Dylan Cale Jones: My name is Dylan Cale Jones,
Isa Rodriguez: and I'm Isa Rodriguez, and this is Practice Practice.
Dylan Cale Jones: And today we are interviewing Martha Coates Donahoo. Martha, will you please introduce yourself to our listeners and tell them a little bit about who you are?
Martha Coates Donahoo: Hello, hello. I'm Martha and I am primarily, at this point in my career, a textile artist, although I've worked with many different mediums in my life.
Isa Rodriguez: How long have you been a textile artist?
Martha Coates Donahoo: I have worked with textiles since I was a child. My mom is a seamstress designer and growing up she had an interior design sewing workroom. And she worked with a few different designers in our area who would design kind of whole house setups and my mom would get the fabric and make everything from drapery to slip covers to tablecloths and everything.
So I grew up around sewing machines. I grew up around scraps and I grew up around like raw materials, which really allowed me to start digging into making stuff at a young age.
Isa Rodriguez: Did she make things for the house that y'all lived in too?
Martha Coates Donahoo: Oh, yeah, she did. So not only did she have the interior design sewing workroom, but my mom always had this side project she called "Multiple Threads" where she, would buy vintage wool sweaters and denim and she would cut them up and make like little jackets and little dresses and stuff. But she would also recover our furniture with these kind of like zany textile...
Isa Rodriguez: Oh, cool. Like combo sort of...
Martha Coates Donahoo: Yeah. We had a old slipper chair that she found at Goodwill and she cut up a bunch of jeans and covered it and had some linen leftover from a slip cover so it was this like weird denim chair with pockets all over it and had like a linen skirt around the bottom. It was awesome.
Dylan Cale Jones: That's really cool. I grew up in a household where we bought a lot of mass produced things. And I always wanted to learn how to make things on my own when I was really young. So to me that like sounds really cool to be able to see that in action. And to me as an adult now, that's something that's really important to me. I love to make the things that I live with and interact with every day and understand how they're made .
Yeah.
Martha Coates Donahoo: Isn't it especially satisfying when it's the objects of daily use that are also your art practice? It's really really...
Dylan Cale Jones: Yeah!
Martha Coates Donahoo: Deeply satisfying.
Isa Rodriguez: Yeah. So tell us a little bit more about what creativity was like for you as a child, like some of your, your personal experiences and also your influences.
Martha Coates Donahoo: My mom was a single mom, three kids. This is before she had her sewing workroom. She was manager at a deli and a bakery. So we didn't always have art in the house.
But some years later my mom remarried, and she married somebody who was really into culture and he wanted us to learn about culture and he was really into like us learning musical instrument, playing a sport, doing some community involved art and stuff like that.
So he kind of uncovered a hidden desire in me to perform and he was like, "You can totally do that!" And I was like, 'Oh, like I could be on stage. I could dance. I could sing like wear a cool costume.' So I started doing Spanish classical guitar. I started doing theater.
And at the same time my mom was developing her sewing business. My mom had a sewing studio above the garage and you had to like pull down the attic stairs and it was super steep. So there was like this cool juxtaposition of me going out in the community and learning all of these skilled art practices. But then like, on the other hand, my mom's pulling down the attic stairs and going up into her zone to like create alone.
So those two worlds really continued to spin and grow in their own right and have really different positions in my life because my stepdad is like, really perfectionist. He has really traditional views on what high art is or what matters and what doesn't matter.
Isa Rodriguez: Yeah, it's not it sounds like maybe like what's good enough Like what's a real art?
Martha Coates Donahoo: Yeah, real art. Real art.
And the word "culture" was like what he would throw around like, "You need to be cultured." And he wanted us to understand classical art and classical literature and all of that stuff. Which is cool and great but like there's so many ways to access meaning and beauty and interest and layers and nuance. He believed everything had to be done to a certain standard or it wasn't really valid.
Isa Rodriguez: Yeah. That sounds like a lot of pressure to put on a young creative person.
Martha Coates Donahoo: On a seven year old. Yeah. I think one way that is really beautiful that humans learn is that we reiterate,we see something that we love and we repeat it, especially as children, that's like a really beautiful thing to do.
