abby cheney

Abby Cheney presses and pushes the ground-up remains of paper into whimsical structures and familiar objects. In this conversation, we talk about scale, transforming cardboard and paper, and what the domestic means to her. Born in Baltimore, she now resides in Brooklyn. 

I hope you enjoy our conversation. It has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Artwork photos courtesy of the artist; artist portrait courtesy of Hannah Cash

Let’s trace your evolution into making sculpture from paper. 

I started with abstract painting. I was really obsessed with Helen Frankenthaler. I’d always been excited about big, watery materials. When I was applying to graduate school, I was making installations in my parent’s attic. I would get these giant rolls of hot-pressed paper, watch Twin Peaks, pour paint onto a bunch of paper, rip it into all these pieces, wrap it, and then make it into this nest. I wanted it to be really immersive. I was really excited about how paper and painting could be—I wasn’t calling it sculptural—but I was excited about it becoming this other thing.

Were you particularly attracted to the Abstract Expressionist movement?

I’ve always been drawn to that movement; it was this era of women making these gigantic things. Working big feels like a performance. I was lucky to make really big things in college. When I got to Pratt [Institute] for grad school, and being in New York City in my mid-twenties, I started to make smaller things.

As you scaled down, how did your work start to change? 

In 2017, I got a grant for an artist residency. I made this big abstract painting on a wooden raft in the lake. I stretched a canvas on the raft and painted on it. I was dealing with physicality. I was on the thing, making the thing. It was big. 

I was inspired by being on the water, using this watery paint, and thinking about the idea of women painters. When I was a kid, I watched a documentary about Beatrix Potter going into the field in a dress with her plein-air paintbox and making a painting. I then did a performance in which I made a watercolor painting while swimming in the lake. I was out there for about 15 minutes—treading water and painting. I wanted it to be an endurance thing, but also funny. I made this painter’s box out of cardboard that I attached to a life vest so it would float with me. It looked like faux wood and I made compartments for my paper and paint palette and brushes and a little latch with a strap. It got destroyed but it was this really cool artifact from the performance. It was this object, the cardboard object, that I was obsessed with.

A somewhat incidental element ended up surprising you.

Cardboard became my main medium in that year. I started making two-dimensional work, painted cardboard that was sectioned and put together to make a quilt-like piece. I was also making domestic objects. The early ones were just made of cardboard, tape, and paint. I would do performances with them, videos of myself using those objects. It felt really different than the world of abstract painting.

It feels a lot less self-serious too. Abstract Expressionism has such a serious history. I don’t find much humor or playfulness in it. 

People would get obsessed with the replicas of a cheese grater or a bowl that I had growing up. 

They evoke very immediate and direct memories, like to a grandmother’s kitchen or a favorite childhood snack. 

It was this one-to-one thing. That felt exciting to see people having that reaction. But it didn’t feel like that was what I was after. It felt flat to me, like I hit an end of the road with it. I started to do other things. I spent a lot of 2018 and 2019 figuring out what would stay together in a sculptural way. I became interested in making baskets and that was when I started to get some sort of sculptural integrity with the cardboard. 

But you also weren’t just using cardboard anymore. 

I was using paper pulp. It’s something you can buy that you add water to and it is different mixed papers, paper products. But also an adhesive. Or I will make my own paper pulp. 

Is it like ground-up paper?

Shredded. It becomes like paper clay, not so much like papier-mâché where you take strips and adhere it and it’s flat. It’s something you can mold. That has become my main vehicle for my work. 

I started to work with cardboard because it was around me everywhere in New York City. It feels important to use it. That is what a lot of craft is, this excess of material. With the paper pulp, it’s using materials in a way that creates a medium. It’s a longer process that I’m starting. I want to think about utilizing materials that we see as waste or disposable, to create medium and materiality with them.

Your recent interest in weaving navigates these same considerations.

This summer I learned to weave at Haystack [Mountain School of Crafts]. When I think about textiles and talk about weaving, it makes a ton of sense. It’s a human reaction to making sense of stray materials. This process of assembling and structuring and strengthening. That is what a lot of the paper pulp is about, it’s piece-by-piece putting it together. With weaving, you can put upcycled fabric and scraps together and it literally makes—

It’s like magic.

Although it’s surprising you identify this as a new direction because you mentioned that you used the method of weaving and quilting in your first cardboard works.

I would talk to some of my friends and I was like, this is wild but I’m really into this weaving. They were like, duh. But it felt really different to me. Originally it was a very simple and instinctual process. I wove materials using an over-under weave to create structure. After I learned how to weave properly, I saw endless possibilities of how fibers, paper, and other materials can be intertwined.

