angelica yudasto

Angelica Yudasto is engaged in a practice that explores and reveals our relationship to our own bodies. Emerging from the very personal and complex relationship to her own body and its traumas, Angelica seamlessly integrates techniques and mediums to reflect upon the dualities and tensions of being embodied creatures moving through dynamic spaces. Born in Lima, Peru, raised in both Jakarta and Miami, 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

The first thing I was attracted to in your work was your choice of materials—silk and glass. Can you talk to me about your relationship to materials and your evolution within that realm?

I started off as a painter and worked really heavily with the figure, my own figure in particular. I was diagnosed with scoliosis at about ten years old and had to wear a back brace for about five years. Those are some big years to grow and have this constricting thing on my torso. It really affected me and the figures that I was drawing at the time. You get off the brace when you stop growing, which is around the end of high school. That was when I started noticing the figures changing, as I was drawing and painting them. Whereas before they were in fetal position, more anxious, the colors were more intense, all of a sudden there was a breaking free moment, which I didn’t notice until later. 

Towards the end of my undergrad, I was more interested in breaking things apart, like Julie Mehretu, spatially. That’s when I started breaking away from traditional painting on canvas or linen too. Eventually all of what you saw of the body was the feel of it. What kind of indicators, or what was enough, to still feel like my own body, or a female body. With the human body, we’re so accustomed to faces and wanting to anthropomorphize things. That’s why humans see ghosts a lot of the time. They see the three marks, the eyes and then the mouth. You see that in the torso as well. I had this one piece, it was two nipples, and that was enough to realize the rest of it is there.

Ultimately these paintings started to want to be more sculptural. They were these collections of materials that were very much suggestive of the body. They became installations. I could work directly onto the wall.

Is that when fabric started to make its way into your work?

Fabrics keep coming back over and over again. It’s the closest thing to the body. It conforms to anything it touches or is near. It covers the thing. Images will emerge from it, things that are familiar. In the kind of scrap-scapes, or installations, they were suggestive of happening after the presence of the body. It was no longer, here’s a woman or here’s a phallus. It was, there was somebody here and something happened.

I was very much interested in the psychological that happens after the fact, the spaces that we occupy and how that changes our perspective and our feelings and memories, things to do with trauma. You can enter a room two different dates altogether, but have a completely different feeling, depending on what you just experienced. When people are recounting stories, let’s say you’re being interviewed after a car accident, in a room with ten people, half will say this person was wearing red, half will say blue.

Right, the differences and fallibility of human memory.

At the time too, during grad school, I went through an abortion. Again, something that impacts this part of the body. It took a while to heal from it. It also fueled my practice at the time. I was really thinking about what happens to me, my mind, my brain, as I'm going through this. How that completely changes and shifts spaces. Humans have such a strong connection to objects and even places. They hold so much memory and they change depending on each time. Someone deciding to never step into a place again because this happened. It’s not the place that did it.

Talk more about this interest in capturing and conveying memories, while also recognizing their instability.

The way I like to describe it is trying to capture a drawing in a foggy window. It’s something instant, then it goes away. It changes altogether. You just have that one moment and that’s it.

You go back and forth, using your past work in your current work. Some of your textiles have the glass forms printed onto them. The scribble form appears on the glass plate, the silk, and as the glass sculpture. In another interview, you talked about “cannibalizing” your work.

I feel like that’s just natural—to repeat some of the same things. It’s not going to be the same each time, but it is the thread within the work. I want to call them characters. They show up here and there because they’re expressive of my interest in translucency or the fragility of the human body.

I like the mirroring, the rhythm, the repetition of what memories can be. This ripple effect. It eventually changes, distorts itself to be a completely new story altogether. I usually play with different types of mirroring, I’ll have a glass piece as the image and then the same glass piece next to it, where it weaves in and out. The internet is that way. It’s more organic than we think. It’s almost as fallible as the human mind, and memory, and how trustworthy it can be. People can just come in and manipulate.

This repetition questions reality at the same time that it’s trying to pin down the memories.

All of these things contain dualities too. Glass is super fragile but it’s also not. Because I work with borosilicate, these are very strong. But if you ever see glass artists work with the heat, it seems so malleable. That’s why I feel that it’s like drawing in midair.  

How did you get into glass?

