For Kate Costello, drawing is both a formal operation and a conceptual framework. The Los Angeles-based artist uses figuration, women’s figures in particular, to allude to the ways that subtle gestures—the act of mark making and the marked movement of one’s body—can elicit or deflect attention, corroborate or misdirect meaning, recede into the background or take up space. When she transposes drawing’s provisional nature into hard-set media—via cutting, molding, and shaping—the resulting sculptures in aluminum, tinted plaster, and porcelain express how verbal and visual cues of both personal and civic communication can easily synch up, and break down. Costello’s wall-mounted works and sculpture in the round play off one another, intonating the loose rhythm of stories and myths through a rotating cast of archetypes. The hermit, the muse, the poet, the collector, and the time traveler comingle with the perennial forms that populate the artist’s visual lexicon: hands, lips, hips, clouds, smoke, mirrors, dominos, and razor blades. Often rendered in black paint directly on white walls, Costello’s stark outlines intentionally reference shadows, a primeval technique of image making that Tufts University Art Galleries Director and Chief Curator Dina Deitsch noted “evok[es] an entire history of image making from the shadow of Plato’s cave to Kara Walker’s cut-paper silhouettes.” ¹ Costello’s works are clustered into loose vignettes that drift across prints, drawings, bound books, stretched fabric panels, framed photographs, tabletop sculptures, and wall-length murals that sometimes wander outdoors.

Her exhibitions often present the viewer with an expanded, spatialized rebus in which allegories of gender and power—or the power of gendered stories—remain unresolved. Costello’s insistence on making space for visual and verbal ambiguity offers a welcome reprieve from the voluble chatter of social media and the deadening silence of self-isolation and quarantine that started in 2020. Overall, Costello points us to the ways that images can be legible without aiming for completeness. In this way, Costello’s idiosyncratic visual signs and hand-drawn gesticulations show the tendency to collapse erratic speech acts into formulaic sound bites or sloganeering. Doing so draws out the episodic nature of how civic debate often unfolds in rhetorical patterns that adhere to similar refrains—actions speak louder than words, sticks and stones may break my bones, everything just went up in smoke— reminding us that while the context for these verbal exchanges may change, the positionality of the protagonists uttering these phrases often does not.

The Tip of the Tongue, Costello’s most recent exhibition, organized by Deitsch at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts (January 16–April 4, 2020), featured fifteen years of the artist’s work, including, Echoed Agent (2020). In this architecturally scaled drawing, Costello paints her vocabulary in black paint directly onto white walls. Her renderings are interspersed with polished aluminum forms that are mounted on the wall yet appear to float. A fragmented landscape that gestures toward ruins, cave paintings, and an outmoded radio transmitter,  Echoed Agent visually corresponded with the pine trees, smoldering campfire, washed up bottle, French horn, chairs, and dishes that were strewn across Costello’s Hermits’ Strand (2019), a two-year commission for a fifty-nine-foot-long mural inside Tufts University’s Science and Engineering Complex.

What follows is a condensed and edited transcript of a conversation that began as a public talk on the occasion of the opening of The Tip of the Tongue and continued remotely when the exhibition was shuttered in March 2020, due to the COVID 19-related closures of public spaces.

Kate Costello, Hermits’ Strand (detail), 2019. Paint, aluminum, 9 × 58 ft. Courtesy of the artist. Photo: Stewart Clements and Julia Featheringill.

GLORIA SUTTON: We first worked together in 2016, when you made an animated video called P&P (2016), which was based on a limited-edition, clothbound artist’s book of your drawings.² You produced the video for the online publication Art Journal Open, which I edited at the time. This act of translating a printed object to fit a digital format underscored your investment in the act of transposition—the transfer of your drawings into another milieu to question presumptions about how formats are expected to behave in certain venues.