And I think, not only in my household, but in general, in culture, in America at this moment, we have to like strike out and be like the only one who's ever said, written, painted, done, you know, it has to like really be new. And that ideal was drilled into me.
I remember really liking this sketchy, colored pencil, CD cover on,Sinead O'Connor's album that came out in '97 or whatever: "Universal Mother". And as a kid, I was like, that's so cool.
So like I made my own version and I was like really, really proud of it. Like I loved it. And I took it to my stepdad and he's like, "But that's just a copy." and I was like, "Wait, what?" Really, like really crushed and I didn't understand Why like a repetition made of, in love and passion, like why that wasn't included in making something.
Isa Rodriguez: But I think that you're right, that remaking something is really an important way to learn. It's also how people have learned for thousands of years. Like, say, there's a way that we make a certain vessel, and I teach you how to make it, and you teach someone else how to make it, and we're all making it because we know this is what works.
Martha Coates Donahoo: There's a lineage.
Isa Rodriguez: Yeah. And it develops the idea and the technology.
Martha Coates Donahoo: This, this, this discussion that's burbled up really underscores why I do what I do today, which is that I consider myself a folk artist. And I think a folk artist,doesn't necessarily take ownership for their own ideas or the work of their hands. That everything we do is a community endeavor. Like, if you think about an old song, like a really old song, a song written before the 1900s, like a true folk ballad who wrote it? Nobody knows.
No one wrote it. Right.
Isa Rodriguez: Like every, everyone wrote it. Right?
Martha Coates Donahoo: It's like a ball of snow rolling down a hill. Anybody who sings it adds a line or subtracts a line. They sing it to the neighbor. The neighbor learns the song. They cut it in half and add half of another folk story. You just get a million iterations and each one is perfect and each one is interesting and each one is so human.
So I'm really interested in making things that continue to roll down the hill.
Most of the people who buy my stuff are also artists and makers. And I'm sure that at some point it's going to rip. They're going to cut it off. They're going to make a shirt out of it. They're going to re-hem it. They're going to re-dye it. It's going to keep going and it doesn't need to be mine, always mine. It doesn't need to stop.
Dylan Cale Jones: Yeah. When you were talking about your stepdad and his definition of culture.What I think of when I think of culture are like the things that people share and build together in community.
That definition is really expansive, right? It needs to include these other versions of sharing things and taking them apart and things that we can make without having to claim ownership over them for them to have value.
Isa Rodriguez: Yeah. So tell us a little bit more about your practice right now.
Martha Coates Donahoo: I have a clothing company called Hag and Company. And what I primarily do is I go to places where donated fabrics are having their last moment before they go to the waste.
So I go to like the Goodwill bins and I'll buy tons of bedsheets primarily, or like whatever is enough fabric that I could cut and make something out of. That also includes doilies and hankies and anything that anybody embroidered by hand I'm like snatching out. I don't want that to go to the trash.
Like that just feels really like energetically valuable.
And I drag it back to my studio and then I try to imagine what I can make using the most of it and like try not to throw anything away. Like, how can I use all of this? And what else can this be?
Isa Rodriguez: I know that your work is also really influenced by historical textile practices.
Martha Coates Donahoo: Yeah, so something I really, really like to think about is how valuable textiles have been historically. And when we think about what has been important over time, like what we learn in school, we learn about wars and politicians.
But textiles influenced all of that as well. Textiles were so valuable that people would kind of like do anything to secure the best textile industry.
Isa Rodriguez: Colonization, right? Like a lot of that was about dyes. Like when I think about the, colonization of Mexico, a lot of it had to do with the cochineal dye, right? And finding this thing that made this red, right?
And then we can think about things that almost everyone knows about, but it's not really explained what it is like the silk road, right? So it's like, that's actually named for the textile trade.
Martha Coates Donahoo: And workers rights, right? Like a lot of workers rights movements start in places like the textile industry.
Absolutely.
