In the Studio: Mikayla Patton

Mikayla Patton is an artist based in State College, PA, and a 2023 Joan Mitchell Fellow. We interviewed her about her work and creative practice in March 2024. The following is an edited transcript of that conversation.

I am a multidisciplinary artist, working through sculpture, installation, and material. In my practice, I often use recycled, collected, and gifted materials to form my work.

Over the last four years, my work has shifted and flourished in different ways. I trained in printmaking in college, but right now, my work is sculptural. Sometimes I like to imagine that they are forms that want to be seen, or maybe they are moments trying to show themselves through an archival process. Part of the practice involves building up, embossing, stitching, and vesseling. I make these sculptures with paper pulp, repurposing unwanted or no longer needed articles of paper paired with natural elements like porcupine quills, dyes, glass beads, and wax.

Much of my practice and the methods that I use stem from cultural practices. Some very good friends of mine and I used to joke (none jokingly) that we wanted to have the skills and power of our unci's (grandmas). Lakota women were and still are the backbone of our people. In turn, I'm always thinking about how their methods can be applied to the work I do today.

For example, sustainability plays a major role in my work. The practice of sourcing material from our current environment of discarded products, breaking it down and reforming it onto a screen, reminds me a lot of rawhide making. There is an extension happening where this material can continue to live and serve a purpose. That purpose might change someone's understanding of our environment, or at the least, influence some kind of thought process.

For the past couple of years, I have been nomadic, but I am currently based in State College, Pennsylvania, with my partner and cat. We are both artists and converted our basement into a working studio with a ventilated wood shop. It took some time and I have not made any big works in it yet, but I think it's a sweet little space. Luckily, it has a window, so we get some natural light early in the day, but sadly I work more often at night. It's an intimate space with an ongoing buzz in the background from the air purifier. This is my first time having a solid space where I don't have to be prepared to pack up any time soon.

My process often begins with material. Because I was traveling a lot over recent years, different aspects of materials that I was coming across influenced how I was working. For example, when I was in Roswell, New Mexico, I visited the local museum and found this traditional Lakota dress that I eventually wanted to be in conversation with, which led to collecting books from the library that contained misinformation about Indigenous peoples. This then led to the installation, Visitation.

While I was in Wyoming for another residency, I was coming across a lot of unfortunately lifeless porcupines on the side of the road. I made my offerings to them and collected their quills and they later became a part of another installation of work.

Now that I am in a more stable environment with a studio, I am using this time to explore more processes and find ways to collect more paper locally. I'm excited to learn more about mold making and casting. Because of my background in printmaking, sculpture and installation translate differently for me.

Lately, I’ve been very interested in forms and the non-human energies that they take. I am a very spooky type of person, and I grew up listening to powerful stories. They usually exist to teach us things about ourselves, but the people that have these personal experiences were always very chilling. Now, I still listen to stories via podcasts that talk about unexplained situations. It feels far out there, but it's something that lives within our communities.

Often, I am working off shared themes of growth, healing, and how those bring some kind of renewal not just of materials but within ourselves. I am not a storyteller—my train of thought starts and ends in a nonlinear order, so I could never tell a good story—but I think that I pull from reality and stories about spirits for my work. I enjoy giving them a sense of agency, believe it or not. This is what I'm thinking of now, but that may shift slightly later.

My work has always taught me a lot about myself and motivated me to push through a lot of hardship. I’ve always had a need to learn in order to keep moving forward. With my cultural background, the more I was making, the more I was understanding the history of my people and our relationship in this country. Representation, continuation, and understanding pull me into my work. I understood the negative effects of stereotypes and wanted to build away from that.

This may change in the next few days or months, but right now, as an artist, I am embracing the changes and challenges that arise in my work. There are days and sometimes weeks where I get stuck on one thing—usually writing—but once I am able to pull myself through it, I am able to learn from that.

Interview and editing by Jenny Gill. Learn more about Mikayla Patton’s work at mikaylapatton.com and on Instagram.