Call me ‘K’

An Interview by Lili Rachel Beke
June 2021

Erica Keiko Rawald, ‘K’, (b. 1996 in New York City) is a multidisciplinary artist of Japanese, American, and German-British descent. Specializing in Ceramic Sculptures, K’s artistic practice spans cross-cultural themes, forms, and attributes in their elucidation of the perks and pitfalls of human experience.

I’m reminded of the infamous cinematic line ‘The eyes, chico, they never lie’ as we face each other through our respective screens. K looks steadily at me through the camera, their gaze like dollops of warm honey lit up by the sun streaming through the window, and I forget that in reality there is a vast ocean between us. Wearing a pale blue tank top, their hair is cut into a short bob with bangs, the tips dyed a golden brown. Behind K, the walls are covered from floor to ceiling with frames, mirrors, and plants. An iron spiral staircase comes into view as they shift in their seat, settling in for our talk. There is a bluntness about K, the sort of dauntless sincerity usually, and rightly, attributed to New Yorkers. “I grew up in a few places and I’m not even really sure how to explain my own nationality. Whenever people ask me where I’m from, I almost feel like pausing and saying ‘well, how long do you have’? ”, K grins delightedly, shoulders shooting up to their ears. “I was born in New York, right in the city, but I was about a year and a half when we moved to Tokyo. We spent about 5 years there before moving back to the states for a quick pit stop in Connecticut. Soon after, we relocated to Frankfurt and then eventually to London, where I finished up my schooling. It all came full circle when I returned to New York to attend university. My mother is Japanese and my dad is American with German-British roots, and so all of the places in which I was raised, happen to be where my ‘body’ is from. Between moving around a fair amount and having those places dually be where my family and their heritage is from, I’ve always had a hard time navigating just where I fit in or where ‘home’ is. Luckily, New York is a globe in itself!”, K chuckles as a hoard of honking cars swoosh by her building, supplying big-city ambience.

Their innate ability to adopt a global appreciation is evident not only from the way they interact. K’s multicultural demeanor constitutes a fundamental tenet of their creative practice. The instinctive manner in which materials are shaped in their hands reveals an understanding, tolerance, and compassion toward a diverse range of subject matter and form. “I come from a unique position being a biracial, female-presenting non-binary queer, with a history of mental health issues”, K expressed in our first written exchange. Extending an unconditional welcome to me, sight unseen, they allowed me to step right into their world of sensations and clay. We were put in touch by a mutual friend, one I made on the underground one sweltering August afternoon. Their connection is more elementary than that; it is a friendship forged early on at school, characterized first by distance then several reunions as they played against each other at numerous interscholastic football tournaments. Prior to this call, I’ve only observed K through their social media, which often features them napping in their camper chair following a 12-hour studio session. “The thing is that art, and specifically ceramics, was never more than what I thought was a coping mechanism to get me through a rather toxic high school environment. I never quite fit in but also stuck out just enough to catch notice and be cut down”. Hiding out in the deserted art department during lunch breaks, K didn’t think anyone would take notice of an outlaw taking refuge in the ceramics room. “Then one day, Mr. Prichard, the ceramics teacher, handed me a hunk of clay. “Just make something”, he said. So I made a blue poisonous frog... And that was kind of it. I came back every lunch, every free period, after school—honestly, I think that Mr. Prichard saved me, I don't know how I would've gotten through high school without the provision of this safe haven where I could tune out the entire world and just focus on whatever was right in front of me.” After being accepted into NYU’s renowned psychology program, K did not anticipate transferring into the art department two years into their degree. “Seated in massive lecture halls of 300-400 people, my brain was soaking in all it could learn, but I was becoming increasingly aware of how empty I felt internally. I had gone from spending every waking moment in the art department to a somewhat depersonalized learning environment, without the secure space of the art studio I had learned to lean so heavily upon. Transferring into NYU’s Studio Art program was where I realized my own artistic potential and just how integral the process of art-making and the sanctuary of the studio is to my own well-being.”

