Interview conducted by Aza Pace
Interdisciplinary artists Erin Ethridge and Colleen Marie Foley have been working together under the pseudonym Thorn since 2015. Their solo and collaborative work has been shown in venues such as MANA Contemporary, Grounds for Sculpture, the Denison Museum, the Burchfield Penney Art Center, The Mint Museum, and Sunday Sessions at MoMA Ps1. Jointly, they’ve been awarded residences at Fjuk Arts Center (Iceland), Chulitna Research Institute (Alaska), Elsewhere Museum (North Carolina), and Rhizome DC (Washington DC). They both received their MFAs from Alfred University, where Colleen studied electronic integrated arts and Erin studied sculpture. Erin is currently a Visiting Assistant Professor of Art at Appalachian State University in North Carolina, and Colleen is a Video Editor and Animator in upstate New York. Find more of their work at thorncollaborative.com.
Aza Pace spoke with Erin and Colleen over email about their recent video collaboration, “Bound” (which you can view below). Made during a period of quarantine and isolation due to the Pandemic, “Bound” is a poem about longing for a loved one from afar and finding solace in both technology and the natural world. From their respective homes and video channels, Erin and Colleen sought visual analogies of intimacy embedded in their bodies and the landscapes of the Catskills and the Blue Ridge. They attempted to breach the space between them, collapsing 700 miles of the Appalachians into an infinitesimal edge. By treating the inner edge of a two-channel video as both a meeting point and fault line, “Bound” explores a digital realm where space between phrases, bodies, mountain ranges, and time frames can be folded and rearranged, fragments sutured and healed. “Bound” is currently on view in “Appalachia In Focus” at the Denison Museum in Granville, Ohio until April 10th.
Aza Pace: You describe “Bound” as a “poem about longing for a loved one from afar” that imaginatively collapses that distance via landscape and technology. Could you tell me more about how you think of “Bound” as a poem? For example, the combination of image, text, and music throughout the piece led me to think about your work in terms of lyric, the poetic tradition with roots in song and performance.
Thorn Collaborative: Even though both our backgrounds are in visual arts, we’ve always used writing as architecture to structure our work. For “Bound,” we started by taking turns writing a single line of poetry, and ultimately that call-and-response process became the template for how we created the visuals. It informed the cadence of the editing and the music. The visual structure of two-channel video also reminds us of an open book, with the seam down the center acting as a binding.
Poets are so specific about where each word lives, which words bump up against each other, how much negative space is around them, what shape the poem makes on the page. Everything matters, carries weight, changes the whole. We thought similarly about the elements in “Bound.” Our shots, the music, the words, the natural sounds of the environment— they all affect each other and create a kind of ecosystem of their own.
Structuring “Bound” as a poem also allowed us to engage in a specific type of play. Poetry doesn’t obey the rules of how things are “supposed” to operate, and so there’s space for the improbable or impossible, like, say, folding a mountain range so that our homes are next to each other.
AP: Many of the scenes in “Bound” depict the sensuousness of physical touch—running a hand over moss, writing words in chalk only to erase them with fallen leaves, etc.—as a way of exploring the impossibility of touch across a vast distance. For you, what was at stake in dramatizing this in a forest setting? How did you think about humans connecting with nature as compared to humans trying to connect with one another?
TC: When we made “Bound,” the Coronavirus Pandemic was at its peak. We were all in quarantine, on Zoom with everyone we love, connected through technology that was a poor (but incredibly important) substitute for being together in the flesh. Outside in the woods was one of the few spaces we could feel safe.
In response to a previous piece, we started thinking about the role geology plays in our work. This led us to imagine the Appalachian mountain range as a vein connecting our homes (Boone, NC in the Blue Ridge and Napanoch, NY in the Catskills). “Bound” plays with the idea that we are tied together by the environments in which we live, in the same way trees are connected through a vast system of roots and mycelium. (Colleen hugs this tree whose roots are touching a rock that’s touching the soil of this riverbank, and on and on, until we get to a tree in Erin’s yard.) Physically connecting with nature tethers us to the humans we love.
Something we didn’t expect was that the process of making “Bound” also changed how we experienced our environments. Walking around the woods trying to find the perfect hole in a tree or the mossiest rock made us feel more present, pay closer attention, and collaborate with our surroundings.
This reciprocity felt particularly obvious in the rocks and trees that became our writing surfaces. Instead of a blank sheet of paper supporting printed words with integrity and clarity, these surfaces disfigure the text, making it rough or slanted or hard to read, but the act of writing on them also reveals the textures of the surfaces, making them more visible. Ultimately, for us, the process of making Bound was a dialogue with each other and with the landscapes we live in.
AP: In one part of the video, you use a green screen to make parts of your bodies, your legs or torsos, disappear and blend into the pine needles or leaves beneath you. Can you tell me more about this undoing or blurring of the human body with the setting?
TC: One of the themes that ties all of our work together is the desire to soften our boundaries and bring ourselves closer. It is a shared fantasy that also inevitably softens the edges between us and everything else.
In myth, invisibility is often a workaround for the limitations of embodiment. It is equated with a sense of freedom. When you’re invisible, you can go anywhere; social and physical boundaries can be overridden. At the same time, it can be dangerous, threatening disintegration and disappearance. This push and pull, the utopian and catastrophic implications of dissolving the self to let others in, and how that relates to love and friendship, is one of the driving forces in our work.
