Rebecca Chamberlain on Fine Art, Fashion + Finding Hope
The Peak talks to THE award-winning fine artist, fashion designer, and partner in Clementine Vintage about finding hope + calm while making art and doing business in a pandemic.
Artist Rebecca Chamberlain works broadly across disciplines—fine art, fashion, and performance. Her paintings and drawings consider the boundaries of public and private spaces and the psychological and physical impact of architecture. Calling attention to design and its effect on the way we experience the spaces in which we live, her work underscores the essential human need for physical safety and spiritual refuge.
Rebecca Chamberlain (R) with Clementine partner Misha Mayers.
She is the recipient of many grants and fellowships, including a residency at Het Vijfde Seizoen (an artist residence program at a psychiatric hospital in the Netherlands), where her hauntingly beautiful renderings of the property and buildings tell the stories of the rooms and their inhabitants, the patients. Reviewed in the New York Times, ArtForum, etc., and exhibited around the world, Rebecca is also an award-winning fashion designer.
Recently, she became a partner with Misha Mayers in Clementine Vintage, a carefully curated collection in Andes, New York, a quiet corner of the world and a refuge in its own right. This summer, they launched a new line of recycled fashion, Clementine Regenerated. A big success, the first drop is almost gone but a new collection is arriving soon.
Is there any cross pollination between your work in fine art and fashion? I think any cross pollination between the two is maybe only evident to me, and it's a stylistic one. Because my artwork focuses on the interwar period of architecture at its core, it's aesthetically notable. You can tell that era of architecture. But there is also a lot of anonymity to it. There are these clean, sterile, void spaces that, for me, have become kind of empty canvases in and of themselves.
When I look at fashion—especially now that I’m curating clothing for the store—I see that there's the same need for me to find austere and simple pieces, something that someone else can put their imprint on.
It's a bit of a fraught question because you have to do so much messaging in this world and people prefer to pigeonhole you. So, it's always been difficult for me to explain that I work in both worlds, fine art and fashion. I've been doing both fairly equally throughout the years, and success and intensity of work has risen and fallen in both areas, over time. I wonder if the two worlds will ever really collide and they haven't totally, yet.
White City, Green Hovevei Zion Street, Hutt, 1935
Where does your interest in architecture come from? As a kid, I was drawn to movies of the 1930s. In those films, there was always something about the spaces that drew me in. The only corporate position I ever held was with the Gap in the late 90s. I was the men's knits designer there. As I started to understand the company structure, I became more and more frustrated and I needed to find a way to make it work for me, to make something other than travel come from the job. I utilised simple office materials like the xerox machines, feeding my own vellum through the feeders. I began emptying out the ink from the ballpoint pens and painted with it. I found paper that had originally been developed as an architectural drafting material—it came on rolls—and it resonated with me like fabric. I was studying at the time at the New School, studying the history of 20th century fashion. I wrote a paper about women in the workplace in the thirties, and their roles with men. Some of it related to stuff I was going through in the office at the time, and some of it was about that era, in general. There were a lot of firsts then, as far as relationships between men and women. The pieces that I started making first were images of women in offices, using the ballpoint ink as paint on drafting material.
Then, I did one painting of a reception desk. It seemed like a fraught idea to me—this reception desk and the woman who was most definitely going to be sitting at it, working for the executive in the office behind her. As soon as I saw the piece, though, it became so much more to me without the figure in it. That was it. I never went back. My work grew to include all sorts of spaces—and their stories.
Your artwork has been described as “meditations on dwelling and being,” and during our long COVID-19 quarantine, our lives have changed. Dwelling and being has taken on new meaning. What has it been like for you? My husband [artist Guy Richards Smit]and I and our two boys left the city for our house upstate where we felt safe and, for many reasons, where we could afford to be during that time. There were fewer people, the boys could get outside. Early on, there was this feeling, amongst the four of us, that we were living life in five-minute increments—in very present, momentary acts. Cooking has always been central for us, but it became really present those days. We started baking cakes and that sugar intake kind of saved me early on.