When asked about the crystallization of their primary medium, K emphasizes the importance of not being fostered into a unitary way of creating. NYU’s accentuation of a multidisciplinary educational approach taught them how to wield a variety of mediums and techniques, amongst them printmaking and glass. Their two-dimensional compositions, comprising prints as well as photographs, exhibit overarching themes of nostalgia. K’s fascination with history and documentation goes hand in hand with their urge to honour the past for its shaping of the present. Tactile Memories of You I. & II. (2019), for instance, was executed in the style of a blind contour, but instead of the traditional methodology (where one observes the subject and tries to align the speed of one’s hand to the speed of one’s eye tracing the subject), K used one hand to feel their grandmother’s face while blindly transcribing the contours they felt onto paper with the other. Their photographic series titled 50 for 50 (2019) was captured during the 2019 WorldPride parade in NYC, coinciding with the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall Riots that effectively catalyzed the modern LGBTQ movement. “I knew it was going to be a once in a lifetime experience and it was also to be my first Pride fully ‘out’ and about. Fifty shots for the historic 50th anniversary - armed with my SX-70 Polaroid. The strict numeric constraint was necessary to create a sense of preciousness in what was being captured. I wanted to celebrate our bold Black community, our fierce Asian members, our Trans royalty, our Non-Binary heroes, our Gay queens, our Butch baddies, our Lipstick Lesbians, our fabulous allies and our community’s children, raised to see the truth behind the pure love that the queer community represents. The project yielded intensely honest and genuine portraits, reflecting the openheartenedess with which I was embraced by the otherwise perfect strangers featured in the shots. They knew where I came from and why the work was so important to me, to us.”

Gravitating towards modes of representation that are usually considered more technical, K revels in exploring practices that require foundational ‘know-how’. “If you don't know what you're doing when working with ceramics, or glass or printmaking for that matter, things are going to explode, things are going to break, you need to know how to properly pull emulsion across a silkscreen, you have to have some degree of knowing what you're doing to be successful and I like that— you really have to work for it.” We talk about the reconciliation of the different artists within and the worries that arise along the way as one constantly evaluates and re-evaluates whether there is enough continuity in one’s oeuvre. “Observing my ceramic practice alone, I would say you would find two somewhat distinct modes of working. This dichotomy between the two might appear too rigid or separate at first glance, obscuring me as a singular artist behind the different modalities.” Anthesis (2020) is a recent work created at Guldagergärd, in Denmark, during K’s Artist Residency. Both pieces have since been donated to the Guldagerärd International Ceramics Research Center’s permanent collection. A pair of curvy black and white ripple glazed ceramic plants sit side by side, their anthers dripping with a special material called ‘gold luster’. Defined by K’s interest in nature and precision of form, the two sculptures manifest an immaculate synergy between the organic and the calculated. “Such coil pieces fall within the sphere of abstraction, focusing on a certain aesthetic or more accurately, a particular sensation when you run your hand across the surface of the work. It is almost an automated mode of working, this repetitive process of rolling out coils, wrapping them around and on top of each other, smoothing them down together, feeling the imperfections with my hand and scraping them away. I have a solidified vision or a specific meaning I am trying to convey, and my job is to sculpt whatever my mind’s vision is to the closest degree of precision, easing an almost physical sensation of discomfort when things don’t sit quite right”.

The two main forms of Ceramic Studio Art are sculpting and throwing on the wheel. K says there is a definite divide between those who consider themselves throwers and those who regard themselves as sculptors, comparing the two modes of creation to different types of runners; sprinters and long distancers. “They are all runners, but different in their methodology and results focus nonetheless”. Utilizing the gravitas and dexterity attributed to traditional sculpting strategies, K’s ceramics push past the meeting point of convention and contemporariness. Their earnest and advanced forms seek to implode past legacies from the inside out. “Japan has a long history of ceramic making, England too; I think of the Victoria & Albert Museum dedicating an entire wing to ceramics. But most of these forms and their focuses are within the confines of functional ceramics or more specifically, pottery. I've never wanted to make a pot, the closest I've ever come to making just a ‘pot’ has been sculpting a fake caricaturized porcelain flower pot with fake soil and fake interchangeable emotive flowers sprouting out of it.” The piece, titled Tell me how to feel so I don’t have to (2021), presents three off-white porcelain buds lined up on a miniature rack, reminiscent of the laboratory equipment used to store test tubes, waiting to be placed in a planter, sardonically labeled as ‘pot’. While one bud hasn’t quite reached the blooming phase yet or has in fact retreated again after blossoming, another stretches upward with hollow eyes and a strained smile, as the third sits erect and in silence, eyes closed, a crown of petals framing its plump face/floral disc. “The piece builds a narrative around our societal tendency towards brushing off the real, hiding emotion, or settling with a superficial "I'm fine" when really that may be anything but the truth. I like to use the material in a way that contradicts the notion of ceramics being no more than a craft as opposed to ‘fine art’. Perhaps that is also why I am very outspoken about not being a ‘potter’. I cringe whenever people assume I do the sort of pottery associated with the movie ‘Ghost’ (the sensual scene of Demi Moore and Patrick Swayze on the wheel being people’s only reference for working with clay). I think there is a greater capacity to express or elicit more complicated/higher levels of discourse through sculpture. Because ultimately you can sculpt whatever you want, or whatever you can figure out how to make within the limits of your own skill level and what the physics of ceramics will permit”.

