Johnny Doley

Interview with Alice Matthews

In February 2023, Alice Matthews asked me to sit down for an interview, which would be included as part of her masters thesis in art history. The thesis, titled “To Live and Die Well With Each Other: The Relational as a Creative Practice in the Time of Climate Crisis,” included a transcript of this conversation in the appendix. With Alice’s blessing, I have included this interview here, as the conversation really touched on so many different threads of my art practice.

Alice’s full thesis can be read online here and the interview can be downloaded in pdf by clicking here.

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Alice Matthews: In your 2019 project Homes for Later, you mark places in the landscape that hold some kind of significance to you by placing your own works in places where other creatures might build a nest, bore and hole, or otherwise make a home. As part of that project, you wrote that “these places aren’t useful now but [you] hope they will be in the future.” It’s an interesting temporality to think about because those sites were places you already knew or had some familiarity with, but are still positioning them in the future. I was wondering if you could talk more about homemaking in general, and what you are learning from making animal homes as it relates to your own homemaking.

Johnny Doley: I was really reflecting a lot on “home” as a non-physical thing or a space that could exist in between borders, countries, oceans. Something that I thought a lot about were moments where I’d be FaceTiming my partner Chiara and I would yawn and then she would yawn. There’s this connection that would happen. That transfer of yawn happens over quite a large distance, but there’s this space in between that exists. So, I was sort of trying to imagine a physical place to house that non-physical space. I was looking a lot to nests, and that was honestly the beginning of me imitating other creature’s homemaking processes. I tried to do a project where I would weave bird nests in the shape of human houses, like weaver birds who make those really complex nests. I thought it was going to be my magnum opus! I tried it and realized that I don’t have a tiny beak! I can’t do this! I gave up immediately! I was dreaming about all these amazing works of art that were going to make me very successful as an artist, but I didn't even think about the fact that I couldn’t even make them. Something I learn through these attempts at other forms of homemaking is different approaches towards space and what “home” can be and what relationships can be—whether it be a relationship with the material that we are making homes out of, or the relationship between a lover or a cohabitant. I’ve learned a lot by looking at these other methods to help broaden the way I think about how I interact with others in general which I think is part of homemaking. It’s how you move through whatever space you think of as a home. In some ways Homes for Later is not an incredibly successful work, but it is a kind of gesture at physical objects holding non physical space.

Alice: In the text portion of Homes for Later you write about learning to understand where storms are coming from as a way to mitigate fear about them. Can you say more about how you learned to feel those things instead of just looking up a weather report and why tuning into your surroundings in that way is important for you?

Johnny: It was almost out of self-preservation really; it was like a survival thing. I had such a strong phobia when I was very young about the weather. At one point, even just dark clouds would get me all anxious. It was completely irrational, and it got a lot better after going to therapy, but there was this anxious need to try and rationalize the storms away. I knew that I could look at the west to see where clouds are coming from because that’s the way the winds generally move in this hemisphere. Then, eventually, it came in handy because I worked at a summer camp. If you looked at the right spot, you could see certain clouds and you knew they would bubble up over one of the mountain ranges. You knew that when they got to the other mountain range maybe then they would get a little bit higher in the sky, and then the weather would change. You figure this stuff out when you’re anxious and hyper attentive to how the clouds are moving and if you can see if the storms are coming your way. I think about that quite a bit, that familiarity with a landscape or that familiarity with a place where you understand how the weather moves through it, not necessarily because you look at the weather, but because you know the weather patterns.

Alice: It seems like you are trying to gauge what the personal impact of that storm will be based on the cloud cover and direction of the wind. Is that something you think about when you’re collecting materials for your current work, which are made from assorted sticks, branches, and tree trunks that have fallen on the ground? Are you thinking about how that stump became that shape and what caused it to be that shape or how it came down?

Johnny: Yeah, I do. The history of the object, of the wood, of the material, of the body is really important to me. I try not to say material sometimes because this wood is a body. I'm constantly trying to negotiate my impact upon what's going on with the work and allowing the life of the tree to still exist. I’ve been thinking about age in relation to some of these stumps. I have these two cedar boards that in order to make them, the tree grew for over 100 years! And they were someone’s fence post! So that history is really important to me. It’s not necessarily something that will come up eventually in the work, but it is really important to the way that I think about it and try to make pieces that are more collaborative where it’s me and the tree, me and the rock, or whatever it is.

