“Art is in a way my only tangible skill. Nothing else ever made sense.” For Atlanta visual artist and sculptor, Iman Person, this is the driving force that has allowed her to embrace her innate creative aura that she’s always cultivating.
Through the support of an inspiring teacher in high school, she embraced the value of making art as a career. In 2010 Person received her B.F.A from Georgia State University and has gone on to become a fixture both in exhibition spheres and public art arenas. Person has developed an artistic identity that is captivating and complex, daunting to define. Her work is distinct but never predictable, channeling recurring themes of dreams, cyclical connection and mysticism. Her art embeds qualities of the feminine, primordial memory and anthropological customs to illustrate lineage and identity within the new, synthetic landscape.
Person took the time to talk with CommonCreativ about her philosophy of delving into one’s authentic nature, designing a dimensional world in which to create freely, and the power of the environment to dissolve metaphorical road blocks.
CommonCreativ: Your work reflects influence from the Southeast. Are you an Atlanta native?
Iman Person: Yes and no. I am a Georgia native, born and raised. I’ve lived in Atlanta on and off since 2005.
CC: How did you find your path as an artist?
IP: I’ve enjoyed creating things since I was little. I really loved drawing animals, plants, almost anything really. I would also build things in our yard with mud and sticks and even books, but my mother hated when me and my sister did that. The moment that I decided to be an artist was one day in my kindergarten art class when I saw a poster of Frida Kahlo’s Self Portrait With Monkey, and I said to myself: “I want to make art like that!” That was my personal humble beginning. From then on, I didn’t want to do anything but be an artist.
From there I took art classes in school, but it wasn’t until high school when I was able to put more direction into it. Fortunately, I had an amazing art teacher, Mrs. Fletcher, who really helped me to see that going to school for art was something that could really valuable and worthwhile. Before that I had been dealing with the doubts of my parents and their concern [about] me taking on a more traditional or “stable” career path, and she pushed me in a way that erased some of those doubts. In all honesty, a career in the arts was the only thing that made sense to me. While I’m interested in many topics like various sciences and history, most of those things are not able to hold my interests independently. Art is in a way my only tangible skill. Nothing else ever made sense.
The artist
CC: What medium did you start with, and how did you venture into areas?
IP: While in college I focused mostly on drawing and painting. Then I came to a point where I felt like only doing the two was not only limiting to the concepts that I wanted to express, but it also became too time consuming. I say this because while drawing, I was obsessed with making the work as perfect as possible and then I would get so frustrated when it didn’t turn out that way. It became very creatively draining for me, so I decided to take a textiles course and had the opportunity to begin thinking three-dimensionally. This was really a turning point for me in my ideas and how I thought of space manipulation. My drawing professors were very supportive of the move and I began to experiment with the implementation of form into my work through incorporating elements of stitching into my drawings and by creating installations that included different fabrics and surface design. That class gave me the confidence to experiment in other ways, like in my paint materials.
In conjunction with that work, I began to mix soils and salts into my paintings, which then led to the first real public piece that I completed for the Georgia State Sculpture Garden. The work was composed of thin fabric “pillows” that were filled with soil, metals, and salts, sandwiched between ceramic slabs that shifted as the materials decomposed or grew. I don’t think I would have ever arrived at that piece of it wasn’t for taking a step outside of my familiar mediums.
CC: You work with a variety of evocative themes—how do you choose them?
IP: It’s hard for me to say…I think what theme I decide to work on at that moment depends on which influence is heavily affecting my day-to-day thinking or experience. Although, I’m never really working on one specific topic at a time. It’s actually very difficult for me to focus on just one idea. I get distracted by new materials or sites so often that I tend to work in more of a web. Themes like dreams, cyclical connection and self-channeled mysticism, are all things that are constantly loosely woven into every piece that I create, but the degree of any of those experiences varies with each project. I go through moments where I am very interested in writing short prose, or dedicated to exploring precognitive dreaming…I like to rely on my intuition of what my body wants to commit to and now because of this, art-making doesn’t feel so much like work. My practice just exists in balance with everything else that’s going on in my life. The one thing that I do keep is a notebook for writing ideas, random words and questions to myself that I will hopefully answer later.
CC: What have been some of your favorite projects/pieces to work on?
IP: I think my favorite projects have been Earth Medicine and the site piece that I did on Ossabaw Island. I loved doing Earth Medicine because the topic [of geophagy, or the act of consuming earthy substances such as clay] is so rich, and it allowed me to again take a step outside of my comfort zone. Whenever I reach a turning point or a block in my work, I search outward in the environment. The opportunity to work on site for this piece was beyond rewarding. The landscape was so surreal, in that I didn’t even feel like I was in Georgia anymore. There was also a sense of suspense and the unknown because I only had vague ideas of exactly where the kaolin mines were and when I wasn’t able to find the abandoned ones listed, we had to result to technically trespassing. I also got to experience firsthand how laborious video really is, which is not necessarily a hindrance to future projects I would like to do, but it is a major consideration when thinking about how would I execute another project of a greater magnitude or even one of a lesser scale. With Ossabaw, the work was all about surrender. Surrender in fabricating it, surrender in hanging it and in experiencing it. I loved it! It taught me to throw away all my expectations of trying to attain something close to perfection, and instead I got transcendence.
CC: What inspires you to explore your concept of “authentic nature”?
IP: The philosophy behind my work is that I believe most people experience phenomena that the masses would dissect as pseudo-spiritual in their day-to-day lives, and dismiss them as coincidence. The objective of my practice is to re-introduce the question of maybe these are not coincidences, but moments for an individual to gain greater atonement in their bodies and become something other worldly. I want people to realize the greatness in their smallness and the infinite power that comes with it. The physical reactions that humans have lost, feared and ridiculed for centuries, are for me the only frontier that we have not overcome or realized. In my mind, the origin of these experiences depends firstly on the acceptance and reverence of an authentic nature. Of course people are able to actualize these things outside of nature, but I think that all of these moments are funneled through one source of ethereal other that begins with nature, and is amplified by the shedding of our created distractions.
CC: What are your thoughts on Atlanta’s creative scene right now?
IP: I think that it is in a really interesting space right now. There seems to be a new energy of collaboration that has hit. I also really appreciate the recent commitment to create worthwhile dialogue about the work being created here and that it’s being taken into the hands of capable artists themselves to spearhead these conversations. It’s also interesting to be in the space of an artist who has been showing and working in the community for a while and now to see younger, newly enthusiastic and budding artists fresh out of school embrace this air. Davion Alston and Whiro Kim come to mind. Seeing their work and the work of people that I’m re-discovering has me really excited and hopeful for the future of creatives coming out of Atlanta.
CC: When you’re not creating, where can you be found at in Atlanta?
IP: This will sound super boring but, I’m kind of a loner, so if I’m not at an art opening, I’m either at home reading and entertaining my cat, in my studio or outdoors at a park or something like that. On very rare occasion you can find me at Sound Table. More recently, you may have been lucky to find me at some random new age workshop because…well, why not?
CC: What’s up next for you?
IP: I [recently curated] my first show, Through and Felt, that opened June 4th at Eyedrum. Other than that, I am committing to a few choice projects as they come for the short time that I am still here in Atlanta.
You can see more of Iman Person’s work on her site.