How were you actually incorporating weaving into the works?

At my residency, we made these looms ourselves, out of wood. I made this organic shape. It had these negative spaces where I made holes around them so you could make a warp in there. It was this little thing that had all of these little compartments, which is something I think a lot about, little compartments and little places. 

I’ve never thought about making the loom itself in a different form or structure other than the traditional rectangular or square form.

I’ve been thinking a lot about that with my work, having the sculptures have spaces that would become weavings.

Tell me more about your interest in compartments. It seems that you compartmentalize visually through the grid-like form or by creating objects that are used to compartmentalize, like a basket or vessel.

When I make a drawing, that’s what I draw. I draw a form with smaller forms within it. Often it relates to the grid or it’s a bunch of organic shapes that come together to form a web. It’s this natural way that line flows in my head. Line creates form and then there’s negative space. When I was starting to make baskets, I was thinking about all of these containers that we have in our lives to use for various things.

I saw that Agnes Martin show at the Guggenheim [in 2016–17]; it blew my mind. This idea of the grid being this airy, flowing thing; it just felt alive to me. I always thought, in art, the grid was so patriarchal and masculine. Textiles and weaving, and even window screens, colanders, the different things that we use to create barriers between other things, it feels very human. 

Is that how your interest started to morph towards architectural forms? 

I was building works that were using that same material language of the pot form, or the basket, or the vessel, but they were just stacked. Some became the columns. I wasn’t thinking I’m interested in architecture; I’m going to make something architectural. It was the idea of vessels or containers coming together to create architectural reference. 

I was playing around with making my own pedestals and surfaces for sculpture. I would be making little tables and things, stacking materials to create those. I made a pedestal that was more decorative, and had scalloping and detailing in the molding, and it ended up looking like this large ceramic or large plaster work. In some ways, it became more interesting to me than the things that were just upon it.

There’s certainly an irony to the solidness of architecture and working in paper. 

That line between when material is structurally important but also decorative. With my use of cardboard and paper, while incredibly useful, I’m adorning and constructing in this way that makes it an art object, an object of beauty or decoration. It feels related to the way that, in the city, there are so many ways that iron and plaster are used as just décor as well as incredibly important structures for a bridge or building. 

Your early work was interested in the domestic, particularly interior spaces like the kitchen and its related domestic objects. Are you transitioning away from that? 

I’ve always been interested in interior spaces and homes and memory in places that you live. The objects within it. Then I was seeing the real structures that exist, especially in New York City or other urban environments. The molding in the apartments, fire escapes, columns, ornamental stonework. Those are everyday things that I see and think are so beautiful. The way they add shadow and volume and negative space or additive space. These are moments of beauty.

Now that I’m thinking about it, the domestic doesn’t just refer to the inside of the home, it refers to the sense of living and being lived in. In that regard, architecture is quite related. 

That is something I am also beginning to connect myself. For years it was thinking about objects, like the refrigerator, the oven, different things that you use when you’re cooking or at home. Those familiar things were what a lot of the work was about. Now that it’s getting bigger again, it feels like it is relating more to architecture.

You seem to be returning to making large work.

When it comes to having scale, like large scale, I like this idea of it reminding you of the architecture you live in. I’m interested in how artwork fits into our life in that way. 

I want to make big work but it’s hard to have the space to do it. That’s why I did the stacking, which I ended up obsessed with. The column is a good way to get height. The idea of making big sculpture and using alternative materials to make it, I was like maybe this won’t be a thing beyond just me making it. But that was cool to have the columns well-received and then sell. 

As you’ve started thinking about architecture more, have you wanted to move into different materials? 

There’s an immediacy with the paper-pulp that I feel really excited about it. And I still am navigating why it’s crucial to the work. The texture really lends itself to thinking about a material being both solid but disintegrating as well, having wear. You described not knowing what it is at first. That moment is exciting to me, creating this work that the weight, the feel, or even the look of it is confusing and surprising. 

Part of this interview series is that I’m asking each artist to direct me to the next. So, who is an artist working today that you are intrigued by, and what is it about their practice you’re intrigued by?

Adriana Gallo’s practice is very activating and I’ve been thinking about it a lot. She makes sculpture and installation with materials that are food-, wax-, or plant-based. I’m interested in how she’s using community and gathering for meals as a medium. Cooking is a main part of her life and practice. She hosts pasta workshops in which she talks about her work, relating the history of pasta to the human experience, the idea of making food or a recipe, how that has shaped so much of history (geography and different objects and cities), and the way that people live around food.

Published February 18, 2024