Alice: Understanding wood as a body as opposed to a material makes me think of this inherent life cycle that comes with being a body. It starts somewhere, it’s born, it lives, it dies, and it becomes something else. In terms of the lifetime of the object as a tree stump versus the lifetime of it as an artwork, can you say more about how you’re imagining the life cycles of these things as they intersect with you as the artist?

Johnny: Thinking of them as art objects is tricky because I often get sucked down some sort of rabbit hole when I start thinking of the ethics of art making and projecting one’s being upon another. I think that a lot of these pieces will eventually move back to the woods. They’re not going to be preserved forever, and they can’t be. Some of these are in various stages of decay already, and even though they might exist in some kind of recognizable form over the next 50 years, they won’t for the next couple 100 years. Even that is such a short life span in relation to some of the things I’m working with. For example, the fossils that I work with are so old, and to place these fossil ferns in relation to the wood feels really strange. I’m trying to think about how to incorporate them together because this shift in scale gives a perspective of time that is really important when we think of our actions or my ethics with these things. At the end of the day, I’m only going to be alive for a blink of an eye in comparison to the matter of this wood, and the homes that it will provide, and the homes that it will nurture through decay.

Alice: Merete Røstad also talks about the importance of ethics within her more social practice, particularly the ethics of engaging with a community to create a participatory art experience. When you are participating with nonhuman beings and bodies, what kind of ethics are you thinking about?

Johnny: Well, I try my best. At one point I found it incredibly crippling because can I take things at all? Can I disrupt? Maybe if I was going to be purely ethical about my impact upon others then I just wouldn’t do anything. I was just frozen. I know that I’m imperfect and try my best, but the ethics that I hold myself to are to reuse as much as possible, think about life spans, allow things to return, to decay, to not be frozen, and to not view wood as something that needs to be an object. I struggle when I start to get into the commodification of it and start imagining myself selling some of these things. Then it becomes a little more tricky, but because people tend not to want to buy bug-filled pieces of wood, it’s not normally an issue for me. I think that I can support myself through other parts of my art practice. Yeah, the ethics part gets really tricky, but I just try to minimize my harmful impact and to be responsible about resources.

Alice: Something that Donna Haraway and others talk about is the concept of “kinship” as an alternative form of being in relationship to people and your nonhuman surroundings, as opposed to being in a given familial relationship. Andrew Yang writes that “becoming kin is not automatic, but an extended process of intention and care among humans and nonhumans.” Obviously, you are working with a lot of nonhumans and you wrote in your own artist statement that your practice revolves around connecting with many different nonhuman neighbors that you share space with. Is “kinship” a concept that resonates with you and can you say more about your process of connection with your nonhuman neighbors?

Johnny: The kinship element is something that resonates with me but in perhaps a different language. I struggle to connect with that language because for so long I've thought of a porousness, or an openness, and a connectedness with others through my relationship with Quakerism. Instead of “kins,” Quakers talk about being “friends,” which, in my opinion, is a lovelier sentiment. For me, “kin” has a sort of seriousness to it, and something I tend to do is to embrace more childlike or silly, sweet, sentimental types of language when it comes to these things. Because, for me, these types of connections are so tied into love and care. In a way, that is tied to kin and family, but when I think about friends, it becomes a bit more apparent. I find a lot of what I do very playful. My visual aesthetics are sometimes a bit more austere than people can relate to, or the playfulness gets lost, but then I talk about the work and it comes up a little more. So that’s something I am working on.

Alice: In the past you’ve written that “worship as porous practice” is connected to the “importance of listening.” Could you say more about that?

Johnny: The listening part is so essential. It’s tied to Quakerism. Sometimes I find it tricky to talk about Quakerism because my relationship with it is less of a religion and more of a lifestyle, or like a foundation of a way of living rather than a belief in all these tenets. But Quaker worship is silence and sitting in silence, in collective silence, so in Quaker meetings you're supposed to be waiting and listening for God. A lot of language now used in younger Quaker circles is shifting to “listening for an inner light” or that there’s an “inner light” or “life force” that connects us all, so younger Quakers are pushing back on the God element a little bit, but that listening and that silence was brought to me through my introduction to Quakerism in a summer camp. We would have our meeting for worship outside and you’d just be sitting there for like 30 minutes in silence. As a little kid you don’t want to do that at all! So you’re looking at the ground or picking up sticks and poking at the ants as they cross by. There would be this one kind of hovering bee that would zoom on in and scare a lot of the little kids and then zoom on out, and it would do this every day. So through sitting and listening, you start to become open, to be porous to the surroundings. You learn a lot, you observe a lot, and to be forced to do that as a kid at Quaker camp led me into this lifelong practice of finding other ways to do that. I find that now one of the ways that I worship is through birdwatching, which to me is a replacement for going to meeting because it’s still hours of silence and of being open.

