A Conversation with Brielle DuFlon
Brielle DuFlon (she/her) is a multimedia artist, weaver, natural dyer, and gardener. You can find her natural dye project / storytelling platform at www.santamente.com. During her Spring 2024 New City Arts Fellowship, Brielle used handmade natural inks and poems to explore being a new mother who is grieving the recent loss of a parent. The work she made will be on view at Welcome Gallery as part of fallow, a group exhibition featuring work by this year’s Fellows.
Brielle DuFlon was interviewed by Kitty Smith (Summer 2024 New City Arts Intern). The photos in this interview are by Lindsey Leahy.
I’d love to ask you about how your form and medium evolved overtime.
Oh my gosh, it’s taken such a journey. I feel like a lot of my creative wandering has happened in tandem with what has been practical at the time. And where my curiosity around exploring texture has landed.
When I first left college, after majoring in printmaking, I moved back to Guatemala and I didn't have access to a press. I had studied in Italy my fourth year and taken oil painting classes, and I still had all my supplies. So, I kind of reached back into my semester abroad and returned to oil painting. That felt fitting for the magical realist imagery I was using at the time. When I moved back to the States two years later, I didn’t have a studio space and was working out of my bedroom. I didn’t want to be sleeping in the same room as turpentine etc. so I started working in watercolor and ink, and then realized the ink could be swapped with thread a lot of the time. The thread let me create a textural element that was missing in my life once I wasn’t in the very vibrant place I’d grown up in. Latin America is just very sensory— everything has texture and color and smell and sound.
I was so in love with the thread that I worked in embroidery and acrylic for a while. I brought the acrylic in to create hardness and control with the soft medium of thread, though embroidery is very controlled in general, right? How can I create these areas of lushness and these areas of sterility? That is where my love affair with texture started. And I started doing more and more kinds of large textures, a lot of the time with found objects because reducing waste was such a part of my ethos.
I don't think I realized the extent to which a lot of the work that I was doing was so intertwined with my mental health management, but I started to notice that the very repetitive things I was doing with the paper- often cutting, folding, or gluing- which everybody seemed so surprised I had the patience for were actually really cathartic for me. It was around then that I was diagnosed with OCD. And I was like, “This is just so interesting. I have this thing that I found that helps me with feeling some relief around this.” I really leaned in and felt proud of the work as a mental health practice. Since I’ve treated my OCD within the last year, it's been really interesting to observe how I don't have the same craving to do some of the repetitive things I was doing with my work. That, combined with the circumstances of losing a parent that was an artist who worked in a medium that I also love working in, has brought me back to painting now.
While I was self-soothing with these repetitive textural works in the last few years, I was also cultivating pigment plants for dying fabric; the gardening is also really soothing. I had just started making my natural inks before my mom passed. When painting felt vital after losing her, I already had these plants and inks in my life. There was a very easy path into painting with them and seeing what would happen. This has probably been the biggest leap of my career from the outside, but it has come out of a deep need for comfort and connection in this grieving time.
It’s so funny you say that, because I had been curious about your relationship to your heavily folded pieces or the ones with the repurposed lace— if you ever felt you needed to take space from them or if you found solace in them? Hearing you talk about the context of those pieces within your body of work, it just makes so much sense that your work has developed as it has.
Yeah, I loved the process of it, and I still do. I have done a few exercises making little lace pieces, and I like to keep the part of my brain that can do that kind of thing alive. I think the patience of it is golden. But it’s nice feeling like I don’t have to be committed to making abstract, textural work. It feels like I’ve gotten this pass— nobody needed to give it to me, but between losing my mom and having my daughter at this moment in my life, all of a sudden I was like, “Why am I not just talking about this with everybody? What is there to lose?” I’d slowly felt more and more reserved about sharing myself in my work after college and my early magical realist works. I had lost track of the idea that in sharing yourself, you often open doors for other people to relate. Over the last decade I’ve made works about topics I’ve cared very much about, but if I ever had an inclination to make work about myself, I would ask myself what I think is an important question: Is this really a valuable perspective? Is this useful right now? I think in the last couple of years, as I’ve come into the intense convergence of loss and birth, I realized I just need to make art to survive. I had to let go of everything and say, “Maybe this isn’t valuable, maybe it is. Maybe nobody will care about it. I need to make it for myself and for my kid.” I was really surprised when the work I was making out of a place of survival resonated with people so much.