Um, but how that lives in my work is that maybe I look at the cloth with the eyes of an ancestor or something. And I think about how people treated cloth in the past and the kinds of clothing shapes that were made because of the value of cloth. So I try to make those same clothing shapes. And what I mean by that is that garments were cut out of whole cloth. Cloth was so valuable that you wouldn't want to cut shapes that left a circle out where you'd cut a hole for the neck. You don't want to cut things that leave waste bits. So for most of time people's clothing was made in the shape of their loom Like however wide your loom was and whatever kind of cloth you used in your community informed the way you made clothing.
The folk garments that people still wear, all over the world is still based on those ideas, even though people have used modern fabrics since industrialization, they're still making those same shapes, which is really interesting to me and really beautiful.
So in a gesture of like respect, to the laborers of the past who provided the labor upon which we still stand I make those shapes.
Dylan Cale Jones: Yeah. And it seems like part of what you're saying, is your appreciation for fabric and textile is in part the appreciation of the physical material, but also the appreciation of the humans who use their time and labor to make that physical material and the intersection of those two things.
Martha Coates Donahoo: Yeah. in the past and the present. Like how many factory workers are behind every thread we touch and that labor is also extremely valuable to me.
Dylan Cale Jones: Uh, you, you've also mentioned being a working artist in other times of your life. Have you always worked with textiles or have there been other media or ways of working that you've practiced?
Martha Coates Donahoo: Yeah. So actually growing up working in the textile industry with my mom really turned me off from working as a seamstress I was like, I'm not going to be seamstress because my mom really struggled to survive. She continues to really struggle to make enough money to survive. She eventually quit doing the interior design sewing workroom and only made her art clothes.
I really liked doing the exact same thing, but different. But what else did I do? I started a weird dance company with my friend, Adrian. And like,
not a way to survive, but like that, you know, I, I went from like passion to passion.
I did trapeze and and clowning and miming. And that was like in my early 20s. And then I was like, okay, I'm gonna really go to circus school but then I, I startedgetting a repeat shoulder injury and I was like, okay, I have to take this like physical interest in physical storytelling and move it somewhere else.
So I started dancing and then I went to Mills College and I studied dance and writing and electronic music. And I also went to work with this woman called Maggie Payne, who is one of the original experimental electronic musicians from back in the day. And so I learned how to play an antique cabinet Moog, like one of the original Moogs. It's like a cool. It's like you're a switchboard operator.
So that was a really, really magical period in my life where I had put the sewing machine down and I was like really experiencing these other avenues expressing like my eternal questions and curiosities. And even though my interests kind of stay the same, when you are using a different media, the question changes just because of what's in your hands.
Isa Rodriguez: Okay. Yeah. And what brought you back to fiber?
Martha Coates Donahoo: Well, there's, it's sort of a sad story. It is a really sad story, actually. I lived in Oakland, for a million years. And all my friends were musicians and performers and everybody had a punk band. Everybody. It was really beautiful because we shared big, awful houses with terrible, rotten plumbing and
we supported each other in being able to make free art for each other. And that was the whole point. Like nobody was trying to get really good or like get somewhere...
Isa Rodriguez: Like sort of the opposite of that pressure from childhood, right? Yeah.
Martha Coates Donahoo: We were just like, "This is for you, Bob." Come over to my house tomorrow, there's going to be 40 people and it's going to be the best thing ever. You know, I'm just like, I'll sing to you if you sing to me. Like, yeah, that like freed me from all of that BS from my childhood. And not that I ever really believed in that very hard. It didn't really like scar me or anything. I like, I was like, "Yeah, yeah, yeah." But I pretty easily found my way into a scene that was just really for the experience, which is why I probably still am an artist.
Because for me, creating space where we focus on accessing each other and accessing community that's the whole thing. And that like really kept me going even when I was like, so, so poor and hungry.
And this was before social media so if you wanted to know what somebody was singing in their bedroom, you had to go to their bedroom.
Isa Rodriguez: Yeah. Yeah. I mean that sounds great.
Martha Coates Donahoo: Yeah. So.
Isa Rodriguez: And so then what happened when you were there?
Martha Coates Donahoo: So everybody was always at the same show and there was a big show at a warehouse and the warehouse caught fire and burned down.
