BOMB Magazine | Elizabeth Hohimer by Caitlin Lorraine Johnson (2024)

Caitlin Lorraine Johnson How has your morning been?

Elizabeth Hohimer I’ve been taking all my sticky notes off the wall and gathering relevant papers for a potential titles list.

CLJ Can I read one? [Elizabeth nods, and I pick up a stray note that says: “Timeline A—soft but the same. Timeline B—rough but the same.”]

EH I write things down as I go. Some titles I know right away, and others are just two phrases put together. A mix. I like to respond to a finished weaving because I don’t know what it is until the work is framed and sewn on. This is the final moment.

CLJ Can you tell me a little about your process up to this point?

EH I have two European floor looms, which allow me to create really complex weave structures. Since I work in double cloth, I can use up to an eight-thread sequence. Within this body of work, there are variations on twill, lace, basket weave, and simple tabby. Once I weave, cut, and unfold the piece, it will be around sixty inches. Weaving in double cloth means I can see one half while I’m weaving but not the other. It requires an incredible amount of trust, and checking, and just being okay if something unexpected happens.

CLJ Do you have a sequence mapped out beforehand?

EH Sometimes.

CLJ Did weaving come naturally to you?

EH I think so. I grew up dancing at a really high level. I danced in New York City for a while, mainly contemporary ballet and modern. There’s a rhythm within weaving—not just the weaving aspect but even winding the wool—that reminds me of dance.

CLJ Did you weave while you were dancing?

EH No, they were like separate cat lives. I wish I’d known of more overlaps when I was dancing—women like Trisha Brown or Anna Halprin.

CLJ What happened after you stopped dancing?

EH I was at California College of the Arts (CCA) for three semesters. I earned all my credits from a community college and state university but wanted to graduate from an art school. Somehow I found a way. I really milked the experience. I worked for artists while I was at CCA, and they helped me grasp how my career was going to happen.

CLJ How did it happen?

EH My friend John Patrick tells people: I found her crying on the bench outside of The Get Go natural grocery in Marfa, Texas. Which is true. JP just believed in me. He asked how much my rent was and said, Okay, you need to make three times that a month. This is what you’re going to do for me. I boiled chicken and rice for his dogs at 6 AM. Then, we became best friends and made design choices together. I wove clothing for John Patrick Organics. JP set the price point really high: $1000 pieces, $3000 coats. He choreographed all this: you’re going to weave; then you’ll weave clothing; and after several years, your work will be in a gallery. I got into a gallery a little quicker than he said. Everything we thought would happen in five years happened in three.

CLJ Where was your first show?

EH There’s a gallery space in Marfa, The Wrong Store, run by artists Camp Bosworth and Buck Johnston. I got to know them and was like, Your space is the only space I want to show my work. The building is a restored church, but you can see adobe bricks through breaks in the plaster. It’s very real and raw. So, I ended up having a solo show there. The opening coincided with the first Marfa Invitational—unplanned—which worked really well in my favor. I made a dossier with images from that show, and it got to Gerald Peters Contemporary.

CLJ Your titles are so evocative. Maps of Affection is the title of your current exhibition. I also loved the title of your previous show, Negotiated Desires.

EH I think a lot about language. Lately, I’m reading everyone’s take on the sublime. I’ve spent months working on writings to try to recreate this narrative and to try to figure out how these experiences are spoken about correctly, you know?

CLJ It’s hard to distill into words.

EH Trying to make my work digestible is almost a conflict of interest for me. I don’t even think I can. I resonate with Edmund Burke’s A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful. Burke bases his writing on the sublime mostly in what a beholder can create from emotion, perception, and nature. That feels like what I’m circling. Another source of the sublime is what Burke calls infinity, where the eye is not able to “perceive the bounds” of something or “see an object distinctly,” and this gives rise to a “terrible uncertainty of the thing” perceived.

CLJ Does what you’re reading inform how you think or speak about art? If so, does a particular passage come to mind?

EH I keep going back over and over again to one Clarice Lispector short story. I appreciate when other artists insert direct references to help with all of this floaty sh*t, so this is the little paragraph I feel deeply about. It’s from “The Fever Dream”:

Lavender colors hover in space like butterflies. Slender flutes extend toward the heavens and fragile melodies burst into the air like bubbles. The rosy shapes keep sprouting from the wounded earth. All of a sudden, thundering anew. Is the Earth bearing children? The shapes dissolve in midair, scared away. Corollas wilt and colors darken. And the Earth, arms contracted in pain, splits open into fresh black fissures. A strong smell of wounded earth wafts in dense plumes of smoke.

CLJ It’s always interesting which passages keep coming back.

EH Do you have one?

CLJ I think a lot about this paragraph from “Marble in Metamorphosis” by Rachel Cusk:

What makes certain things last, while others decay and are forgotten? Perhaps what lasts is what continues to fit into the human story, what we can bend to our subjective understanding of who we are. For something to last, we have to agree with it, even if what we are agreeing with is something the lasting object never intended. Time strips an object of its context, revealing it for the achievement or mistake that it was, but what about its intentions? One might say that an artist is a person who has found a way to bind their intentions to the object they create. Yet how can they know whether those intentions will or ought to last?

Music used to inspire me as much or more than writing, but lately I can’t concentrate when a song is playing, particularly one with lyrics.

EH It’s like weaving with colors on. I’ll just look down and be like, Oh, great. Unless I create these rules ahead of time, it’s too easy to get distracted. I prefer to wear white.

CLJ I create so many small habits and rituals around writing. Sometimes it feels like the ability to write might disappear at any moment.

EH I wish someone had told me earlier to stop thinking I just got lucky. Nepotism exists, sure. That happens for some people, but luck kind of doesn’t.

CLJ Or at least doesn’t continue.

EH Right. Luck’s a one-time thing, but I still have a hard time letting go of that idea and reminding myself that my work has established me to the point where I can ask for things to be different.

Elizabeth Hohimer: Maps of Affection is on view at Gerald Peters Contemporary in Santa Fe, New Mexico,until June 15.

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