when asked to draw a house.
Craig Smith:
Architecture and art go hand in hand for you. Please comment a bit on how your technical architectural work informs your personal art output – format, look, planning, etc.
Margaret Denney:
There’s not a lot of technical architectural stuff that transfers to the art. I would say it’s more a matter of process. Designing houses is all about visualizing something that doesn’t exist, and then translating that idea into a format (a set of plans) which can be understood and executed by others. (It’s very similar to music composition that way. In the same way that no two conductors will conduct the same symphony, no two builders will construct the same house, although each is following the same score or set of plans.)
I think my architectural experience makes it easy for me to conceptualize, visualize a piece, whether or not the work deals with architectural imagery. I don’t do a lot of drawing. It’s there in my head, so it’s almost redundant to draw it unless I’m trying to explain the idea to someone else. I’m more likely to make notes on scale, materials, the associations I’m trying to evoke in the viewer.
I’m very concerned with meaning in my work and I think about how to reinforce that through choices in material, media, etc. I was trained in a classic modernist ‘less is more’ tradition’, so I don’t want anything in the work which isn’t contributing to the overall meaning of the piece, be it a color, texture or material. I’m after a kind of visual poetry, triggering a string of associations for the viewer the way a good haiku would. Figurative and idiomatic language often play a part in my work, either through titling or literalization.
Actually creating the piece always brings surprises and challenges. There’s no way to figure everything out beforehand, and that keeps things interesting. I think of each piece as a kind of preparation for the next, even if the pieces don’t appear related. When we finish a set of plans for a house, it goes to a builder and a year or two later the house is finished. With my art work, it seems like a luxury to just be able to go ahead and do it myself, without needing anyone else to make it happen.
And the fact is, I love making things. It’s at least partly in my genes- there are lots of artisans (blacksmiths, carpenters, etc.) in my background. My great-grandfather, a mason, put the final slabs of limestone on the top of the Washington Monument in 1884. I’ve had a photograph of that event in my studio for years. It keeps me humble when I think I’m facing a technical challenge!
Margaret Denney 