Isa Rodriguez: Oh, wow.
Martha Coates Donahoo: And many, many people died. And it was like a real, like a huge group tragedy. We were like this huge interconnected community. And it just stopped. Everything stopped. It was like this extended silence unrolling from where there was all of this bustling. And then lots of buddies moved up north, lots of buddies moved down south. Our circle just like crumbled.
Isa Rodriguez: Well, that really makes sense. Yeah. Yeah. Well, that sounds awful. That sounds really hard.
Martha Coates Donahoo: So I moved to LA. I was like, I'll go get a job and make some money.
So I lived in like a tiny efficiency apartment and worked my butt off and I was doing all kinds of shitty work, but like, uh, just to keep it PC, I was a set dresser, um, on small film sets. Uh,
Isa Rodriguez: Okay. Yeah.
Martha Coates Donahoo: And, um, So I made a fair day wage, but it sucked and I was driving all the time. And all my friends have sort of like spun away from me. So like all of the things that we did, everything we did was together. So like I didn't have a singular practice that was only me.
Dylan Cale Jones: Yeah.
Martha Coates Donahoo: So I hated LA. And so my partner and I moved here to Oklahoma, which is where he had gone to college. He actually had a difficult youth and ran away as like a 17 year old lesbian, you know, after family was like, "You're crazy, get out!" So he came here, he transitioned, he finished high school, he put himself through college and met such an amazing tender community. And just always had like a really big soft spot in his heart for Oklahoma City. So yeah, we moved here from LA.
And...
Isa Rodriguez: it's really nice to hear Oklahoma City framed as like a refuge for a Queer person.
Martha Coates Donahoo: And it really was! Like you'd think, being in like the San Francisco Bay area, that we'd have all the lesbian bars and all this, like there's no lesbian bars in California. And that's when my partner Ryan was like, "Oh, there's two or three lesbian bars in Oklahoma city. And I know of one in, uh, Dallas too."
So the first time I came here was on a lesbian bar tour and I was like, "It's great here!"
Isa Rodriguez: You came out to Oklahoma and how do you like it?
Martha Coates Donahoo: Well, we really like the space that we've created for ourselves and in our community.
It's great to be here. And it really allowed me to stop freaking out about financial security because we were able to feel secure. And it really opened me back up to trying a whole new art project, which is the Hag and Company, which is what I'm doing now.
Isa Rodriguez: We found a similar situation when we came. It was a lot easier to explore our ideas as creative people and to try new projects and to start things because there wasn't the constant financial pressure that we experienced when we lived in Chicago where rent is high and it is expensive to find food.
Dylan Cale Jones: Martha, what does it look like for you to make a living as a textile artist? For people who are listening who might be curious about what it means to be a working artist and make a living, like, what is that like?
Martha Coates Donahoo: Working as a textile artist is a fabulous way for me to make art because it's something that people can use. It's easier to sell than a painting that takes you six months or an album that takes you a year to write or whatever it is.
And I started this project at the beginning of the pandemic. And so social media became a part of my life for the first time but it was a time when everybody was really relying on social media to stay connected.
So it was actually kind of this really incredible unforeseen boon that I moved to a quiet place, got reconnected with my desire to make, and then had this opportunity to connect to a different range of people than I had ever thought about connecting with. So that really changed the way that I perceived who I was speaking to as an artist and who I was speaking with and finally enabled me to find some kind of like financial stability with my work.
But it has also turned my art practice into a work practice. Especially if you start selling something and people are like, I really like this X, Y, Z that you make. And then you're like, "Oh, I have to survive. I want to make money. I want to eat food. I'll make X, Y, Z."
Isa Rodriguez: Uh huh, they really like the yellow ones.
Martha Coates Donahoo: Yeah. Or like, I feel like I have to do that.
So I really have to like tug of war with myself as far as like my business mind and my creative mind. But that's ended up being pretty fun and satisfying and has allowed me to like incorporate a lot of new structures into my artwork, which I didn't have before. And structure has like saved the day.
Isa Rodriguez: So what does a typical day look like for you?
