IN CONVERSATION:

CONNECTING ART, HEALTH, AND LASTING CHANGE

Transcribed conversation between Hayveyah McGowan & Miguel Lastra

HM:

In your sculptural work, how do you conceive of the body—not merely as form, but as a site of memory, labor, and spiritual transmission? What possibilities does this open for healing, both personal and collective?

ML:

Bodies. Bodies are archives. You know, they are archives of our DNA, of genetics that span centuries, millennia, right? We are archives of organisms that predate humanness, and I think that’s an interesting thing to keep in mind when we think about the body persevering, transforming. I certainly think about it often in that context. And the body's not only an archive of mutation, of transformation in its past tense—what came before that explains its present form—but the body is also a continuous archive, a collector of experience. I think about that in the context of illness, trauma, but also joy, and the matter- of-factness of what we go through. We age. Our bodies change in small and also drastic ways as life moves on. That might mean our bodies start to become something we had no intention of, or something we had so much intention in. I think about this regarding illnesses that linger and become part of daily living. I think about the augmentation of our own bodies, when we decide to transform ourselves to meet certain needs and desires. I think about this in the grander examples of the transformation of the trans body, the disabled body, and also in other instances, like what it is to be medicated for whatever reason. For me, for example, being asthmatic, I think about what augmentations my body needs in order to perform, or for me to perform, physically speaking.

There’s a broad array of what the body is, what the body does, what the body collects, and the needs that arise from what it has collected, whether experientially or physically, in terms of change. We all occupy these vessels with so much potential to move through, move past, and be informed by what has occurred, either within our own lifetime or as a consequence of ancestry. I think about the idea of us coming from single-celled organisms somewhere along the way, but also about ancestry in a racial orethnic context. So, I think I’m constantly thinking about that, because I’m constantly in awe of our own physicality.

When I’m sculpting, I’m often thinking about the incredible diversity of the body and of what the body may require. I'm preoccupied by a desire to understand that. And I think part of that understanding is not just about experience. I think the act of looking at bodies is incredibly important, and I practice the importance of gaze. What it is to really look at a body, and then to embody that gaze. When I look at someone’s body, whether through image, video, or in person, I’m questioning, wondering. I become excited by, perplexed by, surprised by, impressed by the body. In joy, enjoy, and in joy. But it’s not only about experiencing the body—my own or others’—through personal experience. Part of it, for me, is also wanting to understand the body, generally speaking, through making.

A good example of this is in many of my fired sculptures. I think about Nicolas, for example, a large standing sculpture I made a few years ago. Nicolas is almost completely hollow on the inside, raw, meaning there’s no glaze. On the outside, there’s a lot of waste glaze, and the clay I’m using is this waste material. When making that body, I build intuitively. I have a rough idea of what this body may look like. The rough idea for Nicolas was to create a standing body, referencing the history of standing figures in the canon of art history, idealized forms like the David, and thinking about what it is to sculpt a body, to allow a body to just become.

I allow the material to decide what it wants to become, how it wants to warp and bend. So, when I’m sculpting Nicolas, I’m thinking of archiving—archiving experience, my experience with the clay. There’s a harmony between me and the material. We are co-sculpting the body. I respond to the material, to its wants. If it wants to bend outward, I work with that and see how I can stabilize it. The material also conforms to my needs or desires. I want this body upright. The material is responsive to me. There’s this sort of dance, a kind of embrace. You can really see this in the interior of Nicolas. You see my thumbprints, the pinching gestures as I press each coil of clay onto the one before it. I'm making a stratum. Nicolas is stratified, like in geology, where we read history through layers. So, Nicolas holds this archive—of itself, of me, of the material becoming itself.On the exterior is another archive, of waste material that finds new life as a body. I think of Nicolas’ body as a consequence of my labor, as a consequence of material once undesired that becomes this seemingly undesirable body, but one that is still present. Nicolas is a body of potential, now standing in front of you.

