Welcome, Protection

Angie Wilson

Interview by L. Valena

September 27, 2022

Please start by describing the prompt that you responded to.

I was given a painting of a person on the phone, thinking “I don't fuck with pigs,” primarily in purples and pinks. They are a femme, female-appearing person of color with a concerned look on her face, not quite teary-eyed, but emotional. Initially, I thought about vegetarian, vegans, and Muslims not eating pigs. I thought about Black Muslims and Malcolm X and not eating pork as a path to freedom and liberation. But then I thought about pigs as cops, like it’s saying “I don't fuck with cops.” That brought up the idea of not dating cops as a personal position, that “I don’t date cops” or “I don’t fuck cops.” Maybe she’s on the phone with a Tinder date and she’s doing a pre-date phone screen and he’s just revealed that he’s a cop. She’s like, “Oh no, I gotta get out of this. I don’t fuck cops.”

You literally don’t fuck with cops.

Yeah, that's my boundary. [both laugh] So, not eating pigs as part of one's path toward liberation, and somewhat relatedly, not fucking cops as one’s ideological stance. There’s an overlap there about Black bodies being unsafe in both ways, by eating pigs or being targeted by police.

Also, her face is really expressive. She's a sensitive, cautious person with a skeptical frown. She is a conscientious person who stands by her values. She has boundaries that she's upholding. The boundary of this liminal space, between inside and outside, between what we allow in and what we don't allow in, this related for me too.

Where did you go from there?

Prayer rugs and Islam. I work with rugs a lot in my practice, and I think about them as a way of demarcating a liminal space between heaven and earth, as a way of grounding ourselves and connecting our bodies with our spirits, with higher spirit. Thinking about police brought up defending ourselves in our homes from police. I thought about Breonna Taylor being shot in her own home, unarmed, by police.

I also did some research about the pig as a symbol to locate how it’s been dealt with in art and in history in different cultures. I learned about the pig as a symbol for fertility, which then shifted to a symbol of sexual restraint, and then sexual desire and lasciviousness, to greedy capitalism. It's interesting to see how symbols shift and change from Paganism to Christianity to modern capital worship.

I decided not to go in that direction with my piece though. I wanted to deal with protection and how to protect ourselves from violence, from police brutality, from other demons and dark forces we have to steel ourselves against. I decided to create a small rug as a kind of amulet or talisman to ward off bad energy, evil, danger - to invite safety.

The piece is called, “Welcome, Protection”. It is constructed like a welcome mat, set in front of my own front door, made with crab apples in various states of decay (fallen from the tree in my yard) and thorny pomelo branches pruned from a neighbor’s pomelo tree. This piece relates to a series of welcome mats that I've created throughout the pandemic, which I haven't posted about or even put up on my website yet. I've been thinking a lot during this time about how we relate to our homes during this time of Covid. Home is sanctuary, workplace, school, gym, dance club (or is that just me?!), a place to quarantine, a place to protect ourselves and stay safe. We're asking more of our homes than we have other times - needing them to be spaces to confine us for so many things as we stay home and try to stay safe. I decided to make a welcome mat that is also an unwelcome mat. It's not something you want to step on. Some of the thorny branches are piercing decayed apples, and you know that if you were to step on it, it would be painful and also gross - it's mushy and you would have rotten fruit on you. It would be an unpleasant experience. The point of it is to keep away the bad spirits, to protect ourselves, our homes, and our loved ones from any and all harm.

I love that you used apples in this piece, especially thinking about the connection with pigs. I just keep thinking about how much pigs love to eat apples and I love that visual. Was that something that you were thinking about?

A little bit. I thought about pigs being like garbage disposals and just eating everything. That’s why some farmers have pigs, so that they clean up after the other animals have eaten. They're kind of an outdoor vacuum cleaner. I was also thinking about apples and this harvest time of year. Apples are a potent symbol too.

That fertility symbolism comes right back up. I love this concept of a welcome mat made of materials that you wouldn't want to step on. How did you choose to arrange these materials?

In order to photograph the piece, it required significant contrast so that the viewer can see what is happening. There's this harsh, south-facing light coming through the porch window, and I wanted the piece to be legible. So, I arranged the materials in a way that all the features of the thorns and the rotting fruit could be visible, so it wouldn’t just look like a compost heap, or tangle of who-knows-what.

You were saying that the pandemic has changed our relationships with our homes and those boundaries seem to be so much more rigid than before. But also, during the height of the pandemic, no one could come into my house, but because of the technology we’re using to communicate, it also felt like those boundaries were more porous. You know, suddenly we’re working from home and doing Zoom calls with friends from home. It changed how those boundaries felt somehow.

Totally. My living room is now also my office and my studio. There's more happening in our space, and that opens up the need for boundary setting, and to be more thoughtful and creative about how we organize ourselves. Another aspect of this piece is it is a ritual, an altar (my main altar is also in my living room). Welcome, Protection is like an evil eye or amulet designed to keep out bad spirits or bad energy from the home.

I love that the title of your piece is “Welcome, Protection” because it feels like a very positive way of putting that. Where so much of this is about keeping things out, it’s welcoming protection in. It seems like the reverse, but somehow maintaining the same boundary, which I find very nice.

Thank you! I didn't want it to be like “UNWELCOME MAT! GO AWAY BAD SPIRITS!” or something like that. In my life, I tend to put a positive spin on everything. I prefer to bring in positive energy. Other welcome mats in this series are “Welcome, Boredom,” “Welcome, Grief,” all of these intense emotions that we've been going through during this time. It’s a way of dealing with all that stuff. We need to actually welcome all these big feelings in order to process them and learn from them and grow.

That's so radical since we're so hell-bent on trying to distract ourselves from all of these dark emotions. They just get bigger and scarier.

I was excited to make this piece. I paused working on this series about a year ago - when we thought maybe Covid was over?!, and it felt right to pick it back up again. The darkness of the pandemic is still not over, and we still have so much s#@! to process with all the political and social turmoil - not fucking with pigs/police brutality, among so many issues. So thank you for the opportunity.

Do you have any advice for another artist participating in this project for the first time?

Pay attention to your instincts, your initial reads. Look at it from all directions, be in touch with all the different reads that come up, and see how you feel about them. I mulled it over for nearly the entire two weeks to consider how I wanted to approach it, and then ended up making the work rather quickly toward the end. That was my process though. I had some other ideas and this was the one that felt right. Actually, I tried to take a nap and I couldn't sleep. I was like, “I need to make this right now!!” Listen to your intuition and then be open to the unexpected.

Be experimental and free with it. Due to the time constraint, I didn't feel like it had to be super refined. I felt like I could be gestural and loose, which is liberating! Like not eating pork so I can unite with God/dess! I actually don’t fuck with pigs. I don’t eat them and I don’t date them either.

That's great. That's absolutely the point. We can all get so fixated on creating the next big thing, the next finished thing. We fall into that pattern, and it would be really helpful to just play with something for a while, try something out and see what happens.

Exactly.

Call Number: Y86VA | Y91VA.wiWe

Angie Wilson is an interdisciplinary visual artist working in textile-based sculpture, installation, social practice, and design. Her work investigates the parallels between interiority and the cosmos as well as the metaphors of string and fabric to describe the universe. Wilson lives and works in Oakland, CA.