Martha Coates Donahoo: Well, because I have a three year old, I work from home and I don't have a typical day. Because you can't really sit down and have like a structured workflow time when you're parenting a three year old.
So I have to like bar the door. It's not necessarily like a compatible thing. I mean, it is because I'm fortunate to have the support to take that time. but they don't like go together.
I'll find time to be like, okay, sneaking off into the studio and closing the door. I'm really going to get some focus. So that aspect is, is very difficult. It just takes a lot of gumption to like gather yourself and refocus. You just don't have time to get into a flow and it's really hard to functionally complete things if you don't have time to get into the flow state.
Dylan Cale Jones: You mentioned support. What kind of support are you receiving that allows you to sometimes bar the door or get into that flow state?
Martha Coates Donahoo: Yeah. It's just my partner, really. We both work from home, but my partner has like a serious worky work job, which is, you know, nine to five. So then during the nine to five job, I'm on the house duties and the kid duties. And then when he's done with work, then it's like we swap, but you know, at the end of a work week, we're like all exhausted by the time the workday is done.
So...
Isa Rodriguez: Yeah, there's still only so much energy.
Martha Coates Donahoo: There's still only so much. And so I work on the weekends, but I think that'll change a lot when my daughter starts going to school. Then I'll start to have like a real work week. Cause I'm really, really excited about what that will mean for my practice and opening avenues to not being financially productive all the time, because I think that that's a real creativity killer.
And it's kind of a sad way to approach. It's not really how I want to approach my work. Is this financially viable?
Isa Rodriguez: It's like a necessary question.
Martha Coates Donahoo: Right.
Dylan Cale Jones: Well, and your work is addressing all of these other needs that you're thinking about too, right? Like you're thinking about the need to acknowledge the value of material and to acknowledge the kind of what I think of as sacredness of other people's labor.
Isa Rodriguez: And bodies, right? Like since, since your work is for people's bodies, it also is sort of about the value of the body or like the comfort of the body. Yeah.
Dylan Cale Jones: And the culture that we live in, both in capitalist culture and consumerist culture are constantly undercutting those things. And so I imagine it can be hard to find financial viability and also turn your attention to these things whose value you're trying to draw attention to.
Martha Coates Donahoo: Yeah. So I think I just have to acknowledge my enormous privilege in being able to say this, but, what I've decided to do to maintain my focus is to say okay, I'm going to try and make this much money a month. And if I hit that goal, I'm gonna then focus on my real work, which is to think deeper about something, you know. But I think a lot about how we can't afford our own time in a capitalist society. Like I can't afford to sew for myself. That's a really interesting thing. I sew for a living. I can't afford my own sewing. I can't afford to read a book.
Like if I only have three hours a day in which I could be productive outside of like my child rearing stuff, then it's like, you want to go for a run, you want to make sauerkraut, you want to go to a ceramics class, just whatever nice little things you would do. But you also like, want to make something really cool, or like ask an interesting question.
So these things have a cost. Especially if I'm trying to work and support my family, those three hours should be spent working, you know? And so anytime that I divert my attention from making something that I can sell , that I know I can sell, it costs me the price of that object. So I'm like losing 50 bucks every time I sit down to read a book or something.
So I have to get like really tricky with the way I think about value and money.
Isa Rodriguez: Well, and I know that teaching is part of your creative practice, right? Like there's the making of physical things and then selling the physical things, but then there's also allowing your knowledge to pay you in a way.
Martha Coates Donahoo: Yeah. And that's actually a really new part of my work and I'm adoring teaching. I was invited by the Vesterheim Norwegian Folk Museum, in Iowa, to teach a stay making workshop.
It was a really beautiful project. I researched traditional Norwegian stays from the same time era that I normally make my patterns from . And I made a pattern just for them.
So that was really, really nice. And then I was like, oh, I could teach somewhere else. So yeah, so been looking into other folk schools and teaching online, but most notably I'm teaching here in town at the Oklahoma Contemporary Studio School, which has been an amazing home for me to play in over the couple of years that I've lived in Oklahoma City, and I've enjoyed it enormously.
