Hey there, I'm your host, Jennifer Wallace Fields.

Bringing "Monograph" to your screens these past seven years has been a profound privilege.

We featured everything from the traditional and classical all the way to the contemporary and experimental.

Along with you, we have been amazed and inspired by the creativity that courses through the entire state of Alabama.

Sadly, this is our final season, but we couldn't say goodbye without showing you a few more artists before we go.

We hope you enjoy them.

Thank you all, and keep creating.

My artistic process feeds my wild mind.

(gentle music) My name is Jennifer McCohnell.

I'm a conceptual artist working mostly in fiber and ceramics.

I was always the creative person in my family.

My great-great-grandfather made white oak baskets for gathering cotton and whatever crops.

Women quilted around me.

Was not something that I saw women do or that I participated in as a child; it was just sort of a part of the environment.

I knew that quilts were being made and I knew how to do that.

For me, understanding how to do things like sew or cook did rely on someone showing me how to do it.

I've always been the kind of person who could read a book and figure out how to do a thing, but with hands-on, intimate kinds of making, I think that there's something in the energy exchange and the looking and the seeing that can't necessarily be conveyed through words.

I think that translates into the work that I do now because all of those kinds of arts are best done and learned in community.

And whether or not that community has been my family or the adopted communities that I found myself in in Alabama, that's where I have gained confidence as well as skill in my ability in these various mediums.

(gentle music continues) Because my work is so rooted in concepts, like I'm always thinking about something or another, that has driven me into all of these different mediums.

A lot of the work that I've done thus far has been in ceramic, and I have a love-hate relationship with clay.

I just do.

I hand build and I love that process.

That process is very, you know, sort of zen and visceral and whatever.

Working in fiber, there's a lot of control.

And so I try to allow experimentation in or idiosyncrasies where they happen, if that's in my stitching.

You know, I hand stitch, it's imperfect.

Painting is probably the place where I feel the most free in my artistic practice, maybe in my life in some ways, because it is just intuitive.

It is responding to a color or to an emotion.

Painting is sort of, you know, my emotions dancing or some sort of thing, and then I get to resolve the issues with color or line that are whatever, but the core of it is that.

It's meditative, but it's also, it's compulsive.

You know, I can have something on the easel and I can be compelled to come to the easel and put like one blue mark.

It's like two inches, like right there.

Okay, now it's fine.

But I have to do that, right?

And people will say to me, "Well, you know, how do you know if it's finished?"

And I'm like, "Well, when it stops looking like a hot mess to me, then it's finished."

And they're like, "What does that mean?"

And I'm like, "Ah, I can't tell you."

But that's my process, right?

It's a hot mess.

I put the blue line, no longer a hot mess.

(gentle music continues) I think a lot of people think that intuitive painting or abstract painting is just kind of slapping paint there.

And for me at the beginning, there is much paint being slapped around, right?

But it's in the resolving of that, of all of that, into something that has some sort of harmony or balance.

All of my work is rooted in the intersectionality of memory and identity.

When I think about home and I think about, you know, where I was born, my childhood home, my family, things like that, that's home.

But this is a deeper sense of home that gets to my origin as a Black person in America, my origin as a Black person in America in the South.

And it reminds me of all that everyone who made me went through.

So the house represents resilience, home, cultural roots.

That chair, that ladderback chair, all of this is about the reverence that I have for the community of Black women that I grew up around.

Those chairs are and were thrones because I saw these women as these like titans, you know, in my life just because, you know, they were just everyday women, but they were strong and pretty and smart you know, all these things.

They would have on the porch any number of those ladderback chairs.

And if you're from the South, you know what I'm talking about.

Thinking about being an American Black woman from the South and what that means this time and juncture in America is that for some, I'm still looked at as a person who should still be in a shack of an enslaved person.

That's the reality.

For me, that's a part of my story.

And I'm fine with acknowledging that.

Like, I can't do anything with that.

But I don't want to forget and I don't think that people should forget that piece of my history as a Black American woman.

So in that way, these objects are intentional because I'm not done thinking about 'em.

I'm not done saying things about 'em.

I'm not done, you know, saying things about the remarkable everyday resiliency of Black people and Black women in particular.

I'm not done with that.

I probably won't ever be done talking about that.

I think that the wisdom that I'm coming to understand is that spend less time worrying about resolving yourself or resolving whatever, and just be in your life, you know, try to be present in your life.

(chuckles) As my mother would say, you know, trust your own mind.

That's the hardest thing to do.

The reality is you can't do anything but that.

You can only make your work.

You can't make your work like anyone else's.

Just begin and continue.

(gentle music) (mellow music) The way I work, style, I guess, I am aware that it does turn people off.

But I think they're not looking with open eyes.

