INTERVIEW – Guy Laramee
Toilet Paper Diary Volcanoes
By Kathleen White, Editor Artnet

Q: You've worked carving these mystical landscapes into books and other unexpected materials for years. Had you considered using toilet paper as a material before?

A: Never! As everyone else, I guess, I must have unconsciously thought that it was too trivial, banal and was never even considered as a medium nor triggered any interest.

Q: Why did you decide to work with it now?

A: Well as you know, there was an extreme panic to acquire as much as possible at the very beginning of the quarantine, and it took most of us by surprise. Sociologists and anthropologists tried to make sense of this nonsense, but even then, apparently the only consensus was is that this gave us a true picture of what a panic actually is: an irrational mass movement driven by fear and greed. This time it was toilet paper, pasta and disinfectant. Next time it could be gas, lipstick and light bulbs...

In the midst of the first hours following the announcement of the lockdown, I too found myself unexpectedly shaken by fear. Should I, too, stock my month's food ration, and immediately? I confess that I also thought about toilet paper, and rushing to the grocery store and all the rest, but my reaction was the opposite: I was going to do my best to AVOID using toilet paper for a while – not to say that I even thought about using that opportunity to do some fasting...

Then came the vision.

It came in a flash. I was in the studio, struggling with my mixed feeling about the whole thing. Suddenly I saw the image of a toilet paper volcano in my mind and I burst out in a roar of laughter. I did not have any rolls near me, so I had to steal one from the public washroom of the building... I raced back to the studio and an hour later I had the first example in my hands. It all came about so quickly – the floodgates opened. I took a picture on my phone, posted it on Facebook the same evening and received a great response.

Q: What is it like to work with as a material (any surprises?)?

A: It is a fantastic material! So soft, easy to work with, a totally new challenge! I have worked with paper for twenty years but I never encountered this kind of fluffiness even in the softest paper stock. I had been searching for this type of paper for many years. The fibers are extremely long and they loosely hang together to create an effect of grass. And there it was waiting for me to discover in a toilet paper roll!

Q: How have people's perception of it has changed in light of recent circumstances?

A: People's reaction was immediate. Laughter. Accolades. Of course, in North America we were at the beginning of the lockdown, so I guess most people – Europeans included - perceived it as a wonderful joke. But little by little, people realized that I was keeping a real diary. The dramatic and serious nature of this work took people by surprise.

Q: I wonder how your study of anthropology has informed any artistic interests you are currently pursuing or ideas that seem particularly relevant at this moment?

A: It certainly informs THIS project! From the onset, I realized that this diary was going to be about mind-states, more than the factual reality of the pandemic. It still strikes me how the pandemic formalized the victory of the quantitative over the qualitative. Number of infections, number of hospitalizations, number of deaths. Curves, curves and more curves. Narratives about how people feel are written, questions about the meaning of our lives are addressed, but this is secondary. Saving lives come first, even if we don't know what this means in terms of 'what kind of lives' will be saved, preserved and fostered.

So I guess this project is a reaction to this unbalance between the quantitative and the qualitative, within this crisis and within our postmodern world. To me an important aspect of the project lies in the titles and subtitles I gave to every piece. I initially decided that I would try to avoid socio-political comments. Then remembering the form of Haiku gave strength to my position. I realized once more that one can offer the audience a more open space – a space in which people can project their own life – when one limits verbal utterances to the raw description of feelings and sensations. And this is what I strove to do. Each piece corresponds to a certain phase of the quarantine. The ups and downs, hopes and despairs, how different people dealt with the unknown, how images of ourselves came to be questioned and drawn anew, etc. The visual image – the specific volcano – and the verbal image – the poetic line attached to each piece, both are part of an organic process where one creates the other. So the project is way beyond description. It is like writing a play where the characters take on a life of their own, in spite of your original intentions.

Q: How is the work a continuation of the themes and ideas you've worked with before? How is it different?

A: I have always been interested in how the mind colors everything and how, properly speaking, we don't live in a world but rather in pictures of the world. The world is a picture. The power of the mind is amazing. So in a way I am just pursuing that focus. Even if the symbolic level is even more visible in this specific work, the creative energy that this crisis brought about makes for a project that is more about leaping into the flow of life than making up a commentary about life.

Q: How has your practice been affected by quarantine? How have you been staying busy?

A: Prior to this crisis, a lot of friends, and certainly yours truly, felt that something of largesse was coming. Most of us felt it at our personal core, sensing our inadequacy. In my case it was like chewing dirt, everyday, for months. Did we foresee the crisis? I dare to think that many intuitive individuals did. It was as if we felt that the snake was about to shed his/her skin.

This crisis for me was as if the cork in a bottle exploded! It was a surge of creativity like I've not experienced in years. It was like a daily Memento Mori. The skull on my table kept shouting that time was no longer a luxury. So I just did that. I worked like a demon. Was it to save any remaining sense of mental sanity? Was it because I realized more than ever that it is in crisis that the true meaning of being alive and productive is revealed? Was it because, being less restrained while jumping into the flow of life, all barriers suddenly disappeared and I was, once more, possessed by forces bigger than my little me? I don't know. I probably don't know because while writing these lines, I'm still in the midst of that tremendous energy. There seems to be at least two different reactions to urgency: you freeze or you run. And it is the same with the unknown.

At a global level we just entered a completely unchartered territory. Those who are able to make predictions are either naïve, ignorant (of their own ignorance) or dishonest. Yet we can't help but enter the game of betting on the future. Or we don't. Artists have uncertainty as their daily bread. The unknown is our modus vivendi. For most of us it is not a choice. We just realized at some point in our lives that there is no way to know the future. And yet... by jumping into that river – call it insecurity, uncertainty, unknowing, whatever – facing the problem of the future fades away. You become the future. It becomes a moment by moment romance.

Two weeks after the beginning of the gradual lockdown, I had a relatively grave accident. While fabricating a new tool to cut compressed rolls of towels, I cut my left thumb. I almost lost it. I had to run from one hospital to the other (three in total), pass through Covid zones, experience the fear of contamination. A couple of days later I had a three hour surgery to join the two halves of the broken tendon and to return life to the damaged body part. The next day I was in the studio. Working with only one arm, devising new techniques to accommodate my new handicap. I realized that there was simply no way for me to put this project on pause, because this project was a diary. The challenge was precisely that: to include every single event, not to discard anything. Later on, through this wave of sharing resources through the internet, I discovered a new prodigy in music, Jacob Collier, 26 years old, playing a dozen instruments and composing like a God, a pure genius. He made me realize once more that this is what creation – and art – is about: terminating barriers. How paradoxical that within a global sanitary crisis – all about building walls to avoid the propagation of an invisible enemy – there he is, this young man, without any inhibition, without any knowledge about what is and is not possible, seemingly without any frontiers or barriers in his mind. And here I am, 62 years old, discovering once more what it means to be young: total abandon to the unknown.

It's never about materials, or subject matters, for that matter.

What is art – and life - really about?