Alice: Something that Mark Dion and Claire Pentecost elevate and activate in their work is the role and the importance of the amateur. By virtue of pursuing an MFA, you’re a professional artist, but you incorporate things like birding or mars or geology into your practice that you don't have professional training in. Can you talk about how those areas of “amateurity” are important to you and how you approach those areas that might be someone's profession and how you use that as an artist?

Johnny: It’s always incredibly humbling when you start to get interested in a subject and you realize how incredibly dense and difficult it is. For example, when I started identifying or trying to identify rocks and realized how much harder it was than identifying birds, I was like “this is so much more difficult!” But that curiosity is essential in this approach to operating in the world. If we exist more as curious beings, then we start to inquire, ask questions, explore, and try to learn about things we don’t already know about, which is so essential for being a better human. That’s where my interest in these other fields is coming from. It's an interest in the pursuit of curiosity and expanding one's knowledge. Maybe not to the extent where I can become an ornithologist, even though my knowledge of birds is decent, it's not nearly as scientific. But when I think about incorporating them into the work sometimes, I have to stop myself because I’m like “Okay Johnny, your new hobby just can’t become art.” It goes back and forth–I don’t make any work about auto racing even though I enjoy it a lot. It's the question of how do I pick the interests that end up in my work. It comes with a certain level of humility that you need to have when you’re trying to incorporate them into the work, or a level of research that you need to do. There’s a certain level of responsibility when you’re an artist when you’re trying to make work about something that's not something you are trained in. I can talk about art, but I can’t necessarily be an authority on rocks, so I’m not going to try to be.

Alice: I think often when artwork gets pegged as ecological or is at all scientific, it can be misunderstood as just pretty data visualization or as art that is made in the service of science as opposed to being an important inquiry or investigation in its own right. So I appreciate that this body of work is in service of itself and those who interact with it.

Johnny: Right, and I think that’s so important. I don't want to be making work that’s depicting the eventual decline of the planet. It’s so morbid but also just not interesting art. Where I get excited by making and viewing art is when the works have something to teach me that I don't know yet—especially as an artist. My approach to making is not thinking that I have all the answers, but asking questions along with the material and trying to learn with wood—that is, existing alongside the work. I like to think that they are teaching me a lot.

Alice: Last time we spoke you brought up John Dewy and Mary Jane Jacob’s Dewey For Artists, and it seems like Dewy is thinking about experience as art and art as experience in a couple different ways. There’s the experience of the artist within the artistic practice as the artwork, and then there is the experience of engaging with the artwork as a viewer as a necessary component of completing the art object. Can you talk about how your process of being porous and learning from the objects is received by an audience, whether it’s a human audience or a nonhuman audience.

Johnny: I think that reception is what the art is. Something that I’ve taken away from John Dewy, despite a lot of my disagreements, is the way that I view art as a transaction or a relation. As a viewer I’m experiencing a thing as an artwork, not necessarily that that thing is an artwork, because it’s not always. I sort of think of it as that saying, if a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound? Is this wooden sculpture saying anything to anybody if no one is around? And it’s not. It’s just existing as it is. That audience and viewing is essential to the work, and if that ends up being just me interacting, observing, and learning from it, then I think that’s the end of it. But when it does have an opportunity to be seen by other people, then it starts to speak in other ways. So, a lot of the time when I’m trying to figure out what I’m going to do with these pieces, I am assessing how these actions could be read. The interventions that I do are quite minimal, so I’m thinking about how they could be viewed and not about a meaning that I want to be dictated through the work. How will my interjections into this thing exist for other people, and are they going to be in conflict with the way that the wood is already existing? And then sometimes I do think about artistic conventions and formal qualities as a result of being a trained artist, but I try to limit that.

Alice: Something that Hai-Wen Lin mentioned when we were talking about the audience for their work, they are not trying to enact global change in response to things like climate, but instead they are extending a bridge to people who are already willing to walk across and listen. Is that something you think about? How do you measure impact, and what impact are you going for? I know you just said it is mostly what you are learning from something else, but do you have any interest in that reverberating out?

