"This is painting tarp. They sell them really big, really thin sheets of brown paper. I just ordered a 90-pound roll of recycled packing newsprint. I had to get that up my stairs. Some of it is a just white paper, sign writers bond. I have a big roll of dumpstered fashion pattern paper, that somebody found for me. I like the newsprint a lot for the way it decays. The white paper just kind of peesl and stuff, but the newsprint really rots. I do use a lot of newspaper as well. I just love the way the newspaper looks."

"I’m trying to use more recycled materials in my work. My dream right now is to build an off-the-grid, totally environmentally sustainable houseboat. And do traveling projects throughout the country."

Have you been drawing since you were a little kid?

"I began drawing as a really little kid. I began painting with oil at the age of ten, and then I studied realism when I was a kid, and was into classical painting. And then I started to become interested in modern expressionistic stuff. And then I went to art school (Pratt Institute) and studied painting for a couple of years. Then I got really frustrating with the art of painting and the normal kind of outlet for people to do art and to experience art.

Incidentally I started doing printmaking at the same time that I started thinking about working on the street. There is something about the ability to reproduce things yourself, in a rough raw way. The printing press has a certain amount of power with one person’s ability to distribute information. I think that’s why a lot of relief print is associated with political work."

"Well the papercuts? I really only did for about a year and a half. I was going to say that I’ve stopped doing them, but that’s not true. It’s too much strain on my hand to continue to do those. It’s too much cutting. I usually do it a few layers at a time. Making a few of the same piece. And to cut all those patterns it’s too much. Even just the cutting of one, I find that after spending all these years linoleum carving, wood carving and paper carving my arm is just getting really tired. I try to keep up with do yoga and stretching and massage and stuff, but I don’t know I might need to go to a sports doctor. It just hurts. I’m trying to vary up the stresses I have on my arm. But all I really want to do right now is various forms of carving, between linoleum and wood it all hurts.

Anyway, my new pieces are a combination of the paper cutting and the carving technique."

You produced a lot of stuff over this year-and-a-half.

"Yeah, I’m a fairly prolific person, I’m kind of and obsessive worker, this is what I love to do. I’m sort of a workaholic. So I make a lot of stuff. (laughs) Between this stuff and Toyshop it’s been kind of a rough year."

"We had more than 5 toyshop events. The first thing we did was a fake tour of DUMBO. We realized that the DUMBO Arts Festival didn’t have an official informational headquarters. So we set up a little booth that said “Official DUMBO Art Tour” And people would wander by and ask like “Hey, what’s cool in the neighborhood?” And we would go like “We’ll show ya.”

The next thing you know we’d be leading these people down an alley and showing them a REVS sculpture. And telling them that REVS is an artist who has been doing graffiti in New York for twenty years. And about how he told his life story in the subway tunnels. And at first they are kind of looking at us like “What are you showing us!” But then after a few minutes they start to get real interested, and them we start showing them around all the different stuff that is just happening outside. It was cool, one of the funnest things we did.

The next thing we did was we got a grant to go to Germany, and we made an interactive map of the street art in Berlin. I mean there are ten or fifteen of us, but I’m sort of taking a break. We came back from Germany in the dead of winter. And then I was doing my own shows and my own projects , and I was doing the Indivisible Cities project, it was a kind of street art exchange. Plus the events themselves, plus just trying to work, plus the Show at Jen Bekman with the handmade books, this year has been totally nutty. For the last month and a half I’ve gotten eight hours of sleep a night, every night. It was like “I’m going to die if I don’t…”"

Yeah, yeah (laughs) No disagreeing. Plus you have your day job as a waitress. I don't know how you do it all.

"I’m kinda chillin’ out a bit. For the past month I've gotten a full eight hours of sleep a night. But stuff is starting to get busy again, I’ve got some other projects lined up."

"Usually I’m by myself or with one person. I can do them by myself, but sometimes it helps to have someone to hold them because they are so fragile."