He was the first full-scale sculpture I made, standing about shoulder height. He required so much labor from me. I had to manually fire the kiln for over 12 hours in both firings to ensure it reached temperature. I had to be attentive to him. He is not only the consequence of my physical labor in producing the body, but also of transforming him from clay, which is full of potential, into ceramic, which has very few possibilities of change. It becomes more permanent, more eternal. So, I’ve given Nicolas this sort of eternity, and that creates the archival idea: permanence, history. He is a collection of history, of feelings and reactions. That’s how I work with the body in sculpture. Other fired sculptures Dani, Omar, Justine—operate similarly. Other bodies I make may operate with the same sensitivities but collect, become, or transform in slightly different ways. Lately, this has shifted more and more. This practice has become a site of healing for me. I look back at Nicolas and re-experience something. I enter into new dialogue with him. I remember what it was to sculpt him, to understand what it meant to create that body. Nicolas does not look anything like me. His belly is rounder, he is stouter, and there’s this baffling second body attached to his back. It’s upside down, unrecognizable but recognizable. It’s fractured, painful, unusual. I think a lot about what it took to feel that, to inhabit a body completely unlike my own through making. It’s a form of understanding.

And I’ll end by saying: when figure sculpting, especially at the scale I work at, I often have one hand on the outside of the body and one on the inside. When smoothing the exterior surface—the skin—I’m simultaneously pressing from the inside. I can never stop thinking about the incredible intimacy, gentleness, and sensitivity of having one arm on the skin of a body and the other deep inside it. I’m inside and outside of Nicolas at once. That stays with me.

 

HM:

How has your experience with caregiving shaped your understanding of empathy as a creative force? In works like Hernando, how do tenderness and attention become mediums in themselves?

ML:

When I was in college, in my early twenties, I was volunteering for a hospice center. I would volunteer atthe front desk of the hospice floor of a hospital in Albuquerque, New Mexico. I was there answering phones, helping people check in if they were coming to see a loved one. At other times, I would keep company with certain people in hospice who might not have visitors very often, who were alone, or maybe comatose.

There are many particular experiences I could talk about from those environments. But in relation to caregiving, I thought a lot about what it meant to be in company with people who were in a very fragile state in their lives. Their bodies were in a very sensitive moment. They were on the verge of death, in different ways. Some people were very naturally at the end of their lives through old age. Others were experiencing very difficult conditions with their bodies that were bringing them toward the end, whether through severe illness or other health complications. I would sit with some of them, particularly with one older gentleman, reading to him, reading privately but being in space with him. I saw this as a kind of caregiving. The body, they say, can sense what is happening around it. It can listen, it can hear. Some senses remain active. So I think a lot about being in company with people at that very heightened somatic state.

At the time, I was around 20 or 21 years old. I didn’t really revisit the idea of the fragility or transformation of the body in that kind of way until about 2020 or 2021, when I began sculpting Hernando, an ongoing sculpture I have been continuously working on. When I started Hernando, I had just begun graduate school. And of course, it was 2020, a time of overwhelming complexity. Health on a global scale, political upheaval, and my own feelings around mortality were all pressing in. Mortality related to illness. Mortality related to the climate crisis. I felt an onslaught of chaotic, existential questions, rooted deeply in our physicality. I needed to externalize those questions. And so Hernando happened.

Hernando became a piece made from waste clay, clay discarded or abandoned by others because it was contaminated or simply left behind for different reasons. I sculpted Hernando roughly to my owndimensions, but still very different from my body. I needed to surrender this body to something else that was not me, to co-author the body. That is why I placed Hernando into a tank filled with soil I had dug up from here in Providence, Rhode Island, where I currently live. I left all the organisms in that soil. It came from an area near water, on the land of one of my mentors atthe time, Leslie Baker. I sealed the tank, allowing whatever organisms were there to begin working on Hernando. At that point, the sculpture entered into a different kind of collaboration. For about two years, the only work I did was to maintain a life support system for the organisms in the tank. That support came in the form of light and water. I attached an IV bag to the tank, replaced the water periodically, and moved the tank—sometimes on wheels—to give it light or shade when it was in my studio, or outside of a gallery environment.

