Name: Kalah Bernardo
Pronouns: She//Her
City: Monterey, CA
Contact: @ashandiron // ashandironco.com
Medium: Hardwoods
Where are you originally from and how did you find your way to the Monterey area?
I’m originally from the Monterey area! I grew up in Marina, lived in Salinas for a couple of years and then seaside for a few, moved down to southern CA for college and then hopped around between countries and states for about 7 years afterward until finally moving back last year to be closer to family. I never expected to find my way back here once I moved away for college, but being home has been wildly healing for me and I’ve found such a beautiful sense of groundedness here that I think my life had been missing.
How would you describe your process?
My process definitely differs for my mosaic work and my illustrations. I experience so much of my life through intense feeling and internal reflection and when I get particularly overwhelmed by a personal experience, the social or political climate, or the state of the world it’s easy for me to get debilitatingly stuck in my head. I started drawing because I often feel like illustrations can capture the complexity, nuance, and borderlessness of my feelings in ways that my words might confine too strictly. When I have a really hard time putting language to my internal experiences, I try to visualize these feelings in images and slowly piece together illustrations that symbolize aspects of what I’m experiencing inwardly. It’s so much easier, once I have the image on paper, to explain what that it means to me, which really helps me to verbally process through the way I engage with my own internal experience of the world around me. I often do this with a glass (bottle) of wine at hand, some classical music on Spotify, and and lot of “SHHHHHH’s” aggressively escaping my mouth as my absolutely amazing partner walks around the apartment too loudly or rustles through the cabinets endlessly looking for snacks.
As far as my process for my mosaics go, I find that this is much more of a way to calm or ease my mind rather than explore it. The geometric designs bring me strange a sense of sturdy, grounded, concreteness. I often feel so overtaken by the fluidity of my feelings, thoughts, and imagination, that getting to make pieces that allow me to take a solid, tangible, organic material and turn it into something symmetrical, composed, angular, and kind of absolute allows me to bring a sense of order to my creative process (when I’m not yelling expletives at my work during frustrating glue-ups). It also draws my focus so intensely (losing focus could mean losing an actual hand in a real big oopsie) that my mind isn’t able to race in one thousand different directions at once. It’s kind of like a forced meditation and helps bring me back to my center when I need it.
I really love the way that my illustrations and my mosaics together offer me a sense of balance and help me to engage with my creativity in ways that honor the parts of me that value order, fluidity, and chaos.
Tell us something about yourself that most people might not know.
This will likely be something most people have a strong aversive reaction to, and I don’t expect it will make me (m)any friends, but often, when the urge strikes mid-shower, I like to leave my partner sweet little love notes on our shower wall in picture form using my shed hair as a medium. Occasionally these, I guess I’ll call them drawings, depict an elegant unicorn or perhaps a contemplative chicken gazing at a fried egg wondering how he escaped such a gruesome ending. Usually, though, they fall more into the phallic variety. I suppose it’s a testament to his impossibly amiable nature (and my irresistible charm) that instead of filing for divorce, he always, without fail, laughs his ass off just long enough to make me feel like a real winner.
Also, on a more honest note, I suppose, I would say that most people, even people that have known me for a long time, are actually quite shocked to hear that I am deeply introverted. I love people, and I genuinely enjoy being around the people I love, but I am most alive and energized after spending hours of my time reading without interruption, drawing, sitting and thinking out in nature, or working alone. In-person shows and festivals really are fun for me and I love getting to show my work (even though it’s often quite scary to do so) and meet new people, but afterward I legitimately need 3-5 days of total aloneness, a few bags of cracked-pepper sunflower seeds, a stack of books, and my cats on my lap to recuperate.
Who are some artists, local or otherwise, that you hold in high esteem?
I’m always adding to the list of artists I admire, but I’ve currently been obsessed with Adrienne Maree Brown’s poetry as well as that of Yrsa Daley-Ward. Each of these women’s words makes me weepy in the very best and most cathartic way. Also there is this tattooist in New York whose artwork is just so free and audacious and it makes me feel free and audacious and I love it all. Her name is Mira Mariah, aka Girl Knew York.
Where do you find yourself drawing the most inspiration?
In many ways, I find myself drawing a lot of my inspiration from my own anger and frustration with the state of the world and the treatment of historically marginalized groups under systems of capitalism, imperialism, white supremacism, and patriarchy. Women are still very much discouraged from expressing our anger with systems that are designed to oppress, erase and silence us. Our anger is written off as dramatic, overly-emotional, aggressive, or as an indication of our over-sensitivity or inability to act or think logically. We are treated as if our reaction to our oppression is more profane and shameful than the oppression itself. Of course, this is not unique to women alone, this tool is equally utilized against BIPOC communities, the LGBTQ community, disabled people, the working class, immigrant communities, and everyone whose identity markers do not reflect those of the white, cisgender, heterosexual, wealthy men in power.
I experience anger when I am systemically regarded and treated as less capable, valuable, worthy, intelligent, etc., than my male counterpart. Rather than repressing that anger and allowing it to fester until I implode in messy self-destruction, I try to use my anger in a way that is generative and expressive and honors the complexity and multiplicity of my humanness. I draw and imagine and create from this source as a way to honor and affirm these experiences when I’m told by society to repress them. I really resent the essentializing binary that very much permeates our limited understandings of gender regarding emotionality and reason. Women are considered emotional, sensitive, and fragile, while men are regarded as strong, rational, and innately capable of reason. Culturally, we attribute much more value to the processes that we inaccurately believe are inherently male, thereby elevating reason and rationality as the standard, normative final objectives of any form of expression while simultaneously devaluing emotional intelligence, emotional experiences, and emotional expression. Anger is a universal human emotion, but because it’s regarded as innately masculine, men are believed to be empowered, righteous, and passionate when they express it, while women are deemed impulsive, reactive, and out of control. This gender coding is wildly problematic and dangerous as we are essentially denying the fact that both men and women are equally capable of both emotionality and reason and equally human for experiencing them. We deny men their humanness when we force them to repress emotions that are culturally considered feminine. We deny women our humanness when we are pigeonholed into traditionally feminine forms of expression. Emotionality and reason and not two mutually exclusive processes, but are rather interdependent functions of humanity that inform one another. My anger at the injustices in the world are both reasonable and rational. Reason informs my emotional experiences, my anger, frustration, joy, and contentment and my understanding of these feelings just as my emotional experiences inform my rationality and my ability to reason. One does not exist without the other. Neither are inherently “feminine” or “masculine,” and in order to affirm my experiences of each I draw upon both for inspiration during my creative process.
I am also deeply inspired by other women artists who have chosen to express themselves publicly. It’s hard for me to share my work as it requires such an immense level of vulnerability and transparency. Watching other women act in courage and do the same fuels my own sense of empowerment.
What advice would you give your younger (artist) self?
Maybe this is cliche, but I suppose something I try really hard to carry with me everyday is to remember that giving in to imposter syndrome will only keep me from my own growth. The work I make now is more developed than the work I created two years ago, and the work I create two years from now will reflect the energy, time, and dedication I’ve put into my own development as an artist and creator. Being imperfect at something should never be a reason to doubt our own potential or competency, as skills and craftsmanship naturally develop with the investment of time. At least that’s what I tell myself when I look at the work of other woodworkers who’ve been in the craft for a million years or more and I subsequently have to fight the urge to throw my work in the nearest dumpster.