KATE COSTELLO: P&P is a compendium of twelve years of drawings, sketches, and notes that I collected and regularly referred to as I thought through projects. The material considerations are the content of the book, that the watercolor looks like watercolor, the pencil looks like pencil. After it was published, I had the experience of watching someone page through the book and turn a block of pages over to see two drawings side by side and make a new pairing. The book form emphasized the mutability of the drawings and the ideas, and the experience of looking at this book with other people was really profound for me; other relationships sprung up and brought new ideas for how I wanted to structure exhibitions and other projects. For Art Journal Open, I thought an animation of paging through the book layered with the sound of moving paper would be a wonderful way to put it onto that platform. P&P online is like a ghost story; the agency of the reader is replaced by an invisible agent. The framing is very focused and presses different visual languages into tight proximity. Like many of my projects, it is directed at the viewer in a way that induces self-consciousness. Likewise, P&P influenced my desire to build an exhibit that brings together multiple bodies of work to foreground and play with conventions of display and narrative while making those conventions visible as subjects.

Page spread from Kate Costello, P&P (New York: Midgramme, 2016). Courtesy of the artist. Photo: Kate Costello.

SUTTON: In your work, drawing is not a preparation or a lead up to something else. I’ve come to think of it as a type of gestural methodology that, while making the conventions of display visible, also asks us to think about the material conditions of drawing—the physically palpable sense of ratio or commensurability of the image to its matrix. The time it takes to actually turn the page over, or how a flattened image can convey a sense of weight, heft, and volume when scaled to the human body are two examples. Or the reverse, how a lack of proportion or contiguity can create the sensation of being unmoored. Your focus on gestures—both mark making and the way bodies communicate—foregrounds how digital media compresses history by emphasizing the immediate or the instantaneous. Likewise, having to slow down to reread certain passages where the aluminum forms complicate the registration of the silhouettes in Echoed Agent interrupts the habitual mode of skimming and scanning that has become endemic to the way that we look at images online.

COSTELLO: That kind of automatic looking does not catch the details, the sparks. For The Tip of the Tongue, I produced a set of bound books, recreations of sketch books that I have kept since P&P, that specifically connect to imagery in this show. As I am considering a thought or an image that I want to incorporate, I’ll draw it over and over again, working details  in or out, to take it from its original context and into my orbit. Tattooed Ladies, for example, is a series of sculptures and drawings from circa 2005 to 2010. The title calls on a gendered social idea of the action of permanently marking oneself, what it meant and how it could represent defiance. Tattoos are polyphonic icons, intricate and specific in origin, they may be detached and defanged on a disconnected body, but the history of the icon is still within it. More hands than can be counted have redrawn images of, say, a butterfly to form this iconography, and there is a rapid recognition of these layers when we glance at a butterfly tattoo. Unauthored and vernacular languages influence me, ancient shadow paintings, early photography, signage, tattoos. I am pulled in by this phenomenon and my attention to this repetition, cultivation, and recording connects to what I create. The timeline of the references in Echoed Agent brings this long history into an even plane: the 20,000-year-old horse and hands from Pech Merle, the 3,000-year-old Roman foot, and yesterday’s domino game. In the installation, the books are slotted into custom-made chairs placed in the gallery as an invitation to visitors to page through them with Echoed Agent in front and the Rubric (2015) drawings surrounding them. The wall drawings followed the Rubric works; both series engage imagery that does not lend itself to reduction and are made in materials that further complicate the silhouette. Again, there is the working from an original source to my drawing. For the installations, it is sized to the space and a stencil is created or the form is fabricated in cut and polished metal. On the white wall, the hard lines of the flat black shapes can sometimes confuse the figure/ground relationship, and when the eye hits a mirrored form that reflects back the room, it produces a visual friction, and it can be difficult to read the image. While this exists in the space for the viewer, it doesn’t necessarily translate in documentation; that part of the work doesn’t exist in digital space.

The Tip of the Tongue, installation view, School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts University, January 16–April 4, 2020. Foreground: Kate Costello, Books & Chairs, 2020, artist-designed chairs and books, dimensions variable. Background: Kate Costello, Rebus, fu, 2015, vinyl on denim, 54 × 52 in. Courtesy of the artist. Photo: Peter Harris.

