Cold comfort

• Artist deploys a homey craft to make a sharp point about work

By Joseph Gallivan

The Portland Tribune, Oct 25, 2005, Updated Oct 30, 2009

Zen Parry used to work for a living, but she’s all right now.

Through October, the artist is crocheting in the lobby of the Portland Building, where city and county employees work, in a space dedicated to public art. In this 8-foot-by-10-foot cubbyhole, many have come and gone since 1994, but no artist has ever installed herself with her work and made what she does a performance. (Christy Nyboer was there in March 2004 and put a wall between herself and the public, onto which they could pin questions, which she would retrieve through a little hole and answer in writing.)

Parry crochets from 8:30 a.m. to 4 p.m. Instead of traditional yarn, she uses Terphane, a clear plastic rather like the stuff that comes around flower bouquets. She unspools it from a 10-mile-long roll, twisting it into a crude yarn.

Her crochet hook is comically large. With it she creates one-meter-square afghan squares Ñ about one every four hours. She needs 64 of them to cover the floor and two walls.

“The Office Assistant” is the name of her temporary installation/performance, which runs though Nov. 4. A text on the wall explains that when Parry worked in offices, she took comfort in having an office assistant around. She now hopes to turn people’s attention to the role of security in their own jobs.

Like the typical cheerful Australian, she’s unpretentious in her manner and alert to humor. That would make her something of an outsider in the Portland art world, with its dour, starving-artist earnestness, if she wasn’t already an outsider by choice. Although she has a studio here, in Hillsdale, she divides the rest of her time between the Czech Republic and South Korea.

Parry makes sculptures from thousands of small pieces of fired clay, held together with wire. Her hero is the American artist Ann Hamilton, one of whose installations was 750,000 pennies stuck in honey.

Parry went to scope out the lobby a week before she began.

“None of the people I saw looked happy,” she says. “They have something others (such as artists) don’t, which is job security.”

Her idea, hatched a year before, was to create a security blanket that has no warmth, as a metaphor for the unfulfilling job.

On her second day, she sits at her chair, with one other chair for visitors.

A young bicycle messenger stands and watches, looking like he’s on the verge of commenting.

“Do you understand the metaphor?” Parry asks, without introduction.

“Uh, no.”

She launches in. “It’s about how the security blanket of work doesn’t provide any real warmth.”

This is useful: art that comes with an instant interpretation. The two of them get into a quick back-and-forth about why the messenger doesn’t become an artist (he has no savings), and that’s that.

“I think after a while, when I get into the work, I’ll find it hard to give people this much attention,” Parry says.

On the move

Parry’s commute is a four-mile walk. This is nothing compared to the pilgrimage walks she has done, in Ireland, Poland (with druids!), Malaysia and Bali, and on the island of Shikoku, Japan.

“I’ve walked 25 miles a day for six weeks before,” she says with a grin. She does this to study the religions involved, and to understand the placement of objects in the landscape. All of which ties in with her degree in mapmaking from the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology in Australia.

She comes from the bush, as she calls it, in Victoria, Australia, which she left “too bloody long ago.” Work took her all over the world. Her last job was as chief executive of an U.S. company’s subsidiary in India, which she won’t name. Basically, she set up and managed call centers.

“I always got into trouble because I’d do things like clean up the conference room after using it,” she says. “It would make other managers nervous, and they’d say I was wasting my time. But I believe if you have people working for you, you should know what they do.”

In 2002 she chucked it all in. “I went from six figures a year to $6 an hour,” she says, referring to her current part-time job washing dishes at her regular eatery, downtown’s Sushi Takahashi. She admits she misses the quality of conversations she had in the corporate world, about strategy, production, data analysis and even foreign policy.

“Artists here tend to be cynical, or completely removed,” she says.

1 | 2 Next Page >>

Facebook	Digg	Del.icio.us
Newsvine	Stumbleupon	Reddit