When we left graduate school (where our collaboration began) one of the first projects we made were two greenscreen capes that we could use to blend into the landscape. It was a really simple piece, intended for use in a future performance or video, that was representative of us trying to understand how to work together after moving to different states. In those moments in Bound you refer to, we’re using those same capes (we call them shrouds) to continue that exploration. We’re asking, what if I were one half of a whole, and you were the other?
AP: In terms of process, did you create the parallel scenes and visual synchronicity between the video’s two channels by agreeing to film at the same time miles apart, or was this achieved mostly through editing after the fact? I think my real question is does “Bound” operate as artifact or artifice (with no negative associations attached to artifice, by the way)? And how did this affect your experience of searching for connection through the process of making the piece?
TC: The idea of artifice/artifact is one we grapple with a lot, but on the whole it’s probably fair to say we are more interested in playing with artifice (and exposing it as such). Artifice is so wrapped up in our daily lives. We can see our loved one’s faces on glowing boxes we can hold in our hands. Being alive at a time when technology is so prevalent, there is a constant suspension of disbelief that we all accept.
The first step of the shooting process was making a shot list together. Then one of us would capture a scene and send it to the other person, who would try to match it. It was not about us trying to do the exact same thing at the same time, but more about us trying to fit into the mold the other had created with their shot. It was a sort of mirroring or mimicry which felt very devotional.
In the first rough cut we made of “Bound” we tried leaving in the “set up” moments before and after the thing we were intending to shoot. For example, you see Erin walk in front of the camera, step up onto a log and out of the frame before she enters again to walk across it. We ultimately decided to include those moments because it allowed the viewer to understand that the staging of these gestures is the point. It’s about creating the synchronicity as much as finding it. In that way, Bound is both documentary and fiction. The process of making it felt extremely “real” and grounded because we were literally going out and shooting ourselves in the dirt and the leaves and letting the viewer witness that process, and also because we were making something that felt so relevant to what the world collectively was going through at the time. But the other side of it was the more illusionistic editing space, where we matched up the movement of our hands, or made mountains continuous by scaling up one shot to align with the other. That process felt like a kind of calibration, trying to join things that don’t fit together perfectly, and the never-ending process of doing that is really what our work is about.
AP: I’m fascinated by your description of collaboration as a kind of devotional mirroring. You also mention becoming more present and aware of your environment. As you were mirroring and responding to each other, did you experience a similar back-and-forth with the landscape? That is, did you find that the non-human world responded to you or required you to respond to it in a certain way (to leave it alone or to alter it, to document it or not)?
TC: That devotional quality was also there in the relationships between us and our homes. Mimicking the shapes of things in order to interact with them felt very earnest and tender. For example, to hug a tree, we had to lean on it, tilting our body in the direction of its trunk, feeling its bark on our cheeks, trying to hold its full circumference in our arms. When we drew lines across the face of a boulder, we had to stretch our arms from one edge to the other, or around the curvature of its surface. It was deeper than just looking. More like tracing, making a map of something’s contours and textures, feeling its mass. Oftentimes we were shooting in the cold, the wind, chasing the last light of day. We were usually on uneven ground, trying to keep our tripods stable in a pile of leaves or rocks. In that way, our environments choreographed our gestures.
AP: To end on a more general note, while making “Bound,” did you realize or learn anything about your process or yourselves that has changed the way you will collaborate and make art going forward?
TC: “Bound” is probably the most ambitious project that we’ve made together while completely long distance, which felt like a bit of a breakthrough. In the past, sometimes it’s been a struggle to balance workloads, coordinate our two separate schedules, and stay in the same headspace over long periods of time away from each other. We typically try to punctuate our time apart with residencies or visits where we can be together and get a lot done quickly, but that is not always feasible, and the pandemic made it impossible.
With “Bound” we found ways to work with (and against) the distance between us and the obstacles it presents. Choosing to work with video made this literally possible, but approaching video more like performance made it feel like we could really be in the process together, responding to each other’s bodies and environments.
Once we had the basic structure of the poem as a roadmap for the images and pacing, it felt good to break things down into little prompts or assignments that we could give each other. Being able to cross shots off our lists and get the reward of seeing how the other one matched it with their composition helped us keep up momentum and not get bogged down by indecision or existential crises (which, of course, never happens!).
Also, we were working toward an exhibition our friend and Erin’s colleague at Appalachian State University, Jennie Carlisle, was curating around the bioregional imagination of Appalachia. She was really supportive of us making new work for the show, which we were really grateful for. Working toward that exhibition helped us stay focused and grounded.
Despite the difficulty and isolation of the past two years, “Bound” taught us new ways to be and make and think together from a distance, and we hope it can do a little bit of that for others too.
Aza Pace serves as Editor-in-Chief of American Literary Review. Her poems appear in The Southern Review, Copper Nickel, Tupelo Quarterly, New Ohio Review, Passages North, Mudlark, Bayou, and elsewhere. She is the winner of two Academy of American Poets University Prizes and an Inprint Donald Barthelme Prize in Poetry. She holds an MFA in Poetry from the University of Houston and is currently pursuing her PhD at the University of North Texas.