Isa Rodriguez: Yeah, we both teach there as well and just love it.
Like love the studio culture, love the classroom culture there. I think that the studio schools are really amazing community and gathering place for artists here in Oklahoma City.
Dylan Cale Jones: Yeah. And one of the things that I love about it that we've been talking about too, is the lack of emphasis on perfectionism in that space.
Like there's a whole spectrum of what people might call skill levels and any like pressure to quote "get better" at something is all like internally motivated. There's nobody there being like, "This sucks!" or "You get an A and you get an F!"
Right? It's like, just come in and whatever you're bringing with you, that's fine.
Martha Coates Donahoo: Yeah. There's no shame waiting around the corner.
Isa Rodriguez: I'd like to switch gears a little bit and ask if there's anything changing in your practice right now. What's going on that's mysterious and unknown?
Martha Coates Donahoo: I'm actually trying to take a really big turn in my work.
And again, this is linked to the only making things that are financially viable conversation, but I really want to move away from production work. My heart keeps calling my attention to certain things like the same kinds of things over the years that I'll keep wanting to like spend a really long time looking at or reading about or thinking about.
So one of the things that I'm thinking about is land projects and how place informs our lives in these like really discreet ways that we may not notice, but they are so impactful. And again, like my ruminating on folk culture, and folk narratives, and folk songs, and inherited practices, and how linked they are to space and place and how much who we are and what we are are so shaped by the place we live.
So something that I'm really interested in, creating is some kind of space. But now looking at it through the lens of textiles and, and also through agriculture. I'd like to think about how land cultivation and like cultivation of culture, and cultivation of self are linked together.
Do you see any opportunities for you to have a place-based practice in Oklahoma City?
Yeah, absolutely. So one of the projects that I'm working on this year, there's a gentleman named Benjamin Birdwell who bought a little farm just on the edge of town here in Oklahoma City. And he is allowing me, so graciously, to grow some flax on his property. And so what I'm going to do is I'm going to grow a field of flax. Some textile scholars have posited that maybe it takes, um, 40 foot by 40 foot square yard of flax to grow one shirt. So I'm going to grow a shirt this year.
But then another scholar says that maybe it takes four years to make a shirt from seed to putting the garment on your body. So I'm really curious about this. And again, I'm really curious about industrialization and use and what labor means. I love all this stuff.
Those numbers sound very biblical. Yeah. which is why I was laughing 40 and 40 and four.
Yeah, maybe.
Dylan Cale Jones: Wow.
Martha Coates Donahoo: That's really funny.
Dylan Cale Jones: That sounds really exciting. It also sounds like a space that could potentially be activated in other ways, like interacting with the plants as they're growing in different ways and even thinking about this kind of like square parcel of land, like a frame or a stage or something like that. I don't know.
Martha Coates Donahoo: Yeah, I like that. It is a little stage for the flax to dance on. I like that. I'm interested in the flax dance very, very much. But another thing that it, it does is that it allows me to bring people physically into my practice because it is close to town and I am cultivating relationship with the Studio School and other artists here that I can bring people out to the flax field and they can crush the flax.
There's all these like. Really tedious ways of turning the woody stalk into thread and a lot of it, most of it, happens in the field.
You ret the fiber. You have to like bundle up and leave it in the rain for it to like rot for a little while and then you have to dry it again and then you have to break it.
So then you're standing out in the field smashing it with two wooden boards. And then you like smash those bundles against a little square full of nails poking up and comb through it and stuff and all of that stuff that people can come and experience.
Isa Rodriguez: Yeah, and help with maybe because it sounds like it's going to take a lot of physical labor too. Dylan and I, in Chicago, volunteered on an urban farm in our neighborhood all the time. And it takes a lot of people to grow a crop and then to harvest the crop and then process the crop. And it's something that always has been sort of done in groups.
Martha Coates Donahoo: Exactly.
Dylan Cale Jones: I want to help.
Martha Coates Donahoo: Oh, great! I'll definitely let you know when it's...
Dylan Cale Jones: Sounds fun.
Martha Coates Donahoo: ...flax breaking time.