SUTTON: “Visual friction” is a useful term. It can also describe how the imagery that circulates throughout your exhibitions turns on situating motifs and archetypes, highly recognizable forms that, as you say, situate historically mediated vernacular language directly alongside more recently minted ones. And yet your exhibitions are often quite pared down, rigorously edited, which seems to pose the question: What is the least amount of visual information or how few gestural cues do you need to convey a certain point?

COSTELLO: Working my way from a mass of ideas to the key details is a large part of my work. I am an editor. I work with familiar forms but pull them into new material states, and being incisive emphasizes this tension. My work with archetypes began in 2003 with Portrait Gallery, a series of portrait busts of characters that embody these legacy roles. The Hero and Lover become the Beast from Jean Cocteau’s 1946 film La Belle et la Bête; the Magician is a precocious child, and I looked at pictures of Sylvia Plath for that sculpture; and Gertrude Stein is the Creator who teaches us how to build language. As I populated the “gallery,” I held a historical idea of portraiture, that the busts enact a social role over an exact likeness. In 2008, I went deep into the narrative morass, and I made a film that no one’s ever seen called The Loner (although it did exist publicly as a billboard over LAXART on La Cienega Boulevard in 2010). For The Loner, I thought through a type of story, told through Knights, Ronin, Cowboys, etcetera, of a figure who arrives in a town and interacts with the population. Who would those people be? What happens between the heroics? I mined shots from films to draw storyboards, read An Actor Prepares (1936), assembled wigs and accessories, then took my camera to the Okefenokee Swamp [in Georgia] and made a film. That time spent working through roles led me to step into the artist-muse mythology with the photographic series Kiki and Me (2006–14), which examines the gendered history of figurative painting, the dynamics of the studio, performing for the camera, and feminist retelling—all documented in photographs. One project informs and leads to the next. The archetypes fell away for a while, but in the last few years I became interested in illustration and they reentered. Illustration and comics deal with narrative so deftly. The off-center details are so important and shifting attention to the edges of the action tells a lot.

Kate Costello, The Loner, 2010. Stretched vinyl on a billboard, 12 × 25 ft. Courtesy of the artist and LA><ART. Photo: Kate Costello.

SUTTON: This makes me think of how your recently commissioned project at Tufts refers to (but does not actually picture) the hermit. How does the hermit take on a new valence within our current need to social distance? While I know playwright Lorraine Hansberry’s What Use Are Flowers? (1962) was not on your mind when you produced Hermits’ Strand, her evocation of a post-apocalyptic parable set in a cave complex populated by children who are saved from their own anarchy by the arrival of a hermit seems relevant, especially Hansberry’s idea of a hermit who retreated into the woods for twenty years and then returned to a society going up in flames.

COSTELLO: There are so many thoughts, feelings, furies, and uncertainties knotted together, including uselessness. When commitments and commutes that filled the week were less urgent or not possible, and keeping all that moving was not the goal, it took a few tries to know how to act. I am asking myself, what is over and what do I need to keep up? The hermit represents a quiet power, making the choice to step away, to resist machinations of capitalism, of social expectation, or to connect with another view of the world. In Hansberry’s play, the Hermit speaks about this rejection and explicitly about the terrible lows people reach. I don’t have the sense that Hansberry connects as a writer to the Hermit but more to the despair he holds in relationship to the beauty and cruelty of human history. In the stage direction, descriptions of the children focus on their feral qualities, their size, their lack of language. How easily language comes and goes. An ever-astonishing effect of art is the experience of someone from the past speaking in your ear. We are witnessing and experiencing so much violence—the will and capacity for cruelty. The last few months, I returned to a series of drawings of coins and bones and smoke, thinking through histories of value. I usually work on my own, but this goes further. I do identify with the hermit, looking for a vantage point, but the idea of creating for no one is difficult to wrestle. I don’t have a personal geography; emerging from the woods and trying figure out what I am going to do is kind of my way . . .