I do flameworking. Flamewoking is the process of melting rods or tubes of glass using gas-fueled torches. Glass blowing is using a steel pipe that’s inserted into a hot furnace to collect molten glass that gets blown into different shapes. I use borosilicate glass, which is more resistant to thermal shock than regular glass, and manipulate it to my desired shape with the hot torch. 

I took an elective class in undergrad with Michael Endo, a glass artist. We got to go and see how sheets of glass were made at Bullseye Glass in Portland. He taught us all of these different techniques. One of them being that you can just sandblast the sheet and draw directly onto that using underglaze pencil.

I hadn’t touched that material in years and then I took an Urban Glass class in grad school, a survey class that covered flameworking. I started manipulating these rods. Like with ceramics, these vessels end up feeling bodily. It’s more physical than anything I've ever worked on before. The more heat you put onto the rod, it just kind of melts onto itself. You can see how it can easily look like an intestine.

There’s such a softness to it. Little movements that you can’t force—like this ripple. It becomes a reflection of you in that precise moment.

Already I was on the subject of how humans get affected by space. I went to this meditation program at the Rubin Museum. They said, how did you get here? You arrived? No, what got you here was the train conductor, your phone. A bunch of collections of little things that got you to this moment. It’s not that you got here. I came here from generations of sacrifice. My mother decided she wanted to move to America. We exist here because of everything else.

Right, nothing is isolated, nothing starts from today.

But glass gets affected by temperature and the process of annealing, when you put things in a kiln. After I manipulate it with flameworking, it’s not done. I still have to put it in the kiln so that the temperature lowers at a slow rate, in order to avoid temperature shock. Sometimes it can take days, usually it takes one night. That’s what strengthens it. They’re fragile and they get affected by other things, the way humans are. I found that connection with the glass.

I see the way they look as if they are of the body, but they also remind me of a scribble. You keep bringing your drawing practice into your new materials.

I really missed hand-drawing so I went back to that, except with glass. 

Are you still using your own body as a reference?

Yeah, definitely. In my early twenties, late teens, it was figure drawing after figure drawing. I am also interested in the honesty of mark-making. You talked about the spontaneity of it. That’s something I try to lean on when I’m drawing or putting things together. But there’s muscle memory in that as well.  Eventually I stop needing to use the figure as my reference point because I’m already accustomed to what these outlines appear to be. It’s interesting to lean on what the imagination of the body looks like.

At the same time as this cerebral, bodily fascination, you also incorporate the digital, both as a medium and through language. The silks are printed digitally. Your titles reference digital spaces and actions (tab, screen, reboot). While it’s not a conflict between the bodily and the digital—

They’re kind of opposites.

Yeah, there is a way they butt up against each other. But as you said above, the internet is more organic than we think. How do you understand the role of the digital in your work?

The stance that I’m trying to take is that it’s not one of the other. Especially now, we’re more cyborgs than ever. With our phones as our appendages. This extra thing that we’re so connected to, we don’t even think about it.  First thing you do is check your phone. The internet is like the human memory. At the moment, that is how we’re treating it too.

I work with these dualities, even with these glass pieces, even though there is nothing digital about it. I’m still playing with the hardness of glass, it being suggestive of being on paper but it’s not. These silk pieces feel very soft and yet they are digital. There are moments where you can see the pixel if you come up close. Fabric also has pixels because of the square format.

You’re not merging the two, but instead acknowledging that we are already merged in our contemporary existence. Where is your practice right now?

Where I’m at is just kind of playing. I’m playing with both silk and glass. Definitely a bit more drawing, I missed it so much. I made this one experiment in grad school where I was projecting and video-mapping so I might play with that, little vignettes, little moments, that show up here and there. I feel like technology can really be a crutch. And I get it. Glass can be that way too; glass can be so seductive. But what else? What else are you trying to say, other than just the beauty of the material itself?

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?

I met this artist in my residency at Wassaic, early this winter—Ailyn Lee. She creates these part stop-motion films and ceramic pieces, some are puppets. They’re all humorous and surreal. Her domestic objects hold a lot of memory. She uses a lot of found objects. There were moments we drove up to go see some vintage shops and it was just a playground for her. She’s not afraid to showcase that quirkiness. Some parts can be really dark as well, passing down objects, what makes them really special, they hold all of these memories you might not be completely aware of. You can feel it in the object without having experienced it or known about it. That’s the uncanny part about it. Like a cabinet of curiosities is how I would describe her practice.

Published November 4, 2023