Garden Variety ©, print by Kaelea Sim, 2007BBO: What were you like as a kid?
KS: I cut my own bangs and cut up my dresses. I wore pants, early women's libber, think Katherine Hepburn. I wanted my mother to drive over my chest with a car so i would not get boobs. I loved the phrase "Welllllll, i didn't know" in response to everything. I broke a lot of bones with my outdoor antics such as tree swings, trampolines and mountain bikes, oh and lost my front teeth in tap dancing class. You might want to call my mother, I blacked out a lot.
BBO: What did you love to do?
KS: I loved building cities for all the frogs in the backyard only to wake up to their blue bloated bodies in the morning. I also built mazes for Giggles & Wiggles, my hamsters, with legos, tinker toys, Castle of Greyskull and papertowel tubes. My mother also let me put shaving cream all over the kitchen table along with my food coloring of choice to draw pictures with my fingers. I took calligraphy classes in 3rd grade, spelunked the neighborhood dumpsters and made a lot of mixed tapes (Think The Cure, Black Flag, MInistry, Siouxsie & the Banshees, Book of Love, Pixies, Sonic Youth) My father taught me how to blow up fire ant hills with black cat firecrackers and my grandmother was a science teacher, so we had a lot of explosives. I learned a lot about fire that year.
BBO: does who you were then come into your work now?
KS: I think the mixed tapes have a lot to do with my organized organizational skills. Early exposure to art and typography especially, have a lot to do with my current job and what I excelled in art school. (I also paid my way through Europe with my callligraphy skills and southern upbringing.)
BBO: How do you keep the spirit of that enthusiasm working for you now?
KS: NYC, Coffee, Taschen, Hundertwasser, NPR, documentaries, books, a very clean apt., trying not to take myself too seriously, lots of humor and sarcasm, restaurants. Oh and the friends I made in NYC.
BBO: What were your top kooky projects you tried as a wee one?
KS: I took art classes starting at age 5 so i did a lot of oil pastel drawings of Lina Tina the Chimp and various others. Ballet class for one, I got kicked out of that for defying authority. Papier mache, Papier mache, Papier mache. Legos and Ewoks. I built a lot of cities, people, a lot. I also built a pair of lungs made entirely out of cigarette butts for art class. BBO: Did you love craft and art books as a kid as much as I did? Which ones?
KS:I can't think of any books, but I remember all my learning records. "1 potato, 2 potato, 3 potato 4..."And the recipe for stone soup, where you were supposed to cook some soup with a stone at the bottom, only my mom tricked me and didn't actually use the dirty stone I picked up. Bless her.
1 comment:
Lungs made of cigarettes!
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