The Space-First Mindset: Cut and Paste the Body
An Interview with Kristin Anchors and Sue Hunt
Sue: Kristin, I am so happy to feature your work and interview you for this volume of Rhizo. I have loved sitting for tea in your home and our sometimes lengthy direct message conversations over the years. It has been such a joy to watch your “Cut and Paste the Body” work grow over the last year.
What was the creative inspo to begin this body of work?
Kristin: I started “Cut and Paste the Body” towards the end of my emergency medicine training, with materials I had on hand: a stack of old textbooks, a pair of scissors, and some drawing pads from childhood that had blank pages in them.
Yearning to reconnect with spiritual and artistic aspects of myself that took a back seat during residency, I channeled my first collage at the end of a grueling stretch of days in the hospital.
Through playful exploration I inadvertently – and inevitably – became a collage artist.
Sue: Do you find visual arts to be a rejuvenating force with all of the time and pieces of yourself you give in the hospital?
Kristin: Creative expression has always been therapeutic for me. As a child, I would lose myself in drawing and coloring. It was my first form of meditation and how I made sense of the world.
I remember art and drawing was my favorite class in all of grade school. Our art teacher had us lay outside on the ground to observe the clouds passing overhead. I still enjoy cloud spotting to this day, and think it is what has kept me in New Mexico for this long, with its abundance of perfect cloud days.
Someone in high school told me that art was a hobby and I needed to choose a career too. I believed them and entered college with an interest in biomedical research, specifically aiming to cure AIDS. While my schedule was filled with science courses and philosophical studies, I continued my artistic practices through intricate note-taking and doodling. Although I did work briefly as a life drawing model to try to sneak in some formal art education.
Today, I maintain a steady daily creative practice through journaling, drawing, and a newfound love of watercoloring. I enjoy exploring new mediums and spent a recent winter learning ceramics. This devotional practice helps bring me back to myself and balance my work in the fast-paced, buzzing environment of the emergency department.
Collaging, in particular, requires that I work at the slow speed of nature with a focus that is hard to reach amid an endless supply of distractions. The imposed boundaries of analog collage both challenge and focus me as an artist. Through conversations with the texts, new and unexpected meanings and patterns arise. I can and do sit quietly for hours flipping through every page until something emerges. Each piece takes its time to come to life. There is no need for the obstetric forceps of the surgeon, as Walt Whitman says.
Sue: How does medicine and spirituality overlap for you?
Kristin: When presenting to the hospital with an acute, life-altering, or life-threatening ailment, patients often grapple with profound existential questions about the nature and meaning of life, suffering, and death.
In such moments, spirituality is always present, even if it remains unspoken.
This layered physical and spiritual crisis offers a unique opportunity to explore deeper questions and find meaning in the midst of difficulty. It invites both patients and caregivers to recognize and address the spiritual dimensions of the experience, seeing the potential for growth and understanding in the face of adversity.
Sue: You and I have a sweet friendship that began from afar with some similar life experiences. For all of us reading this and absorbing your layered work, can you describe the themes behind your aesthetic? I have sat for tea with you in your home, and there is this effortless, straightforward, minimal and textured beauty in everything you create!
Kristin: My tea, qi gong and meditation practices have taught me that less is more. This space-first mindset is why my artwork leaves more blank space than most.
The negative space in each piece pays homage to the necessity of emptiness, stillness, and rest – medicine I need as much as any. My home, arranged according to this same principle, is a sanctuary to which I retreat.
I also love being outside in the natural world. As a kid, I played outdoors and helped my family with gardening and yard work. We gathered on the beach and camped in the woods for vacation. Now, I grow food and tend to the land around me with the same reverence I bring to my other practices.
Sue: There seems to be a metaphysical influence in your collage work, I think that’s why it’s so deeply captivating and mind expanding. Here at Rhizo we also have such an appreciation for the analog tactile piece. Can you please elaborate on these worlds coming together for you.
Kristin: I come from a working class family — truck drivers, house cleaners, mechanics, and the like. My mom became a nurse when I was in college and my dad is sort of a jack of all trades, but currently working as a nuclear consultant at a large clean-up site. Both are incredibly handy and always fixing broken things. They taught me the value and pleasure of working with one’s hands. My hands have always been in the ground, in the mixture of elements that we are all made of – in the star stuff that fell to earth.
Sue: The energy of the body and its fractal imprint in space comes through in your work, can you elaborate on this from an artist process point of view? Or in how you find inspiration to create?
Our physiology is interwoven with natural patterns: sleep-wake cycles with the sun and menstrual cycles with the moon, for example.
This cyclic and seasonal nature of life comes up in my work as a commentary on our current dysrhythmic culture.
I believe it is this disconnect that contributes to much of our dis-ease. This intersects with other recurring themes, such as collective liberation and interdependence that, I hope, awaken us from the illusion of separateness and into the realness of belonging.
Sue: In our western medicine complex there is such a tendency to diminish the body to “its parts” or the basic symptoms, seeing it as something to “fix” or “conquer”. Can you describe how your well-rounded and multi-layered approach to college through body and spirit has been affected by your intense work in medicine and the emergency room?
Kristin: Scientific advances in the recent centuries gave way to a view of the body as separate from the mind and soul, thereby reducing it to a set of parts, which have been divided into smaller and smaller pieces.
Because investigating and treating disease in this way has worked extremely well, it has been allowed to situate itself as the primary paradigm of health care. However, by viewing our bodies and the world in a purely mechanical and reductionist way, and treating them solely with scientific technology, we lost sight of health and wellness as states of wholeness.
As such, medicine remains an art just as much as a science. This is seen in the way health is not produced but made present; it is brought-forth, never forced. Physicians guide people to and through recovery and restoration, helping them become, or maintain, their true selves.
Remembering that we belong to nature, and repairing the disconnect between the body and mind, human and more-than-human world, is part of what I aim to achieve in my artwork.
When I work with my hands — whether in the emergency room or in the garden — or when I gaze up at the clouds, I feel restored. My collage work is like that too: a creative act that is also a healing one, a public statement and a deeply personal experience.
Sue: What a beautiful heartfelt answer. Thank you for sharing your inner world, and foundational worldview behind your captivating work.
Find out more about Kristin Anchors at kristinanchors.com