While keeping with a proficient and exact visual language, K’s urge to progress thematically generates a sort of balancing act in their creative practice. The defined shapes of their Seeking Signs and Reading Symbols (2020) series are familiar, strikingly white, and detailed, verging on eerie in their scale and purified appearance. K, much like myself, takes immense interest in the production of contemporary value systems or ‘modern myths’, which assign meaning to the world around us. Witnessing their grief-stricken mother proclaim seeing signs sent from above shortly after their grandfather’s passing made K want to incarnate consoling signifiers in clay. “It is a conceptual and considerably nitpicky sculptural sequence, created with the intention of building conversation. My goal was to bring awareness to human’s innate desire and active elicitation of perceived signs within our external world. This body of work therefore investigates the instinctive manners in which humans strive for pattern recognition through these proposed 'symbols'. The series originally consisted of large wall pieces, an 11:11 watch, a Jesus Toast toast (as people have reported seeing such iconography in the strangest of places, including toast and tortillas), the Death Tarot card, and the supplementary smaller porcelain street signs declaring ‘Tough Shit Ahead’ and ‘Route 69’. These ‘signs’ of a higher power, signifiers of a greater plan, or ‘more than coincidence’ are viewed as solace especially in times of turmoil, chaos, and confusion. The psychologist in me is well aware of the concepts of ‘pareidolia’ and ‘apophenia’. Essentially, where we want to see connections or patterns, we will. We have the capacity to forge meaning between things where there may not be any. I have a particular insight into the power and complication of such things, from a time where my own mental state was elevated and I was hyper-paranoid and hyper-aware of all of these perceived ‘signs’ around me. To this day, I am still unsure how rooted within reality these experiences were. And so, the series was not necessarily a criticism of seeking and perceiving these comforts, rather it was created as a reminder concerning the power we surrender to external forces instead of taking full ownership of our decisions and actions.”

Embarking on their Residency, right as COVID-19 broke out and the world was heading into lockdown, K’s return stateside 5 months later prompted one of the projects they are currently working on. “I was arriving from the isolated bubble of a 1900s-plantation-turned-ceramics-research-center to a drastically different United States and a practically unrecognizable NYC. I remember when I first saw my little sister, it quickly became evident that she had been struggling in the midst of this unforeseen situation. I was quarantining in my parent’s basement, speaking to her through a glass door that led out into the garden. Having a great deal of maternal feelings toward her, being 10 years her senior, at one point I just said, “ok, put some gloves on and a mask, we are going to hug.” I held her for a long time. When we finally pulled away, she just said, “wow, I didn’t realize how much I missed physical contact”—this really stuck with me. I believe there is great power in ‘touch’. The worldwide increase in depression and mental/emotional depletion experienced in the midst of this pandemic and its social separation showcases this. Hold me, I’m lonely deals with this idea of intimacy created in the presence of another. It’s about the ease with which you rest your head on your mate’s shoulder while riding the train. The importance of not having to think before going in to hug a friend. I started a series of anthropomorphic, hand-like figures and abstracted entities arranged around this concept of ‘touch’ and the magnitude it carries. The piece extends up from the ground, like an outstretched hand, curving around with cascading extremities, holding in its ‘palm’ a warm toned globe light. I’ve been somewhat slow to come on this project having initially discussed the idea with my dad right before he passed. It’s been hard working on something I so strongly associate with him, especially with this notion of the absence of presence. Of course, I’m also running up against a great deal of constructional challenges, so I’m definitely pushing myself with this one, going outside of my comfort zone, but I hope it will prove worthwhile. Ultimately, all of these modes of creation, be that ceramics or the other mediums I employ, are used with the larger goal of meaning-making. I remember discussing with one of my closest friends whether I should lean more heavily into a more aesthetic driven practice, things I know could sell, as opposed to some of my more conceptual works, which at times don’t have the ‘prettiest’ or most light-hearted messages to convey. I remember she turned to me and said, “you didn’t go into art just to make pretty things”, and I suppose that is true”.