Something remarkable happened over those two years. Hernando’s form began to change because of the life and movement occurring inside the tank. I sometimes joked that it became like a hyperbaric chamber, though instead of oxygen, it was closed off and filled with non-human species, soil, rock, even compost I had added to provide nutrients. Hernando’s surface, his skin, started to change. Throughout those two years in grad school, I would always return to him, sit with him, observe him. He became a meditation on what it means to hand over our agency, our bodies, to something else. This idea reaches across many areas of thought. It is a spiritual question. It is also a societal question. What does it mean to surrender ourselves to nature at large? We are nature, yet we often attempt to divorce ourselves from it. There’s a strange anthropocentric way of thinking that places us in a hierarchy, either in or outside of nature. What does it mean to truly comprehend that we are part of a larger ecological system? What does it mean to move through that system, to reconnect our bodies to it?

This also raises questions around surrendering our bodies to other systems of care. Systems of wellness. Hernando became a place where other caregivers, other agents of transformation, were involved. That was new to me. With my previous sculptures, like Nicolas or Omar, it was me and the material working together. But Hernando brought other participants. I had to watch him go through changes I didn’t fully understand. I didn’t know if I was witnessing his death or a form of revival. Eventually, I accepted that it was both. Hernando became a proxy. I realized, years later, that he was experiencing a kind of death. Or rather, another way of considering death—as transformation. His bodybegan fracturing in places due to the humidity and the shifting of the soil. There were probablyorganisms living inside the soil, moving across his body. I chose not to intervene. I chose not to repairhim, whatever I thought repair might mean. My only task was to continue sustaining the system—providing water, sunlight—and watching.

In some ways, Hernando was experiencing everything I was too nervous to face. Drastic change. New forms of care. Survival through unpredictable and risk-filled circumstances. Hernando became a tender proxy, a substitute for me to go through those things. And I really thank him for that. After two years, I needed to close that chapter. But that didn’t mean Hernando was finished. I recycled his body. I removed him from the tank and dissected him. That was a very tender, very difficult process. His body had grown soft, and when I cut him open, it was pink on the inside. I reformed him into a new sculpture to explore different questions—questions about hybridity, presence, agency. I used audio, merged his body with plants, and moved the soil that had once surrounded him into the inside of his new form. Hernando became a continuous exercise in empathy. A way to question what the body can do, should do, is allowed to do. A meditation on all the alternatives available to the body. And I am very grateful for that. At this point, Hernando continues to be an object through which I try to answer these questions— existential questions, somatic questions. I don’t yet know where he is going next or what he will become.

 

HM:

Do you consider your practice a kind of ritual or spiritual technology—one that enacts healing through material, gesture, or intention? How do you see this praxis interacting with the viewer’s own emotional or ancestral terrain?

ML:

I love this question of ritual or spiritual technology because it’s something I’ve been thinking about a lot in the past year or so. My practice is actually changing. I think quite a bit. Certain things that I considered in my past work are now becoming even more important in what I’m doing now.I was really preoccupied with the body itself. What is the body? What does it look like? What is its orientation, its situation? And thinking about the embodiment of that body when we look at it. There’s this theorist named Jules Sturm who talks in their book Bodies We Fail about what it is to look at a body that is unlike ours. They explore the kind of exchange that happens through looking, the power dynamic, and how we experience in our bodies another person’s body. So, I was really thinking about that for a while.

But somewhere along the way, I became more preoccupied not only with what is happening to the body or what the body is doing, but with what are the conditions around the body. I began thinking about environment, location, and other objects that interact with the body and either allow or don’t allow the body to be present or to do certain things. Whether that’s armature, furnishings, or other sorts of apparatuses for the body, these ideas have really informed a lot of my current research.