Johnny: It’s so tough because I don’t want to measure myself as an artist, or the success of an artist, as someone who is attempting to enact social change or something like that because, ultimately, I recognize my own selfishness. In some ways, my art making is selfish because it’s out of the personal desire to learn. Maybe that’s not necessarily a horrible selfishness, but it’s about me. It’s me and the materials, the wood, the bodies. It’s not from some sort of altruistic way to change the world. Sort of similar to Hai-Wen, what I value or what I view as success is when, through interacting with and experiencing the work that I make, people then go about their daily lives a little bit more open or looking a little more. Obviously, I’m only reaching a very small subset of people who already look at art, but I think that people who are used to looking at art are used to looking inquisitively but maybe don’t necessarily apply it to areas that are outside of a gallery. The same type of looking that exists with these pieces can be done anywhere in the world, and that’s where art as an experience is really important to me because you can experience a tree as a work of art if you view it as such. It gets tough for folks when there isn’t an artist involved that you pin intention on, but I’m not necessarily interested in intention. The number of people that come up to me after they see some of the work and tell me about some woodpecker hole that they saw makes me really happy because it means that people are noticing woodpecker holes now. They’re more aware of the presence of woodpeckers in their area, which is a really productive thing even if it doesn’t lead to someone protesting. I’m not sure how much can even happen through that, but I think through some of these shifts in perception, something could happen or a discourse can open up. Who knows, it’s all small, but that gets me happy.

Alice: Something that I struggle with in general is why it matters that we focus on the small stuff. There are people right now today who are in bodily harm because of climate chaos, and it feels hard to be like, well just look at things more openly or just experience the world more closely. How do you navigate the why of your work, and how do you balance what you value with what you need to do as a student to graduate or make a living as an artist?

Johnny: Yeah, it feels really bad. It’s going to take a lot of people to make any sort of progress when it comes to the way that we experience the world or our relationship to climate. I try not to get bogged down in it. I like to think of my work as climate adjacent, where I’m not trying to make work about climate change. My interest in perception of porosity is as something that has inherent value to shifting human relationships with the other living things and nonliving things that we experience, which I think in turn is a way to adjust our relationship with the world and thus adjusting how we extract or cause harm. I don't know if that’s just me justifying in my head why it’s okay that I make this work, but I also know that I'm imperfect and that ultimately this is a selfish endeavor.

Alice: Last time I was in your studio you were making a lot of assorted stools, but hadn’t quite figured out why you were doing it. Do you have any stool updates? I notice one has a flag!

Johnny: One stool had a flag! Yes! That one feels good. I don’t know, there’s more stools now. I mean, one work is just an upside-down stool. The stools came from a point of wanting to provide seats for people at the Graduate Thesis Show, to sit alongside. Then, I figured if people have seats, then some of the wood needs to have seats too. And then I was like well okay does wood sit? So, I don’t know.

Alice: This wood lost its roots, I feel like it would sit on its roots if it was in its forest, but now it doesn’t have those.

Johnny: Mmhmm, there is something nice about wood sitting on a stool that’s also made out of wood and some of them, like the one with the flag, become this hybrid object that exists in these different functional and non-functional states. It’s tough for me to talk about because it’s so much more about dealing with how the audience or the viewer interact with them. What they do that I really enjoy is that they promote a desire to linger or a desire to get down and sort of root oneself in a way. That shift in stature or in your body is another way of prompting longer looking or more intentional looking and I enjoy that. The stump on a stool, I don’t know it does something for me. It indicates a time, a potential use, human uses of nonhuman things. There’s a lot that I can potentially learn from them and that gets me excited, when they’re so new that I don’t really know what they’re doing.

Alice: You’re still learning from them!

Johnny: Yeah! Absolutely! I don’t know how many more holes I have to make because they stopped teaching me so much. Now I’m sort of into crystals, not like crystal shops, but I am thinking of geode-ing the interior of the holes. But I don’t know, I start to think about my interjections into these things and if this is too much. I do like what the crystals do in terms of connecting all of my practices together and indicating at a longer time in the wood through the presence of something geologic. I don’t know. I don’t know if this will make the upcoming show or if this will be something for later, but this is something that I’m thinking about right now. We’ll see.