I wonder if that’s exactly what is resonating so much with people.
Yeah, totally. I think we’re all carrying grief in a sense. There’s so much hope we try to keep alive, hard work that is sometimes not rewarded, loss in general that doesn’t involve death. I don't think I really fully understood until I got such an all-encompassing dose of grief, how interwoven it is in life, and how beautiful it can actually be. Not that I would choose to have it over my mom of course, but I actually feel comforted by it now, like my grief is a friend, and I’m almost proud of its beauty, and certainly not ashamed.
It seems so transformative to have this space to embrace your grief when there is so much pressure to keep it as a skeleton in your closet.
Yeah, I’ve been thinking about this a lot— especially having a daughter and creating spaces for grief for her as she grows older. Also, in this country, we don't have a lot of practices around honoring and celebrating the dead…to give the sadness and anger space but then to welcome the joy and celebration of a person we loved also, and to keep their memory alive in joy and celebration and beauty. There are so many cultures all over the world that celebrate the people they lost in ways that feel more intentional and joyful. I’ve been trying to create that for myself, because I’ve needed a constant influx of honoring and celebrating. It’s been really nice to talk to other people. I’m trying to be open about some of my creative processing exercises, and hope that maybe they create space for others to do similar things.
I feel like giving yourself that space to explore yourself in that way really does set a culture for the people around you to do the same. It makes sense to me that that’s been on your mind especially as you’ve become a mother. I'm curious more about the relationship you feel like motherhood has with you and your work.
Yeah, it's huge. It's so a part of everything that I do and experience now. I feel like it's been a really beautiful lens to both observe and forgive. A lot of compassion and forgiveness for my child self, a lot of compassion for my parents. I’ve thought a lot about how hard parenting can be, how gracefully I feel like my parents managed some of these things. Also, how I wish that you could be a young person and not take your parents for granted in the way that you finally don’t when you've had your own kid. But I think it might be impossible, in the same way that it's impossible to tell a person what having a child is like. As empathetic and compassionate and sensitive as they might be, it's an experience that cannot be explained in its wholeness, it just has to be lived. And of course it’s different for everyone, too! But it’s certainly unlike anything else I’ve ever experienced.
As far as the art’s concerned, my daughter has really shaped the kind of imagery that I want to put into the world. Especially when I first started painting again about a year ago, I was making works that were both for my mom who was gone and for my daughter who wasn’t going to enjoy them for a while, she was only 8 months old. But I still wanted to create something that was illustrative almost like a children's book - an innocent, playful version of this really hard thing. I feel like she's really shifted the way that I think. She's brought me back to magical realism- back to my young self. It’s kind of subtle in a lot of the paintings, but there’s usually something a little out of this world going on, even if it’s not obvious at first. There's a fantasy. That’s something I really want for her, and it's also something that I've always loved. So many of us artists work our whole lives to return to the purity of our child perspectives right? Because that perspective is so unaffected by self consciousness. She’s been helping me get back, helping me level up, and it's been really fun. She’s an incredibly fun little person.
In your newer work I’ve seen, so much of the imagery of your work feels iconographic or symbolic to me. When you're creating imagery, do you feel like it comes to you, or do you feel you're pulling from a bank of things that you have a relationship to?
