Interview with Katie Bonadies, December 2023
Calla King-Clements is a painter and illustrator who makes art books and animation that she hand-draws frame by frame. She has recently taken up ceramics and enjoys the overlap in storytelling opportunities. She has been at Running With Scissors since March 2022.
Painting and bookmaking are modes of storytelling and Calla looks to create a balance between words and images. She makes zines and printed books and handmade books that are single editions. Calla is learning to trust her creative instincts and work without a plan. If she does approach a project with a plan she is learning to be flexible and to let go so that she can pay attention to the elements that feel exciting and new. She enjoys trying new things and her practice is to do one creative thing every day. She’s at an exciting point where she has discovered what works for her and gets to decide what to focus on, though she questions whether she needs to focus on one thing. She has learned that she just has to show up and be present and the ideas will materialize.
Bodies frequently show up in her work, “I think, naturally, things repeat and, naturally, things change, which is the really exciting part.” The figures are primarily depicted in interior spaces. This is because a lot of Calla’s work is a response to her own experience with a chronic, shifting physical illness. Lyme has been a source of inspiration for Calla and the artwork is a visual representation of how her relationship with the disease continues to change through her work. Finding excitement in the process can also make the really heavy things fun. At the USM Book Fair last year Calla met the editor of SICK Magazine, an independent publication for and by chronically ill and disabled people. She hadn’t seen anything like it before. At the time she was only making art about chronic illness and was in the middle of an intense flare up. She and the editor bonded over their experiences with Lyme and Calla was invited to design the magazine cover for Issue 5 that came out in August.
Calla received her diagnosis a couple of months after the Covid-19 quarantine began, which made her feel even more isolated and confined. During that time she worked a lot with interiors and figures and, like many people, Calla yearned to be in nature. For Calla this yearning was complicated by her experience of having contracted a tick-borne disease. Previous to her diagnosis Calla loved to paint landscapes en plein air. It feels more like sketching for Calla due to the limiting, changing nature of painting outside, “There are things working in the environment that are more fun and more of a challenge. You’re seeing what’s happening and it’s changing all the time; it’s not fixed. It has a pulse to it and that’s definitely something I was exploring before I got sick.” Making art is a way for Calla to know herself and the world better. It allows her to play and adds a lot of joy to her life.
She feels as though she is beginning to bring together two ideas she previously kept separate. About a year-and-a-half ago Calla started taking ceramic classes and quickly became obsessed. She is still learning how to make basic forms in clay, though the craft feels less complicated than her other art forms. The process is slow and intense, which allows her to be fully engrossed in it, and she hasn’t had time for much else lately. Clay is familiar in that it requires tactile interaction like her books and is a time-based experience like her animations, but in this case time is determined by the viewer. Calla is interested in how a functional three-dimensional object with an interior and exterior is an opportunity to tell a story through a sequence of images. She’s excited to make large coil pots and carve into them what she calls ‘figurative landscapes’ like she creates in her books and animation. She’s still defining what the term means, but it is a way to combine her figurative work with her landscapes.
She is currently taking her time working on an animation about chronic illness. Her animation is a similar process to clay in which the viewer--or maker--doesn't see the whole until the end, unlike in painting where the whole image presents itself to the viewer at once. She enjoys the moment these finished pieces reveal themselves, "You get your pot back and it's glazed and it looks like an object or you see your drawing move--that's so cool."
Learn more about Call and her art on her website callakingclements.com, follow her on Instagram @callakc.art, and shop some of her work here. She will also be at the RWS Holiday Market.
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