My friend and neighbor, Cecily Rush, was sewing masks for the nurses at Bassett Medical Center. She had developed a shape and fabric combination that worked. By then, I had already organized every closet possible, so I began sewing masks with her. We became a kind of assembly line with many other Delaware County residents. It felt purposeful, involved, and it got me sewing again. Then, Misha Mayers at Clementine Vintage (@clementinevintageclothing) asked me if I wanted to partner with her in the business and I didn’t even think twice. At that point, I’d lost my fashion clients, and the idea of regenerating the life of existing garments and being more involved with my community felt auspicious.
Video by Beautiful Distress
Everything about this business seems like the right thing for me to be doing right now. I'm sewing all the time and it feels really good to make things three-dimensionally again.
On the painting front, in early quarantine days, I needed to feel some connection with others, and I needed almost an assignment for painting. So, I asked people on Instagram the same question that I’d asked patients at a mental health facility in the Netherlands where I’d stayed years earlier as part of a two-month long art residency. “Take me to a place that gives you a sense of hope or calm.”
And people began sending me images, descriptions and links to spaces that they knew might resonate with me, places that really resonated with them and made them feel secure. And that's where I went next. I called the series “Hope and Calm.”
On the Peak, we talk about art and commerce, where the two meet and how artists and entrepreneurs leverage the web to help them do their work. How do you do it? I joined an online movement called the Artist Support Pledge. It was started by an English artist, Matthew Burrows. A lovely program, it kind of saved me for some time. The pledge involves artists around the world making work they’re willing to sell for $200 (or £200, €200, ¥20000). We post to Instagram, tag @artistsupportpledge, and after every five pieces we sell, we pledge to buy someone else’s work for $200. It all started because Matthew understood what was going to happen to artists due to the pandemic—that galleries may go down fairly quickly, and artists would need support, some kind of infrastructure.
Clementine Vintage Clothing
I had only sold work before through galleries, with someone else managing sales. I hadn't done e-commerce on that level before and it was very effective.
For Clementine, a friend who used to be head of operations for Art Basel suggested that we post a “Look of the Day” and offer a certain percentage off for the whole look. It’s fun for Clementine to interact with people in that way, and we reach more people than the shoppers who might happen to walk into our brick and mortar. I also worked on our e-commerce site and launched it in May 2021: www.clementinevintage.com.
With both fine art and fashion, is your approach purely artistic or are commercial considerations taken into account during your process? It's like you're that person, that beachcomber with the magnet device, walking along the sand trying to, you know, find all the things that are aesthetically true to you and your value system. And what you want to talk about in the world. After all of it comes together, then there’s marketing and finding your audience. The image or design comes first for me, always. Then I love thinking about the commerce part of it. I do find it really fun and creative. It's all fascinating to me.
What is fascinating? At Clementine, the back and forth with customers feels really good. I love being shopkeep in the store. I’ve learned so much about what people are looking for.
Being in the store has really taught me a lot about how to stay true to the community, and grow a business, but do it delicately. Because there are so many new businesses in Andes right now, we’ve started something called ABBA, the Andes Bovina Business Association, to get all the businesses talking with each other, meeting each other, and joining forces a bit more.
One solution that we've come up with at Clementine is to partner with other brick and mortar stores. We have two partnerships so far. I'm hoping to develop some more. It’s fun because I'm curating specifically for those stores and Clementine Vintage becomes like another label within another store’s brand. We’re in M. Patmos on Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn—Marcia and I went to RISD together and designed her M.Patmos line for a few years. The other store is K A I G H T in Beacon.
From Clementine Vintage Clothing
Does the back and forth between city and country affect your art in any way? Well, in the city I can get to museums and they are empty now, so I can really see shows early and in depth. I’ve been getting to galleries with more regularity than I had been for years. So, that's been great. I am newly in love with New York City. But, then when we go back upstate, there’s that love that's just so deep—and the kids just wish we would stay in one place.
Do you envision other ways in which the web can help you more? I have been intrigued with the way that certain fashion shows have remade themselves digitally. I think there's a lot more creativity going into how we present clothing to people.
The great thing about putting the Clementine site together is that I understand the bones of it. I feel like I'm learning something through this process, and I'll continue to learn more about how to reach people. Every time I get LTL MTN’s emails, I sense this real sincerity that is such a desirable quality. It always pulls me in. How do people have genuine interactions on the web when promoting a product? I'm still navigating what that means.
For more on Rebecca Chamberlain and all of her creative endeavors, visit rebecca-chamberlain.com and clementinevintageclothing.com