Steef Crombach: Globalization and Searching for Symbols

We sat on a large porch in Zilker, a "safe distance" across from each other -- we had met for the first time on this same porch just under a year ago at an art show for Big Medium's West Austin Studio Tours (this was days before WEST 2020 became officially postponed).  Steef laid on the porch staring at the trees, sweaty but alive from a day of building garden beds - a personal community initiative Steef and partner in crime, Sculptor GD Wright had taken upon themselves as COVID became an increasingly normalized word.  It's this similar dedication to activeness, communal ethos and over-all effectiveness that she brings to her practice and the Austin's contemporary art scene.                                                                                 

 Steef is Dutch-born and has only been in Texas for a few years -- yet her work has appeared all over the city, she was one of The LINE Hotel Austin's first Artists-in-Residence, and  most recently earned the heavily competed for solo show at  Women and Their Work. Her experimental, yet technically intentional, processes on fabric cultivate a jovial refinement  and treat daily consumerist iconography as both textiles and clues to how we think and move. 

CA: What informs your subject matter?

SC: I have always been really inspired by my environment. Especially things that stand out to me in the culture that I live in. Color, shape, pattern, where I find them, where they are common, and how those things make up our environment and what they tell us, how they steer us. The things that I am usually inspired by are invisible to us because we normalize them. I feel like I was really good at that in Holland, because that was my culture, and that was what I was dealing with. And I kind of just blindly went on in America and was like “I’m gonna do the same here,” and then I noticed that the things that I picked were not the same, because I look at things from a different angle and cannot get over my outsider view. Now I’m trying to figure out why my outsider view would matter to anybody in America. Are these things that I find significant really significant? How do Americans read them? And does it matter if they read them differently from me? Maybe that’s what’s interesting? -- that’s really a major shift that happened from moving here. 

CA: What initially motivated your move to the states?

SC: Initially I wanted to go to America because everything is bigger in America and America has a lot of symbolism. In my own art I divide symbolism up in stages: Conventional symbolism is the symbols that we all know and all know mean something, like obviously traffic signs but also more like subliminal things or things we connect naturally. And then I’m really interested in the secondary that I find symbolism in. America has a lot of things that are really typically American, like the eagle, and the hamburgers, and the American flag, and the statue of liberty, that’s like the primary symbolism. I felt that if I came here I would find these very pronounced, visually exciting secondary symbols. And I did, but now it’s like I’m in a tertiary route I’m trying to navigate.

The more I get half American, the more I’m above the Atlantic and speak Dutch with an American accent and speak English with a Dutch accent and stop belonging to anywhere, I feel like that’s where the confusion comes from. I just don’t know… (laughs).

CA: How might aspects of an environment materialize in your work?

SC:  Holland for example, all the roofs on the buildings are made of Terra Cotta clay tiles and they are always higher than America, because the buildings are higher in Holland. So higher in the sky you would always find this terra cotta color, and the brick is THIS color, and there’s a lot of green, but a different kind of green than here, because it’s different vegetation, and the sky has a different color. I kind of collected it as though I’m making a very pixelated picture of an image that I see right in front of me. And I did it for all of the Netherlands, like a mind picture of this, mind picture of that. And it became like scattered pictures of everywhere and at different times of the day in Holland. It was like a color field painting basically. And then I did that for Austin when I came here, and it was a whole different painting. I thought that was really interesting.

CA: What are of interest lately?

SC: Right now I am finding that America is very personal in its commercials. It has hilarious quotes and it’s very banal and it’s very like “Hey! Come visit our store!” But in Holland it’s very serious like “We’re a tire shop. Come, buy tires because we are a tire shop. ” In America it’s like (in a Southern accent) “Did your tire go flat?” as if your friend is speaking to you “ I know this one place that has great tires…” Sometimes it comes with really interesting sentence structure and like the whole imagery that’s created around it. In Holland you don’t talk about money and if you are an average joe it’s admirable. In America it’s the opposite. You don’t want to be middle class, you want to live up to the standard. If they make a commercial about security cameras for your house, they’re going to show a great property with this big lawn. They put a different standard on people’s minds. Right now I’m working with how the symbolism of commercialism is intertwined with our unconscious, to point it out. .

CA: You seemed to find an organic momentum with fabric dyeing techniques.