SUTTON: I see what you mean about the hermit as a synecdoche for despair and dissolution and also how one’s ability to self-isolate, to pull back, does not necessarily mean to hide. In addition to working alone, you work on a scale of production that is manageable by one person. Likewise, the corollary to your drawing practice is the way you install your work yourself within exhibitions. This operates as a type of editing process in which you pause and frame your works using intervals and the interstitial spaces between the drawings. You call attention to those blanks and transitions. For example, the fixed gallery wall operates as a background to frame your drawings, but the drawings also slip away, shifting around conjoined walls. In The Tip of the Tongue you positioned But (2005), a larger-than-life paper-and-cement sculpture of buttocks, as a figurative and literal conjunction pivoting the viewer to another body of work. In Made in L.A. in 2012, you showed Kiki and Me, which, among other concerns, was an exploration of framing devices.³

Kate Costello, But, 2005. Paper, cement, 28 × 24 × 17 in. Courtesy of the artist. Photo: Mark Woods.

COSTELLO: Yes. Along with Tattooed Ladies and Cockaigne (2010), these projects foreground the phenomenon of the wall as an open page and frame the room as a drawing that you walk into. The tension between the objects and the figures within the space of the drawing becomes a tension between the body of the viewer and the body of the work. The landscape is a physical and social space. The Made in L.A. installation was modeled on the first exhibition of Kiki and Me at Wallspace in New York in 2011. Wallspace was located in a former warehouse a block from the river, and the remnants of an elevator shaft still punctuated the entrance to the gallery. The steel supports were like a drawing. I made a sculpture to frame the entrance (Untitled, 2011), a lintel that mimicked the original in its material and construction. I installed it a few steps further into the gallery to mark what the space has been, what this history is, and what we do when we come here. I wanted to address the visitor as soon as they walked into the gallery, as a body in a social space looking at a body engaged in a relationship.

The Kiki and Me photographs are intimately scaled, they invite a viewer to step toward them. The photographs were hung at irregular intervals around the perimeter of the room to invent a course for the visitor to walk along, then pause and look back. Each work in the exhibit highlights the circuitry of looking, to pull the viewer, their eyes and their body, onto this track.

SUTTON: However, by functioning as an actual archway for people to walk through while also framing the negative space of the wall where the Kiki and Me photos were hung, your sculpture Untitled breaks this circuitry in an effective way, reminding us that archetypes aren’t just visual iconographies, but their very materiality informs our spatial perceptions even as you upend our expectations for certain materials. For example, when Untitled was exhibited outdoors in 2011 in Miami, you made an imposing metal lintel and two vertical supports over a walkway read like a pliable frame cut from construction paper. A sculptural object that’s typically meant to be viewed in the round is, in your hands, actually constructed completely frontally with no back, so that coming looks the same as going. Likewise, writer/writer (2005/15), your double portrait of Gertrude Stein made from tinted plaster, not only has a marbled, stone effect, but paradoxically conveys the textural consistency of Play-Doh, something to be extruded and then re-formed over and over again. This contrasts to any sense of permanence, of freezing the sitter in time and space—what a bust is supposed to do. By getting both the bust and plaster to operate against type, you foreground material over medium specificity.

Kate Costello, writer/writer, 2005/2015. Plaster, 12 × 7 × 14 in. each. Courtesy of the artist. Photo: Brica Wilcox.

COSTELLO: The plaster busts are modeled in clay and the colors are poured in the mold, creating an internal animation of the form. These are solid pieces; the vivid colors run through the object and almost lift off the object. I do not have a set technique or definitive material that every idea is filtered through. This is what drove my experiments to develop the paper-and-cement formula for the sculptures Totem (2005), Her (2007), and Leg (2015). I sculpted figurative forms in a material that resists articulation on purpose. The paper and cement mixture is gloopy and must be built in layers that I squeeze together, leaving a staccato imprint of my hands. The surface is the result of the material properties and the way that I work it, rather than a finishing treatment, and it gives the impression of changing, as if the object is degrading. A tension between material and image is built in to the sculpture. The surface is highly associative and allows me to render both architecture and body.

