Olga Hubbard:
Hi, I am Olga Hubbard. We are at our exhibition at Teachers College playing with form, and we are sitting in front of Jacque Simmons' work Making Marks. Hi, Jacque.
Jacqueline Simmons:
Hi, Olga.
Olga Hubbard:
So I've been looking at this work, and I remember the process of you creating this and so many other wonderful things and discovering different ways of thinking. And I'm wondering what about other activities together stands out to you as particularly meaningful?
Jacqueline Simmons:
Well, I think the call for each of us to explore something that we were interested in was the most meaningful of all. We gave each other permission to reach into ourselves and find something that had some kind of creative route that we didn't quite feel fit into our scholarship or our teaching or something durable in academia, but we call it our research. And so that, to me, was the most important activity. So each week when we came to report back on how our explorations were going, it was always a revelation, for me to share the kinds of things that I was doing, but also to hear from everyone else, what you were all exploring, and then to have those move impact my ideas about what I was capable of thinking about or exploring or doing.
Olga Hubbard:
And I remember as you were speaking, how we were balancing a playfulness and a lightheartedness, not bringing too much importance on the one hand, but at the same time taking it very seriously.
Jacqueline Simmons:
Right.
Olga Hubbard:
And I wonder if you felt that too.
Jacqueline Simmons:
For sure. Definitely with the Making Marks, which is part of why I think I wanted to share this particular project in this exhibit, because I've always been interested in what it means to be an artist. And then I really loved the way it opened my mind to just the idea of possibility and work in general. And so I was able to think about materials, and I got into this whole mending thing and acting and improvisation. They're all really just different forms of mark making, right? I appreciate the ways that this has emerged as kind of a practice that is translatable for me in other ways.
Olga Hubbard:
How would you think it translates to your teaching or to your scholarship?
Jacqueline Simmons:
So much.
Olga Hubbard:
You talked about reading, but I'm wondering if you talk about other pockets of those practices.
Jacqueline Simmons:
Yeah, it's made me a brave, a braver teacher. I think it's made my students probably a little braver as well, because I'm not so focused on what that outcome is supposed to look like because this is what the learning objectives say it should look like. I'm actually able to open a little more space for them to experiment as well, and to sort of withhold the ending.
Olga Hubbard:
Tell me if I'm wrong, but it strikes me that this open-endedness is something you may have spoken about and embraced to some degree before we worked together.
Jacqueline Simmons:
Yes. Yeah.
Olga Hubbard:
But now you've gone through it yourself in a deeper way. So it seems like you are still doing what you were doing, but in a new way.
Jacqueline Simmons:
Yeah. I love that question.
Olga Hubbard:
Does that make sense, what I'm saying?
Jacqueline Simmons:
It does, and it reminds me of the pillars of this exhibit. We did come to these understandings of what's required, and it was these conditions that we created and a practice that some of this work allowed me to do, right? So the conditions for experimentation, the weekly meeting, the time that we dedicated to it, the valuing of it, the shared valuing of it, a community of colleagues who were cheerleading, part of those conditions were important. And then the commitment to a practice, to trying these new things and saying this is an important part of it. So I didn't have those before, right? We can all sort of experiment in isolation, be inspired by our ideas, but when we don't know how to share them with trusted others, then we can just sort of swim around and not quite know where is it taking us? Does this make sense to others? Can I use it as a form of connection, as a form of reaching out to other people? And I think the group really helped us all see that it's possible.
Olga Hubbard:
Somehow, the ethos of our collaboration implied that we were expecting this to grow-
Jacqueline Simmons:
Right.
Olga Hubbard:
... individually and collectively.
Jacqueline Simmons:
Like we're on the team together, right?
Olga Hubbard:
That's right. That's right.
Jacqueline Simmons:
We all have work to do.
Olga Hubbard:
Right. Work to do, exactly. We can deepen, we can expand,-
Jacqueline Simmons:
Yes.
Olga Hubbard:
... we can refocus and bring some nuance, which brings me to the display here. So I was so delighted really by seeing how you were exploring the Mark Making and engaging with it in such an essential, fundamental, powerful level, and it seems like that trickled over into your selection for this exhibition. So I'm wondering if you can tell us a little bit about how just choosing the work and setting it up connected to your process.
Jacqueline Simmons:
Yeah. Oh, it's an interesting question because I think we all had a lot to choose from, and we ended up choosing the piece that represented to us that essential kind of learning that we each had. And so for me, even this piece right here, my sketchbook is here. And as I said, I'd never done that before, so it felt like a real achievement to finally understand that it didn't have to be a book of works, that it really could just be a page of marks, trials, mess-ups, bleeds, and that was fine. But then I took a painting class, and I was able to take one of those and use it to inspire actually the creation of something that I felt really proud of. And I think in choosing what to share, there is something about sharing something, wanting to get reaction to something that you're proud of, that you want to see. Does it affect other people? How does it touch them? That's, I think, an important part of the knowledge, knowledge exchange. So I think that's really partly what helped me make that decision.