My name's Christian Hamrick, and I make artwork, mostly paintings, here in Eufaula.

(mellow music continues) Yeah, my mom let us paint on the floors and the walls.

We grew up without a TV.

She was trying to keep us busy and out of trouble, I guess.

When you're younger, you're not really thinking about, "I'm making art," you know?

You're just doing it.

You're just, you know, expressing yourself freely.

The more and more I make art, the more and more I realize that that's what I'm always trying to get back to for sure.

When you grow up, you have rules, and your creativity changes.

And, you know, as an artist, you're always trying to get back to being a child, I think.

(mellow music continues) This is a place where even still people don't really understand that being an artist is a career.

Definitely a lot of people made sure to tell me that growing up.

I was good at science and math, so I, you know, was told to study engineering.

And I was painting the whole time, but I definitely was not like, "Oh, I should pursue painting."

I was living in a warehouse in Opelika for, I'd been there for a couple years.

And I was making all these works, like hundreds of works.

And that's when I decided, "Oh, I'm gonna stop doing the engineering thing and just focus on creating."

(mellow music continues) A lot of my work is playful, I guess childish, and seemingly naive.

I don't think it is naive.

I like for it to be disarming in a way.

(mellow music continues) People ask me if I consider myself an outsider artist or if I'm self-taught, you know, 'cause a lot of the work is like, I guess, primitive-leaning, people say.

But a lot of that is intentional, and it's a way to work really freely if I don't have to think about all these rules and expectations of, you know, the Western art canon.

(mellow music continues) So one of my big influences, I guess, is Dr.

Seuss.

I've just always been interested in the worlds that can be created.

The first book we've done is called "Dear Someone," and it came from an animation, a paper cut animation I did, which was written to be a poem as part of a book, but then ended up being an animation because it kind of just unfolded that way.

And then now it's a book.

So just came from, just people do all sorts of things, and so, like, somewhere someone's climbing a tree, someone somewhere's getting rained on, someone's covered in bugs.

I have two brothers.

We were always kind of wrestling, and so they're kind of acrobats.

Yeah, those three characters definitely came from a memory of that.

The animation and the poem in the book is about how connected we are and that you're never really alone, that someone's always thinking about you.

And we have a four-year-old now, so, you know, he is my mentor, he is my art professor.

He is kind of easing into art-making.

He's into vacuum cleaners.

That's his passion.

So he will draw and paint.

We've got plenty of vacuum drawings.

He's got some drawings on the doors and some on the walls, yeah.

(mellow music continues) You know, I keep doing it, I think, because it is about the process and it is about the act of creating, using your mind and your hands.

I mean, I think we're human beings.

We have to use our minds.

So the process is very fulfilling and very much important, more so than the resulting work.

Even though the work is the goal, you know, it's one of those funny things where you hope it never ends.

You know, you hope you're never really done.

(mellow music continues) (gentle music) They didn't ask me to continue the tradition as a third-generation pinata-maker.

They didn't ask me to do it.

I just took it on my own.

Making pinatas is not so much of a calling, but more of like a family duty for me.

I enjoy it because I'm kind of like paying my respect to the people who came before me on my mom's side of the family.

My name is Edy Aguilar.

I started making pinatas when I was a young girl.

I would make them with my mom.

As a girl, I remember her making pinatas for the community and just anybody who would order a pinata in the area she would make for.

And when I was at home, I wasn't in school yet, you know, I would help her.

I just kind of inherited that kind of craft.

(gentle music) How it started is that my grandfather on my mom's side and my mom entered a contest in their hometown, Rioverde San Luis Potosi in Mexico.

They just put their name in and made a Santa Claus pinata, and it was the very first pinata they made together, and they ended up winning.

So after that, my grandfather, who was an entrepreneur, started making them full-time.

Once he got started making the pinatas, he would sell them at his stands, and my mom kind of inherited that talent from him.

And then she brought it over whenever she came to the US with my dad.

The pinata traditionally has seven cones, which represent the seven deadly sins.

So the symbolism behind it is that you're breaking it and you're breaking out of your sins or just, you know, starting off the new year on a clean slate.

So that's kind of what it's based off of.

But back in the day in Mexico, they were using clay pots.

Essentially, they had to stop that because they were causing injuries to the children breaking them.

So then it just evolved to papier-mache and kind of basically taking a creative side and making whatever it is you want to make.

Right now, the most popular pinatas are made out of cardboard, which is basically two shapes cut exactly the same on a piece of cardboard taped together.

So what I like to do is sometimes I'll ask my clients if they want a very strong or stiff pinata, just because I do know that the adults also like to take a swing every now and then.

So if it's just a kid's party, I'll just do the cardboard with the tape and then start decorating the pinata.