I ask her if she uses the common technique of using a shopping bag to hold and disguise her paste and brush.

"I mean these things are so giant that they are sticking out of my backpack three feet above my head. So there’s no way to be casual. I used to use the shopping bag when I used to do these little guys, but now I’ve almost ditched it. But at this stage there is no cover for you. You just have to go out there and do it. I just walk around with a bucket and brush with these things rolled up, and sticking out of the back of a backpack."

"Never hostile comments, actually yeah, yeah, yeah one time, in Williamsburg there’s a piece. It says like “white art fags die.” Actually of course, what am I telling you I haven’t gotten hostile comments, there’s that one and there’s also... you see how this one is going in on top of a lot of graffiti. So for me, I know the paper is going to wear away really soon, and it’s got all these holes in it and you can still see the tag behind it and you can even still read it. So I kind of feel like it’s a collaboration, we’re using the same walls.

But a lot of people who do graffiti are really territorial, and there are all these ideas about what graffiti is. I’ve heard “Oh those fucking art fucks, I hate them!” The first area of contention is that you are using the same physical space. The second area of contention is that you are doing something that isn’t four-letters and spray-paint. There’s definitely a whole contingent of people that just fucking hate my guts. (laughs)"

Third spaces?

"You have your public and private spaces. And you get this space, it’s owned, because somebody owns that building, but the outer wall of the building sort of creates the visual space. You get some fine lines between the front of somebody’s house or their door or a front of a business where they hang their sign. And then you get a wall that has a billboard on it. And your like that’s a space being sold to a company that wants to address me. So for me if this space is being sold to address the public then the space becomes public space. It’s kind of a little logic that I work with, I don’t know. (Laughs) That’s just the way I look at it. That’s the way that it feels to me, my sense about navigating my own city."

A friend of mine had a dream six years ago before I was doing any street work that I was a graffiti writer named Swoon. I was working for a while before I ever decided to have a name. I kind of liked the idea of connecting the different ways of working, so doing this plus doing the billboard postering, different kinds of postering, I connected them with the name to show the connections between the different ways of working. So I remembered that dream, and used it. (laughs)

I like that your name is not often a prominent element.

The name is much bigger in my earlier stuff. I was more interested in it as a graphic element at the time. But in the later stuff they are actually signed, but a lot of time they wear away. I sign them in a big way, in a really visually obvious way if I want to use the name as part of the design. Otherwise, if I feel like signing them, I just sign them in pencil. It depends on how I feel dealing with it that day.

"I’ve done a few events that included music, but I myself am not a musician. Even if I was making tons of instruments, and organizing a semi-chaotic musical event, I don’t consider myself a musician. My energy is divided between something like community organizing, and the physical visual work.

The Indivisible Cities project was an exchange that I organized. I had people sending people different stuff. So that a guy from Brazil would send a package here, and I would hand it off to a friend and they would put the piece up and send something to Brazil. That is somebody who wanted to participate in the project would take the piece do whatever it required, and then they would send the person in Brazil a piece of artwork of their own, and the person in Brazil would do something with that. (photos) That’s sort of organizing a community or a social structure. It’s either organizing a community that exists for an hour, or a community that exists for months and months, that and the physical work are the two different places my artistic energy goes."

It’s funny when I was working on this series (early smaller pieces) I had never even paid a single bit of attention to comic books. And people were saying that to me a lot “Oh are you making a comic book,” and it never even occurred to me to even think that way. At this point I had been studying classical painting for five years, and all of a sudden I flipped out and started drawing this stuff. So when I went against my education and started doing that, it was a funny break, but it is clearly a continuation of my education too. For me it was just a stepping stone in a thought process.

I don’t even really like this work (the early paste-up pieces). In fact nobody likes it. Even when you don’t quite know what you are doing you have to keep doing, then you will hit on something. Sometimes you will spend six months making really ugly things but you would never have gotten to the good stuff if you hadn’t gone ahead and made the ugly stuff.

Interview and photos: Michael Natale. ©2003