By Avery Quinn
Pearl Jade is a 21-year-old musician and visual artist currently residing in their hometown of Anacortes, Washington. I had the pleasure of interviewing them over Zoom. Look for them in the coming months as they move back to Olympia and at https://pearltottenhammusic.bandcamp.com/music.
avery: What have you been working on this quarter?
pearl: I’m doing a sort of capstone project. It’s a little overwhelming but has really come together in the last couple of weeks, so I’m getting excited. I’ve done this kind of program twice before and in both of those programs, I’ve written projects musically and recorded them as evidence of my work. But in this case, I’m taking a lot of material that I’ve written over my time at Evergreen and I’m focusing on recording. I’m also doing an internship right now at a recording studio in my hometown. So I’m actually getting to record in a really cool space.
avery: It’s really interesting that you are, it seems, mainly following this musical path. I think your visual art is really amazing, but I’d love to know about any of your artistic processes.
pearl: I’ve been making music for a really long time. I was a really musical kid, always in choir, and I learned to play guitar really young. I started writing songs at like 12, recording at 14 and I’ve been recording myself since I was 18 or so. But then in the last couple of years, I’ve started to devote more of my time to visual art. When I first got to college and started exploring visual art more I realized that, yeah, I want to keep making music forever, but it’s a really hard thing to make a career out of, because I’m a really anxious person. I just don’t love the idea of being successful in that particular way. I like my privacy and my cozy home life. I want to keep making music but I realized that visual art is something that I am really comfortable spending a lot of my time on, and really happy spending time on. I’ve been going down a path of pursuing that as a career rather than music, even though I’m still equally passionate about music. I just don’t want to put a lot of pressure on myself to make it, if that makes sense.
avery: I think that makes a lot of sense. It’s really interesting to see the different ways artists use other art forms or multiple art forms to create a practice that supports their livelihood.
pearl: Yeah. I mean, my music is really personal to me. It’s something that I write for myself and I record because I want to have a thing to hold in my hands, basically. But visual art is something that I feel way more comfortable making for other people. Before I turned 18, I started to get really into self-taught tattoo culture. That was honestly what opened me up to making art more consistently. I got and gave my first stick and poke tattoo at 17. My friend and I traded. Then I got my first shop tattoo at 18. As a college music student I was so busy studying that I didn’t have time for a full-time job or anything. So I couldn’t afford to get tattooed as often as I wanted and my way around that was learning how to do it myself. I practiced on my leg and on fruit. I’ve taken a little bit of a step back from it because I realized I would like to learn properly. But I mostly have been focusing my energy on designing tattoos for myself and other people, which has been really fun. I’m trying to sort of build a portfolio, it’s something I would definitely like to pursue.
avery: I’m wondering about how your style has changed over the last few years and what influences your visual work.
pearl: I’ve been building my style for a long time. I’ve always really liked drawing but I didn’t put a whole lot of serious effort into it until high school and college. But in middle school I started off drawing anime characters because I was like, super into anime. And then when I sort of got out of that I thought I should try and draw more realistic things. So in high school I got into trying to do hyperrealism and portraits. Then I realized that’s just like, not what I want to do with art. And so I sort of found a blend between realism and cartoon, because I’m really into cartoons, I love children’s television, and that’s where I get a lot of my color inspiration. I’m super into fun bubbly cartoons even though I’m actually a pretty moody person. I just like to slap a lot of pretty colors on my moodiness.
avery: That definitely translates. A lot of feeling.
pearl: Yeah. I was told by someone once, when I was first getting into painting portraits because I started doing watercolors in college, which is where I really got into art. I was doing a lot of watercolors and I was just trying to find my style doing a lot of really similar portraits. And someone was like, you’re just drawing yourself over and over. And I was like, oh, that is a little bit like me. And I think being being a plus size, AFAB non-binary person, I don’t see myself represented very much. Especially because even though I am non-binary, I’m pretty femme presenting, and so I just felt like there was something a little missing from the styles of art that I was encountering. I love looking at other artists’ work, but I was feeling like, well there’s not a lot of fat people here. Like, can you draw literally anyone who’s above a size six? Please?
avery: I really like the piece you have with the different sizes of the hands. I also appreciate the claiming of non-binary, regardless of presentation. That’s part of what drew me to your work. It’s just the weirdness of it as a standalone, not in relation to a norm, if that makes sense. Weird in the best possible way.