Isa Rodriguez: Yeah.
Martha Coates Donahoo: I think that the other part that really interests me is how many people it takes to perform these tasks and I think that's sort of the magnifying lens that I want to look at.
In order to make the shirt I sort of have to recreate an ancient pre-industrial community in order to get it done. Because how long would it take a single pair of arms to do that? You know when people are like positing how long they think it took people in the past , they included the many hands that went into the work.
Isa Rodriguez: Yeah like a whole village of people.
Martha Coates Donahoo: Yeah or like a family or you know, you and your cousins or you know? You're not working alone.
Isa Rodriguez: Mm hmm.
Martha Coates Donahoo: When we do projects like this, then everyone can witness how much shared labor it used to take to make everything. I think that's an important reflection to have. So I'm interested in that.
Isa Rodriguez: And flax is a pretty amazing plant. Yeah. Yeah. That's exciting. I've, I've never seen a flax plant. I've just read a lot about it. Yeah. Very cool.
Okay. next, let's ask the wrap up questions .
Dylan Cale Jones: Martha, if you were to give a piece of advice to your younger self, maybe something that your younger self or past self needed to hear, what would you tell them?
Martha Coates Donahoo: Okay. If I was going to give some advice to my former self, I would tell myself not to suffer so much. I also thought that to be a real artist, that I really couldn't work. Like, I needed to always be making art. And now I'm like, I could have worked at like 7 Eleven, like a job you don't have to have crazy skills. You can just like go to work part time at a 7 Eleven and then make art the rest of the time. You know what I mean? I had this like glamorous idea that like I had to have like a sick job or like just be making sick art all the time.
Dylan Cale Jones: That's interesting. There's also like an idea in the culture we live in that the best art comes out of suffering.
Martha Coates Donahoo: Definitely.
Isa Rodriguez: Oh yeah. To be a suffering artist.
Martha Coates Donahoo: Well, to be authentic, Okay. I'm, I'm almost 40. So I grew up in the nineties when it was like all about grunge culture and authenticity. And so it was really ingrained in me as a young kid. Like all the stories of artists were like, they were heroin addicts. They were committing suicide. It was like. A deranged environment, but yeah, it was authentic grit. And that's like where real work comes from. And so it's also taken a lot of gentle dismantling to be like, Oh no, we can be like really healthy and functional. And have joy in our lives and still say something meaningful.
Isa Rodriguez: We can say something meaningful with more clarity when we have eaten and slept and taken a walk and had some space for reflection and we're not afraid all the time or, you know, in pain all the time that it's, sometimes that gives an opportunity for more clarity.
Dylan Cale Jones: So Martha do you have any advice that you would give to yourself in the future?
Martha Coates Donahoo: I've noticed that there's been a lot of ideas inside me this whole time that I've been maybe sort of waiting for there to be a hand reaching out towards me to be like, "Yes, I will participate." or I will see that or like to feel like there's like some bridge building towards that making sense.
Um, like how do I go from being a textile artist to doing a land sculpture installation? Like that's a pretty big jump. And sort of waiting for there to be like this like appropriate time to start. And I hope that in the future, that I'll just be really brave and I won't wait for permission. I'll just go ahead.
Isa Rodriguez: Just go ahead.
Martha Coates Donahoo: Yeah. Just do it.
Dylan Cale Jones: Well, thank you so much, Martha. It's been a pleasure talking to you.
Isa Rodriguez: Yeah. This has really been nice.
Yeah. Thank you so much.
Martha Coates Donahoo: Appreciate you.
Dylan Cale Jones: Practice Practice is created by Isa Rodriguez and Dylan Cale Jones. The music you heard in this episode is by Kate Jarboe.
Isa Rodriguez: This season of Practice Practice is funded by a THRIVE Grant from the Oklahoma Visual Arts Coalition and the Andy Warhol Foundation.
Dylan Cale Jones: THRIVE Grants fund community-driven, artist-led projects across the state of Oklahoma. Learn more and apply at ovac-ok.org
Martha Coates Donahoo: This is Martha and you're listening to Practice Practice.