SC: I was really glad to find Batik. It has an element of surprise, where I can’t fully predict it, like it’s not like painting where I put a stroke on there and I know what it’s going to look like. There is the washing out process, and the multitude of layers, and the masking/resist dyeing technique where you can create a pattern that has a pattern underneath it with really sharp lines. I feel like that really intertwines with my ideas of the unconscious. I like that fabric patterns continue endlessly. Like when you buy a fabric roll it’s always made in this way where there are  no edges. I like to think that my work wants to extend and that there is no end to them. You can imagine it rolling on and on and on. Therefore I have been working a lot with Batik. And recently, I have been going into 3D. I like things that contradict themselves, it looks heavy but it’s actually really light, or it looks made a certain way but you can see signs of it being made in a way that doesn’t make sense with the material. I like when the confusion is in the material as well. I like to use stuff that isn’t usually considered part of contemporary art. It happened with ceramics, where it used to be looked down upon, but now it’s totally hip. When I started doing fabric art it was considered crafty, but now that’s shifting. As much as I like to contradict or show perspectives in our daily lives, I feel that within the arts as well I want to show this material is great. Like “You’ve always perceived it like this, or you haven’t noticed it because of the connotations with it, but now I’ll show it in a different way.” That’s why fabric and soft sculpture came to me initially. But now it’s hip and everything is changing.

CA: When did you first use Batik as a medium?

SC: In America there are so many flags (smiles widely). There are like, twenty flags in a car sales place. And you roll into downtown from the airport, there are flags everywhere and it smells like barbecue. So I had this piece of fabric that I laid bacon strips on. When I removed the bacon strips the grease left a trace. Then when I dyed it I noticed that everything touched with grease didn’t dye. It left this perfect ghost of a bacon on there. As I started researching how I could do it even better, I realized I was doing Batik. It’s funny how it brought me back to Holland. Batik is from Java (Indonesia), a Dutch colony, and the Dutch culturally appropriated it and took it to Africa, and a whole different realm of Batik happened in Africa. I realized it was ingrained in my culture. It was the most crafty, insensitive thing you could do in Holland. The one place you could find Batik in Holland was like a really old mom and pop craft store. In this one corner you could find a little Batik set you could do like Javanese elephant patterns with. It pleased that enfant terrible thing in me.

CA: What artists or movements have interested you?

SC:  Even in art school, and it wasn’t a good idea, I was always trying to keep myself blind from artists. And they would always ask me “What’s your artistic family? Who do you relate to?” I didn’t want to know. As much as you can learn from other artists, I felt that it was getting in the way of my own path. I grew up a little (laughs).  I like Melanie Bonajo (@melanie_bonajo). And at this point I honestly get inspired by the people that are literally around me, like Alexis (@a.e.mabry), or you (@freeverbs). I feel like that’s my artistic family, and it’s my actual family, so I feel way more kindred to that. Right now I relate to the people around me. I also like Diego M. Duran’s (@fayeg0) work. 

CA:  How do notions of ‘community’ and ‘collaboration’ integrate into your practice?

SC: That’s the inspiration for it — when you find someone else that makes really dope work and you have a lot in common and your communal work can rise above both of your abilities. You give the viewer more by collaborating. You take your own ego and autograph away for the greater good of creating something with elements that are unknown to you but work well with your own work. It’s really cool to learn from people that inspire you and you both get better. Being an artist is an isolating job if it’s just you working in your studio. 

CA: Do you see yourself in Austin forever?

SC: No not forever. I don’t know yet. There is something interesting about unestablished places and smaller towns.

CA: Are you considering Austin one of those places?

SC: Yeah, in the arts it’s kind of small. It’s not like L.A., New York, or Berlin. I want to change a place and have some kind of impact. And when it’s like an overflow of artists I feel like that job has already been done maybe.

CA: Do you find less established cities offer a more intimate connection to identity?

SC: Yeah, and for others. If I find something that you have been seeing your whole life or passing by on the highway everyday and you just never see it. And the moment I point it out to you you’re like “Oh my god, I’ve seen that everywhere for my whole life,” and that is usually a very local thing. The really significant things that shape us are usually not global or national symbols, they’re local. But you lose that a little in a big city or a global society. That’s why people are so scared, you know, they lose their identity and they lose their being with globalization.

CA: Speaking of local, you and artist GD Wright have been busy building backyard garden beds for the community- why was this an immediate response for you?

SC: I couldn’t work for a year when I first moved here. Legally I wasn’t allowed to make money in the United States in any way. It’s funny how it works, where you come in and you have to prove your income and you’re like “Hey I’m an artist and I got these grants and I sell this much work,” and they’re like “No, that’s not a job. You’re not eligible for anything.” And as soon as you do an art  show they’re like “Oh you must have sold stuff (laughs), that must have been a money thing.” I had to really work with that. I couldn’t do any shows or work and it was very uninspiring to me. I needed to really orient myself to this new place.

So I started making my garden. I have that urge in me to do something with my hands. I noticed that growing a plant from a baby to an adult felt like a creation process that might even be more sublime than the creation of art. Though it is very local and very small, it feels significant. Building the gardens right now is just me hoping to give something to people, hoping to have their hands in the earth, and give them peace of mind and food security.

Keep up-to-date with Steef’s artwork on her website and Instagram (@steefcrombach).