The biggest question in my practice right now is: What are the conditions conducive to [blank]? That question mimics the scientific idea of “conditions conducive to life,” like when we study biology and ask what is needed to sustain life. For mammals, that’s things like water, oxygen, and sunlight. But I’ve been orienting this not necessarily to life alone, but to presence—to being, to the formation of questions. I’ve been looking at examples of environments that allow us to do things. Sometimes this is quite simple, like paying attention to interior design. What is a space that allows us to rest? What kinds of objects or spatial relationships allow us to feel supported, urgent, or to re- experience something? I’ve also been thinking about my ancestral connections to this question, looking at Taíno objects that allowed my ancestors to connect to something beyond themselves—to connect to the spiritual plane.

Many of these were tools, objects that enabled them to convene or to enter spiritual space. Others were furnishings, like the duhos—low stools made of wood or stone that were important for certain occasions, especially rituals of connection. That’s what makes me so fascinated by sculpture. For me, sculpture is about connecting to objects and considering the power of objects in relation to us and to other things. This is where ritual and spirituality, or spiritual technologies, really come into play. These elements charge the body. They allow the body to do something specific. I also think they provide a context for the viewer to enter into an environment with the body. They create footholds to understand what thebody is attempting or doing, sometimes just matter-of-factly, so that we are in company with that experience.

It’s one thing to see a body in isolation. That’s a powerful gesture. Just witnessing a body can be profound. Something happens between our bodies and another body, whether it’s living and breathing or taking the form of a human or nonhuman presence. But something else happens when we are given context around that body. Our feelings shift. I think about how different it feels to enter a church and see bodies in prayer, or to enter a yoga studio and see bodies moving between moments of stillness and action, as a form of self-care. Or when we see bodies at the gym or in sport—we witness the body under pressure, interacting with terrain, with objects, and we understand what those objects mean to them, or to us.

I’m really thinking about the richness of these things and the ways people have already imbued objects with meaning. People know what these objects do. And I want to take advantage of that now. Every object—or many objects, maybe even every object—can become a ritual object under the right conditions. They can become tools for transformation, spiritual or physical. At least, that’s what I want to investigate. I want to reorient these objects. Sometimes we feel a kind of callousness toward certain objects, like medical equipment. They feel stern, intimidating, because we associate them with the difficult experiences that bring us into those environments. But we don’t always think about the other side of that.

For example, going back to an earlier question about hospice—when you enter the room of someone in hospice, you see a hospital bed, IV bags, poles that hold them up, and other devices you might not fully understand. These rooms can feel cold and frightening because they signal hardship. But what we often overlook is the potential and purpose of those objects. Their nurturing quality. They are sustaining a life. They are providing care, relief, and comfort. That ominous IV bag and tubing that pierces the body might feel unsettling, but it carries medicine, hydration, and nutrients. It offers the body rest and relief. I want to reveal that aspect of objects—the thing we know is happening but don’t actively recognize. And that, I think, is what ritual can be. Ritual is about unveiling. It is about performing a gesture of understanding, of divining, of questioning, of seeking answers, of illumination.That’s what I’m interested in now. That’s why I would say my practice is now very much about ritual. I’m investigating objects and technologies that are both ancient and contemporary. I’m asking, what is happening here?

I’m hopeful that with the amount of care I give in selecting objects, in sculpting objects, or in orienting environments through installation, others will begin to question what my sculptures are doing in a space. What are they interacting with? What are the conditions being offered to the body—or to the not-body—through sound, light, and material? I don’t know if that answers the question clearly, because I’m still learning. I’m still figuring out what conditions are necessary to answer my questions about care, about healing, about understanding, about remembering. About what the body is doing, what my body is doing or thinking or feeling, or has felt.