Hope Atherton: to anyone who has ever complained that fantasy had disappeared from the art scene, here's your answer

Interview, April, 2004 by Neville Wakefield

Had Diana Vreeland and the Blair Witch collaborated on curating a room in the Natural History Museum, the result might have been something like Hope Atherton's New York City studio. Inside the Chinatown walk-up, taxidermied animals, shrunken heads, bizarre shrine-like assemblages, and other darkly animistic curios suggest a little shop of horrors--a fantasist's version of nature run amok. Yet the macabre ambiance is offset by flamboyance and high style. Atherton herself is charming and eccentric, anything but the morbid persona one might expect. She grew up on a farm in Warrenton, Virginia, where from an early age, she began using the natural oddities surrounding her to create dollhouse tableaux and strange theaters of the unexpected. Later, that same passion for collecting would yield the source material for her sculpture: the hybrid constructions of tooth, feather, and claw for which she is best known. But more than anything else, the rural upbringing provided her with an unflinching curiosity about the distinctions civilized society makes between animals and humans, between life and death. Recently Atherton has turned away from the visceral dramatizations of her sculpture to make a series of paintings, on view at Patrick Painter Inc. in Santa Monica, California, through May 15. Within these dark, brooding landscapes lurk simian presences. They are both cruel and tender, as redolent of Ebola as they are of Curious George. By leaving the literal behind, Atherton has opened the door to the beguiling splendor of interior worlds that are truly her own.

A lot of your work features elements from the natural world. How does the fact that you grew up on a farm feed into your art?

HOPE ATHERTON: My dad and his friends would always come back from shooting birds and stuff like that. I remember sitting at the sink while they were cleaning them, picking them apart, and plucking the feathers. It was less about sport shooting and more about dissecting and restoring and collecting all the bits and pieces.

NW: Did that fascinate you as a child?

HA: Yeah. Our farm is not like one of those great big operations, not like one of those Midwestern farms with the huge silos and a bunch of people working on it. It was quite small and quiet, so it was more like woods and fields and walking alone, getting lost in there. I would dig around and collect bottles and things. It was very quiet.

NW: Sounds spooky.

HA: It was, but not in a rough way. It was very gentle, sort of a spooky, melancholy thing.

NW: In that environment you're less separated from the realities of death. I mean, you see the turkey that you eat before it's killed.

HA: And even things like seeing the cows and knowing what happens with them and understanding where they're going when they're shipped off. Just yesterday my dad called; we were talking about the cold, and he said that one of the mother cows had a calf that night and how there was almost no way it was gonna make it. It's just a fact of life on a farm.

NW: Tell me more about what your days were like as a kid.

HA: I spent a lot of time developing really complex kinds of fantasy worlds. I never wore normal clothes. I spent a lot of time alone inventing things and concocting stuff. I was always building houses and forts.

NW: Did they have kind of a Blair Witch Project [1999] quality?

HA: [laughs] It was more Midsummer Night's Dream, more like old musty trunks filled with crazy old dresses, a lot of which I have hanging around my place or I actually wear now. I was much more into fabric and curtains and I was always making stages and theaters. I had a really close connection with natural things.

NW: Did you shed any of that when you moved to the city, or did your art making become a way of reclaiming that?

HA: I don't know if it's totally reclaiming it or if it's just going further into that. I think when you're young you do what comes naturally. I had all these complex dollhouses that I made with my dad. They weren't like actual houses, it was more like a collection of little rooms and boxes. Nothing was joined, but each thing was like a little stage, a vignette, with different themes.

NW: Your pieces featuring taxidermic assemblages and animals and mythic encounters seem to continue that play of ingredients. At what point did these dark and more gothic elements come into play?

HA: I got more and more interested in things that were sort of left of center. I liked the eeriness of monsters, and I really got into Frank Frazetta's illustrations of women warriors with their monster beasts when they started coming out in the early '70s. I had a fascination with science fiction and warriors and heroines, like Viking and Norse myths. Coming from a rural world, that made sense to me. I read a lot and was into this whole sense of otherworldly fantasy. I watched a lot of movies like The Dark Crystal [1983] and The NeverEnding Story [1984]. David Bowie in Labyrinth [1986] was one of my favorites. My interests were always more J.R.R. Tolkien [author of the Lord of the Rings trilogy] than a tech-robot-spaceship kind of thing. I visualize the world as being like that. I was always convinced that if you went down a certain grove of trees you'd find C.S. Lewis's Narnia. [both laugh]