pearl: Yeah, I wasn’t necessarily trying to make it weird, but I was trying to make it myself. Weird is a way I would describe my art just because I couldn’t find exactly what I wanted. So I made it. It did a lot for my self esteem and my body image doing self portraits and portraits of other plus-size people and variously sized people. Then I started playing with proportions, stretching things in weird ways and making things fun and less realistic. And [as] I started to feel more comfortable about that, the more comfortable I felt about the image of a plus-sized person in relation to myself. Because I felt weird about distorting proportions at first. I was like, well, people are gonna say, “that’s not what you look like,” “that’s not what people like you look like.” But no, I started playing with it. And then that big hands piece that you were talking about is one of my favorites. I did that after watching an opera in class. I’m trying to remember the name of the director, and it’s not coming to me off the top of my head. But it was a production of Oedipus Rex and all of the main characters had these huge, paper mache hands. They were so expressive and every character had a different set of hands that had different shapes and poses.
avery: What was interesting about that for you?
pearl: I mean, there were a lot of directions you could go with it. Like theoretically, there was a lot of, like, hands-reaching-out-to-God imagery. But at the same time the opera itself is pretty perverse. There was a lot of reaching and longing with the hands. And they were so expressive, so much emotion in them. I kind of wanted to make them more apathetic, to take away the relation from other people. Because they were always reaching for something or gesturing to something. They’re always in relation to something. And I wanted them to be in relation to a self, if that makes sense. Selfish has a negative connotation. But like, the personal—the act of hanging out with yourself in your underwear and smoking. It’s so singular. And so intimate.
avery: Reclaiming selfishness is a really interesting part of that piece.
pearl: Yeah. I feel like it took an upsetting amount of time for me to get comfortable taking time to myself. It’s a weird thing to grapple with when you’re in a pandemic. I had just gotten comfortable hanging out by myself and then I was forced to be by myself for like, too much time. And now I’m almost never by myself because my partner and I are living together. I was used to doing all of my creating completely by myself. I would write music by myself, I would practice music by myself, and I would draw and paint by myself. Then [I realized] that I do it in a different way when I’m around other people, which is not necessarily better or worse, I feel a little more open. And sometimes it brings out a more fun side of art for me than the moody, alone side. It’s interesting. I definitely noticed that I make art differently in different situations. And from a music standpoint I was so used to not just playing shows, but going to shows and being a part of a community in that way. There’s so many barriers between then and now, which is really disheartening and has definitely been a void. But I started interning at a recording studio in, I think, late February, early March. And working there has brought so much back into my life because it’s such a collaborative environment. I get to see so many people creating and it’s a really different side of it for me because I only ever recorded myself. It’s really interesting to see other people making music, especially in bands, because when I do play with bands, it’s things that I’ve written by myself and that I already have all my ideas for, and they just helped me achieve it. But a lot of the bands that come to the studio are totally collaborative and they’re really working together the whole time. There are so many perspectives being put together to make one piece of music, it’s really incredible.
avery: Where is your internship?
pearl: It’s the Anacortes Unknown Studio. It’s a really beautiful space. I’m working with the engineer there, Nich Wilbur. He’s teaching me a lot, I’ve been working with him as my supervisor and observing him. There’s so much really cool equipment there and so many instruments that I’ve never had the chance to play before. I haven’t worked with other people to make a piece of recorded music since I was 16. So it has been really great just to play music with other people again after a year of not being able to do it. I’m really thankful that the people that I’m working with are all vaccinated and we can actually play together in the same room.
avery: Thematically, what are your influences?
pearl: I have always listened to a pretty wide variety of music, and being a music student, it has gotten even wider. So sometimes my music ends up a little all over the place. Like on this project that I’m recording now, there’s one song that’s like, borderline punk, one that’s indie folk and acoustic, but there’s enough stuff in between them that they sort of mesh eventually. I write almost everything acoustically so everything starts like, acoustic singer songwriter kind of stuff. I’m into really melodic music. So I love a lot of moving melodic lines and really physical harmonies, because I like it when you can feel the harmonies buzzing in your ears. I love Joni Mitchell, who I didn’t get into until someone told me that I reminded them of her. So I started listening to Joni Mitchell two years ago, and I literally for an entire summer didn’t listen to anything else. She talks about how she considered herself a painter who ended up a musician. And I feel like I’m ending up the opposite. But she talked a lot about how she thinks of her songs as sound paintings, which I resonate with a lot, because I think that sound has color, and it’s important to match them correctly in a song. In the last few years, I’ve taken a lot more inspiration from nature and I’ve incorporated some soundscape kind of stuff into my regular music. So it’s like pop music, but with birds chirping in the background. I started making music because I love singing. As soon as I could talk I was singing. I was humming before that. And so vocally and melodically driven music has always been what I’ve made. I also love writing lyrics. I love the interdisciplinary mode; I’m an Evergreen student.
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