Jacqueline Simmons:
Hi, I am Jackie Simmons and I'm here with Olga Hubbard in our wonderful exhibit called Playing With Form. We're in front of, Olga, your exciting contribution to this exhibit called Sprouting Seedlings. So, tell us about what you were exploring.
Olga Hubbard:
Well, during our collaboration, I spent a lot of time sprouting seedlings and growing flowers. I think that had to do with stuff that was initiated outside our collaboration. I had a big personal loss and somehow I had this impulse to nurture beauty and create beauty, and it coincided with our collaboration. I ended up doing a little work around the garden that I started growing.
These are just pictures of my daily harvests in the summer, which make me very, very happy. And then, this display down here, people tell me, "Oh, I like your artwork," and I feel guilty saying thank you because I feel like it's not my artwork. This is truly a collaborative piece. I feel it really captures my process beautifully, both in terms of my relationship to the garden as well as my relationship with the group and how this distributed creativity happened where it wasn't any one individual's work necessarily, even though something about our essence was captured. But it was all of us working together towards something that crystallized within each of us.
Jacqueline Simmons:
Oh, that's beautiful. What was the essence? Let's talk more about that. I felt it too.
Olga Hubbard:
I think part of the essence is being in nature, an immersive experience of nature. A real dialogue with nature, not about imposing on nature, but learning from nature. The unexpectedness and joy of these amazing beings, the flowers only appearing in my existence, being able to share them with you all. Growing a garden sounds very idyllic, but it's a lot of hard work and a lot of things that don't go as you expected and a lot of frustrations, so a real parallel between growing a garden and just the experience of education.
Jacqueline Simmons:
I love the growing metaphor, and you actually inspire all of us so much with the emotional growing because as you said, this started with personal life experiences, and I also remember that one of the ways that we crystallized as a group was just in sharing our stories, and that was really powerful. I'm wondering if that has a part of this essence too, just the ability to use our work to tap into each other emotionally. Did you experience that in the same way?
Olga Hubbard:
Yes, absolutely. I remember when we started making, at the very beginning of the collaboration, we all gravitated towards very personal stuff. It was almost like a vehicle for us to share and get to know each other, and we just went with it.
Jacqueline Simmons:
The other thing I wanted you to talk about was your experimentation with modality, because it's demonstrated in this piece right here. That was another way that I felt inspired in particular by your work, because right now, you're showing in this exhibit these photographs of the flowers you grew, but then there were also these drawings. There were these drawings on different kinds of paper. You were actually creating with so many different kinds of materials too, and I feel like that was also a part of what you were experimenting. Can you talk about that?
Olga Hubbard:
As you know, I'm in art education, so what brought me to the academic space in the first place was my love for making art and sharing the process of making with others across materials. Somehow being here with the pressure of scholarship and teaching and especially the everyday demands of being a professor at Teachers College, a lot of this making goes by the wayside. For me, it wasn't an entry into new things, in a way, it was a picking up of stuff that I had left out the door that I had been neglecting, and it allowed me to reconnect and engage more seriously. Because we had time dedicated to it and it was being validated as part of our work and we were accountable to each other, it allowed me to go back into areas of the way I feel I am in the world and the way I think and the way I share that I had totally been ignoring.
Jacqueline Simmons:
How does it feel to have this work exhibited? Is it different from that process of making?
Olga Hubbard:
Well, it extends it in a great way. It puts it in a very tangible form in the world. It makes it public. It's not just part of my private and our intimate sharing process, but it puts it out there for others in a way that makes it more real or makes it feel like it has... I'm not going to say a value, but perhaps a presence on another level or a worth on another level.
It's really amazing to hear people's comments on it and responses to it. These pictures, for example, I mean, they're really snapshots. Every time I would go pick flowers, they were just so gorgeous, I couldn't help but taking pictures with my phone. It wasn't like I was thinking, "Oh, I am making work." And then suddenly seeing here, it feels like, "Wow, these tidbits of everyday life where we're observing and reveling at something, maybe they are stuff that we've put out in the world. Maybe that is where some of the joint work of education can begin to happen."
Jacqueline Simmons:
How has this all impacted your work outside of this group in whatever way it strikes you when I ask that question?
Olga Hubbard:
I keep thinking of that question and I find it so hard to answer. On the one hand, there's no question, it has impacted me in really deep ways that I'm sure trickle into my teaching and my scholarship. But it almost feels reductionist to pinpoint specific things because it feels so deep and so rich.
I feel a lot more comfortable now articulating for students and for colleagues what it means to do multimodal scholarship in different contexts and what the expectations or guidelines or parameters or contours might be in a way that felt very, very, very vague before and I felt insecure. Now, I feel a lot more confident. I feel that I've thought through a lot of the nuance with you all.