Yeah, I would say I definitely do have a bank of imagery that I’m drawn to. A lot of the symbolism that I'm pulling from is in some ways universal. I think, even in my need to make this work out of a survival space, I am still really interested, especially with how it’s resonated, in continuing to communicate with people. I think I've reached for symbols that are ancient in a lot of ways: eyes, breasts, tears. When I think about maternity, there is just no way not to include parts of the feminine body. I’ve also included eyes in a lot of my work through my different media: they speak to emotion; to cleansing and passing emotion through one's body. But yeah, I have my own personal little bank, too. I think a lot of my personal bank of imagery and symbols was really influenced by my upbringing and my mom and her artwork. Also, just her being. She was a very playful, fantastical person, and very humorous in her art. And there were things that I just sort of had around me all the time: hearts, stars, little animal personalities, magical flowers, shooting stars, flying pigs. There were these things that were in her paintings that would also just be around the house because she’d collect them if she found them out in the world. A keychain, a figurine, other people’s art, on a quilt. Her house has black and white checkered floors, and I feel like I have this impulse to put checkers on things. I think it comes from that very much, but also graphically, I just love how they look.
So I guess I have my bank of more universal symbols when I'm trying to speak to other people and I have the personal symbols that aren’t exclusive to me, and would probably conjure similar feelings in other people to what they give me, but when I put those into pieces, those are my playful or whimsical little easter eggs.
I feel like you’re touching on this idea that though this work is your most personal, I feel like you conceptualize it within the context of a great human experience. It’s interesting hearing the threads of selfhood and relationships come together as you speak.
Yeah, I think one of the things that has always made me feel alive has been realizing how similar we all are. And how, and especially in the last handful of years, I feel like I've been craving - I know a lot of people are craving - spaces where we can just kind of hold each other and just be like, “I see you. You see me. You're safe here.” We are craving so much slowness and so much community. A lot of that is just not really factored into the way that our world is running at the moment. So if I can create something that can at all create pause or camaraderie for someone, it just makes me feel really happy. It’s just so awesome when what you need to make to thrive is helpful to other people.
It’s beautiful when something feels so isolating and then you’re like, “You’re telling me, this happens to other people, and we’re all just carrying it? And none of us are talking about it?”
Totally, and I guess it’s sort of a back-and-forth, where you might think, if everybody goes through this then maybe I'm not special. But I feel like it is special, because it’s a shared experience. It's fascinating. It’s like, does looking at the stars make you feel small or does it make you feel big? Or both? I think I simultaneously feel humble and green and a small part of a much larger world, and also big in that I feel like we're all becoming, together. Like we’re a growing embrace or coming together to form one organism with all of our shared experience and our soft bodies.
This idea of interweaving connections within one unit reminds me of your other project you had mentioned.
Yes! It feels more and more like my practices are all mingling into one practice, which is really, really lovely. Santamente, my online space that revolves around the textile and fiber community, is in relationship with my visual art, as I use pigments that I’m growing for fabric-dyeing in that space in my paintings. I feel more whole than I ever have, in a creative sense. Santamente means “saintly” or “in a holy way” in Spanish. It can also split into two words - “Santa” which means holy, “mente” which means mind. Holy mind. I grew up speaking Spanish, and it was a word that captured approaching something with reverence, that spoke to the kind of space I want to create there: welcoming, reverential toward all life, sustainable. It’s a space centered around appreciation for organisms and thoughtful, intentional, making and living. We can have reciprocal human relationships with each other, we can work with the planet — we don't have to use it and deplete it.
Quite a few people have shared their stories with me via this platform and they are so amazing to have trusted me with them. I think they're relevant stories, even if you're not in the fiber or textile world, in that they're about people building things. Passionate people with amazing values who we can all learn from. A web of amazing humans doing thoughtful things.
The 2024 New City Arts Fellowship studio space was located at The Underground: A Center for Creative Collaboration (The Bridge Progressive Arts Initiative), an artist-run creative co-working space on the Downtown Mall in Charlottesville, Virginia. A cohort of four artist Fellows received a month-long studio space grant, a $500 stipend, and a stocked pantry with their favorite drinks and snacks. The Fellowship season (March 2024 - July 2024) culminates in fallow, a group exhibition at Welcome Gallery in September.
The 2024 New City Arts Fellowship is made possible with support from anonymous donors, the Anne & Gene Worrell Foundation, the Community Endowment Fund at the Charlottesville Area Community Foundation, Pam Sutton-Wallace and Maurice Wallace, and a partnership with The Bridge Progressive Arts Initiative.
