Rethinking Materials: John Stowe in Conversation with Liz Hunt John and I met via WebEx to discuss his thesis explorations into substantial building materials with papermaking techniques using wild-harvested plants from the local area and his home in Florida. He has been collecting Sable Palm and Stiltgrass, breaking the fibers down into pulp to cast in molds and reform into siding. John is completing his second year as an MFA candidate in printmaking at SUNY New Paltz. Liz Hunt: We both came back to school in our early thirties. Do you find that that has given you a different perspective returning to school now? John Stowe: They say the thirties are the new twenties.There is something to taking time off between the undergraduate and graduate level, coming into that next degree with a different mindset. LH: It’s like you are excited to go back. JS:The gratitude you have being in that space and doing what you are doing is greater. You feel it more – you want to be there.When you are working in the real world, you’re thinking that being in the studio is so much cooler than working nine to five. I was doing contract work, construction, full time, seven days a week. Working for myself, dealing with clients, doing the entire job from start to finish, sacrificing personal time to get more and more work, with the goal to eventually reach a place where you don’t need to work so hard. I was kind of happy when I was able to stop doing that. Now the energy I was putting into that, I’m able to put into my art practice. And that’s hard to teach, and it’s one of those extra things you bring with you. You know what you are capable of, and that work ethic you bring to the studio is different. LH: My impression of you is that you fit well into the culture of
New Paltz. It feels like a community where everyone wants to be outside and do things together and is in a great location. JS: Yeah, but COVID threw a wrench into all of that. I’ve spent the majority of my time here on my own. I can imagine that if I were living in the town of New Paltz, this year would have been different for me. I wouldn’t have felt so fulfilled in my graduate studies. I wouldn’t have been able to cook fiber in a four-foot pit in my backyard. The stars aligned. LH: Do you feel that the location of your graduate program at New Paltz, here in New York State, framed your thesis? JS: Growing up in Florida, the ecosystems are different – the pine scrub, the oaks, and palmettos. Wild Florida looks very different from wild New York. Everything was so new; my eyes were wide open. I saw many things I wanted to talk about, like soil degradation and nutrient pollutants getting into the waterways. As my work developed, I was making prints and drawings of potential solutions. How could we reimagine infrastructure or record that these things are happening so that the pathways became visible to us? I got to a point in the fall where I just wanted to move away from speculative solutions and try to create something that could be a physical solution. A manifestation of it in the real world, moving beyond print into three-dimensional reality. LH: Was there a reason your focus landed on home structures and building materials? JS: Maybe it ties to where I moved from; Jacksonville is one of the largest cities spatially in the United States. The urban sprawl is noticeable. Large areas of land are clear-cut for townhomes or apartment complexes. I thought about the residential buildings—how we build our homes, there is