Siena Hart
Siena Hart explores simple interventions of the everyday through digitally mediated performance and installation. With a focus on outward manifestations of embodied experience, vulnerability, anxiety, and the dialogue between the real and the imagined, Hart invites audiences to challenge the architecture of their own identities, perception, and memory.
Hart's current research looks at the intersections of the unknown and known, and the possibilities of myth-making as method.
Long Live the New Flesh: the body as fantasy space
Interview with Siena Hart
February 2019
1.How do you explain your art to strangers?
I like to scrutinise and play with the in-between. Things that spread across, between, or beyond binary understandings.
2.How does fantasy or transformation function within your work in relation to materials/the body/ identity politics?
It’s very central, but mostly not explicitly. Nothing in my work (or in the universe) is fixed or immovable. Everything is transforming all of the time. I take a lot of influence from the natural world; ecosystems and transformation through connection, coalescence.
3.What books, films, academic texts etc. have been inspiring or influential to your work?
Elvia Wilk’s The Word Made Fresh: Mystical Encounter and the New Weird Divine
Isabelle Loring Wallace and Jennie Hirsch’s collection of essays Contemporary Art and Classical Myth
Andrei Tarkovsky’s The Mirror
4.Who are some contemporary artists that excite you?
So many I don’t want to start listing in case I miss someone. I’m into myth-making and magical thinking, artists that un-nerve the audience, and a good dose of self awareness.
5.Where do you make your art? What kind of studio do you have?
I oscillate between the screen and the traditional studio. The digital studio is very quiet and methodical, whereas my physical studio is very chaotic. I need to build things spatially to nut out ideas, scribble notes on whatever surface is near me and collage the walls. I think the traditional studio for me is a space to flesh out, or talk out ideas that aren’t quite formed yet. It’s important to make things with my hands and have space to make failures here.
6.What do you listen to when you are making?
In the studio I go for things that intuitively match the mood of what i’m doing. Bjork’s Vulnicura, Elizabeth Cotten, and Grouper are all mainstays. In front of a screen I’m usually working with headphones, but if I’m writing it’s ‘8 Hours Forest Ambience’ on Youtube, ha!
7.What are you currently working on/obsessed with/thinking about?
Celtic folklore, keeping a dream journal, why we’re all so scared of being earnest, Jenny Hval’s writing.
8. If you could take any form for 24 hours what would it be?
Either a bird that lived high up in the mountains, or a whole river system, I bet that would feel incredible.
Image details: Siena Hart 'The Distance Between You and I (production still) (2018) six channel video with sound
Image details: Artist in the studio pictured with 2/4 Total Visibility, Total Unknowing and {No} Angel (2018)
Image details: Artist in the studio pictured with 2/4 Total Visibility, Total Unknowing and {No} Angel (2018)
