[Liz Larner] Clay is just this kind of amazing material
in that it has all these different states.
And it's, you know, very loose and pliable.
It can be unwieldy, especially when you're working with a lot of it.
[chuckles]
— It's a little skinny.
— Hmm.
[Liz Larner] And then, you know, it dries out, the water leaves it, it be—
it just becomes, like, this dust.
[drilling]
And you have to get it into the kiln, you fire it, and it vitrifies
and becomes very hard and stable.
It's so interesting that dust becomes this material that is, like,
probably one of the hardest things to degrade.
— A little bit more.
— OK.
— Push it in there.
— All right.
— I'm going to need this—uh-oh.
I grabbed it too hard.
[Liz Larner] The kind of idea behind many of these works is that they're broken.
It's a rupture, and every rupture is different.
So the terms are, like, kind of both poetic terms and geologic terms,
so a subduction is when two plates, um, overlap each other, so these—
there's these forms called subductions, and then the one on the wall over there,
that is a caesura, and that's a poetic term that means a break in one poem.
The thing for me about sculpture is that it's the most physical form of art
while still retaining this aspect of the poetic totally.
And so the physical reality of instability, something that we all have to deal with,
is part of these works.
The land is very important in California.
It's what brought people out here.
It was the end of the frontier.
It's like the myth of America kind of ended in California.
— Ready for some digging?
I grew up about 60 miles northwest of Sacramento.
My father was mostly a rice farmer,
although we also grew wheat and barley in the winter and tomatoes and beans.
— Ooh!
Good catch.
When I was 12 and my sister was 11, he sat us down and said,
"Girls, you think either of you want to run this ranch?"
We were like, "No."
[laughs]
But I think about that now like,
"Wow.
I just, like, said that when I was a kid, and it changed my whole life, basically."
I was an undergrad, and philosophy was my declared major.
I decided to just apply to art school.
I got into CalArts as a third-year photographer.
At the end, when I got out, I realized that I didn't really want to make pictures of things.
I wanted to make things.
I decided to stay in L.A.
You know, it was a slower pace.
It was easier to live here and make work as a young artist.
I—of course I thought about moving to New York
and just realized that I wanted to experiment and explore,
and I didn't want to have a lot of attention on me.
I guess the idea of an artist being someone that can change their mind,
that that's kind of what you're required to do,
is to follow your ideas and not just do the same thing over and over again,
that's part of what I found really exciting about being an artist.
So this is “Planchette”,
And what a planchette is-is it's that little piece
on a Ouija board that is heart-shaped, usually.
I'm not really thinking you can contact the—
the dead by touching this,
but I love that idea of everyone's hands being on this object,
and that's supposed to be able to evoke spiritual communication.
I just think that—I just love that idea.
I don't really like to tell people what to think about things.
I like to give them things to think about that aren't spelled out,
that hopefully just come from the physical itself.
That's—that's a reason to make sculpture right there.
So these pieces are called the “Guests”, and, um, the idea with them is that
they don't have any place in particular that they have to be, like on a base or on
a wall.
But then they are really defined 'cause they're, like, super mathematical.
And one of the hardest things to do with this was just to get it so that they would never
bind, you know,
that I could move it in any direction and it would stay fluid.
I have little hooks for them, too, So you really can wear them.
[Woman] Really?
[Liz Larner] Yeah.
[Woman] Have you done that?
[Liz Larner] Yeah, I did do that.
We did a fashion show with them.
[Woman] You did?
Larner: It was really fun, yeah.
— OK, I don't think I'll be using this one.
— It's copper.
How about pink?
— Mmm, keep the pink.
[Liz Larner] Every pigment that I get, I make a small sample of it...
— Lot of green and blue.
[Liz Larner] And so I have this kind of huge palette…
— No, too harsh.
[Liz Larner] And it really has to do with looking at the form,
and it's kind of thinking of it as a character.
It has a certain presence within it that I want to try to bring out in the color.
—Right.
[Liz Larner] I'm really interested in technique, but I don't want to stabilize a technique
or get into just having the technique become the art.
I want the ideas about what's happening physically to be what the art is about.
We call them cubes 'cause there's really no other words,
but when I made those pieces, each of the bars were the same length.
But they're curved, so is that a cube?
I don't even know if that technically is— could be considered a cube.
And then the way that the color is applied does not reinforce the form,
so you see all these other forms within the form.
The work is pretty solid, but it seems as if it's falling over or,
um, lifting up or going to move.
Something that I try to do is to not use the same methods,
but work with the same ideas.
So that's why "2001," it's a similar kind of idea in terms of color,
but it comes from a really different method.
"2001," uh, the idea for that was to make an animation as a sculpture,
and so I really did make an animation.
It was a sphere turning into a cube, and a cube turning back into a sphere.
And then, in the computer, I pushed them all into one space.
There's no repetition as you're moving around it.
You get a sense the thing is rotating, even though it is actually still.
I believe right now we're in a time where reality
and illusion are kind of always together,
and I think that the reality of this work is its illusion,
and you're constantly having to understand the form
and then re-understand the form
and re-understand the form and re-understand the color because it's changing on you.
You know, if I keep using the same techniques,
then it's going to become more permanent, and I don't want it to be permanent.
I want it to be about impermanence,
so I have to keep changing the way I do it, otherwise it—it—it gets too etched in—
into the fabric of perception, and it becomes too stable.
One of the things, you know, when I started finding out about geology and
just, like,
the first rule of geology is "rock fall down,"
which I thought was so great, you know,
that it's just this cycle of from mountaintop to sea bottom
and then back up, and that's kind of, like, your Geology 101, first day.
[Birds chirping]
"Public Jewel" was commissioned by the GSA for the Federal Plaza in Denver.
— This is her last name.
— Oh, thank you.
— Thank you.
[Liz Larner] I first didn't realize that I was going to have to do multiple stones.
I thought I might find one stone and, of course,
that wasn't possible,
so then I realized I needed to make what I'm calling the agglomerate boulder.
And that was kind of the great realization 'cause then I could get stones from all over
Colorado.
It was funny to me to just even understand that,
you know, stones seem so permanent,
but there were many stones that would not be able
to make it even 5 years out here on the plaza.
— Ok, can you just switch them real quick?
That's better.
[Liz Larner] It's a history that's in each stone, you know?
They're each like a little time capsule if you know how to look at them.
In this piece, of course, the rocks are being held up high, kind of above your head.
It's a weight.
It's a palpable weight,
and I think people will think about that when they walk into those buildings.
[Overlapping chatter]
[synth music]
Larner: Geology in geologic time and individual human time is so different.
[synth music]
Our lives are so short compared to geologic eras.
♪
— Ready for the kiln.
[Beeping]
Larner: I've always felt that, like, being an artist, you shouldn't get too much
into production,
like, it shouldn't become this thing that,
you know, you have to do,
but you should retain that freedom to, like, take a break and reflect.
I plan on downsizing the studio.
— I'll sit in the shadiest one.
I feel really lucky.
We have a 2 1/2-year-old,
and I just want to spend some time with him while he's really young.
I want to find some spaciousness and
some tenderness in my life
and bring that back when I come back to work again.
[Distant goose honking]
[soft electronic music]