SUTTON: While your sculptures are not in fact images, they produce generative tensions between our expectations for images as inherently mutable or malleable formats, while sculpture has art historically been cast as immobile, staid. Even as sculpture became increasingly dynamic, dispersed, serial, and environmental throughout the twentieth century, its rendering processes remained slower than that of photography. And at the same time, within the narrative of modern art, for example, the development of photography was instrumental in the study of sculpture in situ and the discipline of art history itself, which has always been dependent upon reproductive surrogates or proxies (books, photographs, slides) that govern the way art history has been conceived, practiced, and taught as a discipline.

Kate Costello, Bones, Statue, Coins, Smoke, 2019. Ink on paper, 50 × 25 in. each. Courtesy of the artist. Photo: Peter Harris.

COSTELLO: This is an interesting view of framing. When I am making an exhibit, the architecture is an already present frame to work through, especially any oddities of the space. This exhibit [The Tip of the Tongue] addresses gestures and language around the body, but I also have a long vein of work that is derived from architecture and built spaces. With installations, the placement of sculptures in the room, on the floor or on tables, draws a choreography for the visitor; different materials require different types of attention. I have understood my work in ensemble, and bringing works from different series into vignettes, in view of each other in The Tip of the Tongue, was a direct step to open this dialogue. It is important for me to remember that the relationships can be opened back up to possibility, to ambiguity, and to mutability.

SUTTON: Notably, while the archetypes that recur in both your sculptures and drawings transcend epochs and languages, they eschew the putative subject of phenomenology—a sense of timelessness or universality unmarked by the lived experiences of race, gender, class, and ability that regulate and legislate bodies in real time and real space. They’re not stand-ins for every and any body. They operate a linguistic trope that you keep pressing on: women’s bodies, the artist’s body, but not necessarily your own body. This creates a slippage between universally recognized forms and autobiography, and there’s a way in which your work moves against both of these types of traits within art history.

COSTELLO: I often use my own hand or arm or leg as a guide when I make these sculptures, following how the lines of the leg make the space in the back of the knee, for example. These details are especially important within the flattened silhouette. It’s not important that it is my leg, per se, but the experience of being in the body influences the way the sculpture is formed, the way it exists, and the way it is seen.

Kate Costello, Athena, 2006. Chromogenic print, 11 × 16 ½ in. Courtesy of the artist.

SUTTON: And in this sense of a bodily fragment that is specifically shaped by a woman’s actual body, rather than an abstract notion of a torso or leg, for example, fragmentation remains vital. Your works insist on a palpable relationship to the body. This counters the way that digital images can often appear unmoored, seemingly able to float equally within the space of the gallery and on the web. I attribute this quality to the rise of ubiquitous computing—how images are reformatted to fit various devices and are expected to migrate from platform to platform, making them seem indiscriminate and arbitrary. This is distinct from the ways your sculptures transpose the material qualities of one medium into another. To return to where we started, you animated P&P for a digital context without losing a sense of ratio or proximity to the hand or the body.

COSTELLO: The fragment is a key for me. A fragment can connect to a whole or to what was but does not necessarily get back to the original. Titling a show of decades of work The Tip of the Tongue conjures the sliver that can lead to the big idea. The title draws the viewer to a specific corporal site, one that originates sound and articulation, that can be inside and outside the body. A tongue names a language. And this is a familiar phrase to describe the struggle to access something you are certain is there.

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Kate Costello is an artist.

Gloria Sutton is Associate Professor of Contemporary Art History at Northeastern University and a research affiliate in the Art Culture Technology Program at Massachusetts Institute of Technology.