The Lionheart Five: An Interview with Constance Old

1. Name one of your most defining moments as an artist.  

CO: One of my most defining moments as an artist is a combination of two, ten years apart.  “Design is all about controlling the elements, right?” The first defining moment was in graduate school for graphic design in the 1990s. I was discussing a project we’d been assigned with my classmate, Pamela Hovland. As Pamela (who was a more experienced designer than I, and who to this day makes amazing work), was leaving the studio, she casually said this short sentence. It distills what I learned in graduate school: get your solution to a project down to a single idea, then control the elements within that solution (materials, palette, typography, imagery etc).  

The second and related defining moment came ten years later when I had the opportunity to work on the artist, Dan Flavin’s, catalogue raisonné. The editor, Tiffany Bell, hired me to design an index of the fluorescent lights Flavin used to make his work. Then, from the index, to create diagrams of every sculpture Flavin made. While documenting his work, it became clear to me that Flavin painted with fluorescent lights, and that his oeuvre is an excellent example of a palette that is both inherited and controlled. He accepted the parameters established by the lights available, and experimented within those confines.  

In my work I use up-cycled paper and plastic combined with the technique of rug hooking. As there is an abundance of both paper and plastic, the trick is to sort the materials and to impose some sort of order on their endless variety.

2. Do you collect anything?  

CO: I am definitely a collector, although an undisciplined one. My favorite book on the subject is The Volcano Lover, a novel by Susan Sontag. I collect photographs of ice cream and restroom signs, lists, mechanical drawings, and phrases in my head, among other things.

3. If you could choose anyone—and we mean anyone—whom would you pick as a mentor?  

CO: Walt Disney. The book, The Art of Walt Disney: from Mickey Mouse to the Magic Kingdoms was published in 1973. I spent hours looking at it and have  always thought the person who built an empire on a mouse cartoon must have been smart, creative, whimsical, determined, and resourceful. Figure I could learn  something from someone like that.

4) What’s the most indispensable item in your studio?  

CO: Scissors.

5) Tell us about one piece of art in this exhibition. You might describe your inspiration, your process, the title, what the work signifies to you…  

CO: My one piece is actually ten. It is the “beach plastic” series. These ten pieces all start with the same 4” x 6” format and are all framed to a final size of 7” x 9” x 2.5”. Plastic collected from the beach (such as rope, netting, mylar balloons) is at least one of the elements in each of the ten. This series is a subset of an ongoing series called “filling the void,” which I use to experiment with different grids and materials that might then be used in larger pieces. The “filling the void” series are my sketches.