But if it's gonna be a pinata that needs to last for several people to swing at, I'll do the cardboard, do the tape, and then I'll make some engrudo, which is the the paste we use for the papier-mache.

You would start by mixing up two cups of water with two cups of flour, putting it on your stove and mixing it up really well.

And with the stars, if I want it to be a stronger pinata, I will do the papier-mache balloon.

So, essentially, you would start out with blowing up a balloon, it could be any type of balloon, and tying a string or a rope at the end.

You'll take newspaper strips and you start wrapping the balloon.

You want to wrap at least two to three layers of newspaper.

After that, you want to make your candy hole to insert your candy into and that hole will assist you in giving the shape the string it needs to be hung up.

(gentle music continues) And if you wanna make a star, you grab some poster boards.

You're gonna start bending it until you create a cone shape.

After it's dried, you can start adding your crepe paper.

For glue, I use Elmer's glue just to give it that really traditional pinata style.

You just snip with scissors and you start gluing that around the pinata.

The most pinatas I've made are the cardboard ones, but I do enjoy the traditional papier-mache ones a little more.

(gentle music continues) Through Instagram, I share my Reels into my Facebook account.

I have about 1,600 friends on Facebook, and then I have five sisters who will share my posts whenever I post them on my Instagram.

Just through that, I've gotten orders consistently over the past year, and it's just people back home in DeKalb County or here in the Huntsville/Athens area who have asked for pinatas.

So it's kind of like you're not only selling your product, but you're also making this connection, kind of like a friendship and this trust where you'll have these parents continue to ask you to make pinatas for their kids.

So I'm very thankful for everybody.

There's always room to improve with pinata-making.

It is a learning process, more so of managing your time better and working faster.

Like, not necessarily looking for a shortcut, but also figuring out how to speed up the process with the resources that you have.

I don't necessarily develop a close relationship with my pinata, so it doesn't hurt my feelings when I do know I'm dropping them off to get destroyed.

(gentle music continues) (upbeat music) I think, as artists, we need to push ourselves and we need to get out of comfort zones.

(bright music) You know, we need the world.

And so I think it's really important that we all look out, that I look out and that I, you know, connect.

(bright music continues) My work has the landscape of exterior or interior of the body.

The body has always been involved with it.

I began as a painter.

The paintings never stayed flat.

I was already combining things.

I was doing sculpture too.

(bright music continues) I'm an artist.

I'm not a print maker.

I'm not a sculptor.

I'm not, you know, a painter.

I will say that the sculpture usually is very light and I'm drawing in space.

(upbeat music) Always has had a sense with architecture because it's always been the positive and negative, and we're living where the flux is, but it's not a one-liner.

(bright music) I do think it's interesting that when you go from one sort of thing, you do big drawings and then you go to small, that you have a real transition.

And I think we also need to know that we're gonna do a lot of crappy work in the process.

But you have to start, and I think it's with everything we do.

You move to a new studio, you have to have a period of trying to figure out what the space is like.

You don't even know that you're trying to figure this out, but you've got to go through and just get going.

(bright music) And then all of a sudden, something will click and come.

(bright music) I'm in England and, you know, I go to Stonehenge but I also go to lots of these smaller stone, you know, circles there.

And then I realized that a lot of this is sort of related to what I end up doing with putting it in a sort of circle, a meditative circle.

(bright music) The work has a sort of loop that it comes back.

I never seem to leave.

The work is not going on a line up.

It's just moving forward and reaching back to understand it.

So I do feel like that it does not have something you can't use.

I can use LED when it seems important.

I can deal with blowers when that seems, it's a lot about breathing, it's a lot about contradictions, it's a lot about shifts in reality because I'm playing with change and chance.

(meditative music) I am not afraid to doing things that I don't understand how I'm gonna do.

When you've gotten the commission, you're petrified, and, you know, think, "How on earth am I gonna do this?"

So I like better when I start and then it sort of leads to the next thing.

(mediative music continues) Problems are great and they give you a lot of energy because you don't know where you're going, and it's discovery.

(mediative music continues) Being older, coming back, actually, it's very good 'cause you do what you want to do.

Sometimes I've said to myself is, you know, "You're just so nervous and everything," you know, "This is the good part.

Don't forget to, you know, enjoy it."

(mediative music continues) You know, you're thankful if you think it's good, you know, and you try not to flee till it's good.

(chuckles) So, and, yeah, and, you know, I often think that maybe we don't give ourselves enough minutes to think, "This is good," because then we rush into the next thing.

But I do think it's important to, after you've done something, that we just, you know, say, "Oh, okay.

It's okay."

(upbeat music) (meditative music) The motivation to create art, I think you need to need it.

It needs to be what grounds you.

It's amazing life, but it's not the easiest.

So you need to feel like, "I need it."

And, you know, it's been a good life.

(meditative music continues)