The artist speaks with Camille Bacon about her performance at Palazzo Diedo in the spring, the inspiration she gleaned from Venice’s beauty and history, the memories of her childhood garden that informed her stage design, the cello as the mouth of her subconscious, and how she cultivates a “three-dimensional tenderness” for herself.
CAMILLE BACON: Shall we go back to Venice together for a moment?
KELSEY LU: We shall.
CAMILLE: Your performance, PENUMBRA, at Palazzo Diedo in May was absolutely exquisite. Big up to Olivier Berggruen, Rayna Holmes, and the whole team who were involved in actualising it.
Given that the word penumbra emerged in the seventeenth century to describe the partial shadow cast during an eclipse, I find it quite fortuitous that we’re having this conversation on the eve of a major eclipse, which has historically been understood as a harbinger of rupture, release, and rebirth – all of which are motifs that your performance was deeply steeped in.
How did you encounter the word, and why did it feel like the right conceptual container for the performance?
KELSEY: I love the feeling of directness that comes from something that’s titled with one word. It allows so many other words to circulate it and abstract its meaning.
The questions that were coming up for me when I was developing the performance were around vulnerability, the seen, and the unseen. The work that I do that nobody else sees is so ritualistic. Whether it’s creating music, making artwork, building my altar, or the ways that I meditate or pray throughout the day… even my gait and how I notice that my steps change and alter depending on my mood and where I’m feeling in this grand universe. PENUMBRA reflected so much time and so many different ideas in a single performance. It has been seven years of working through my shadow, and that’s really how the title came to be.
For a long time, I had this image of an eclipse that I travelled to Ohio to see in person three years ago. I’ve had an image of it up on my wall for the past three years. It’s one thing to look up an image of an eclipse. Our access to imagery and the archives of time is so immense. But returning to a photograph of a moment that happened so quickly and that I was physically present for changes what you see in it.
I just kept coming back to this image, specifically that light that’s surrounding that pit of darkness, that void. Nature has always been my source and my go-to to help me better understand myself and other people. When I was looking up the definition of eclipses and their many phases, the word penumbra came up. I also love the way it sounds. It makes me think of the word embryo and these different phases of life, which connect to things I’ve been working inside of and around: a lot of womb healing, tending to the darkness and the light within myself, the shifts between them, the grey areas… Throughout the years, I’ve been engaging in practices and different forms of therapies that I’ve been diving into and getting to know to get to know myself better, to re-love myself, to re-meet myself and to reintroduce myself to myself. So, with PENUMBRA, my desire was to bring these different practices into a performance that could be felt and shared with everyone, and when the word came up and I looked into it some more, it felt divinely appropriate.
Even though a performance is one moment in time, everyone is experiencing it together, and so things are changed afterwards. A performance fundamentally shifts the people enacting it, the space it unfolds in and those who witness it. Even though you can’t always see it in front of you, it’s a molecular change, like the change an eclipse brings about.
CAMILLE: Talk to me about how the physical and social environment of the performance came together.
KELSEY: I have levels of history with all the musicians that performed with me for PENUMBRA. My sister, Lady Jess, was on violin, and we have a whole life story together. Alicia Hall Moran performed with me for my opera, This Is a Test. Mikael Darmanie, who was on piano, I’ve known since I was fifteen. Josh Johnson, whom I’ve known for a very long and deep time too. This was also the first time that my partner and I collaborated on something.
It was interesting to observe what memories would come up throughout the duration of the performance. Whether it was looking over and seeing my sister and remembering when I ran away from home and drove to go stay with her, and how far we’ve come between then and now. Or looking over at Mikael and being like, I remember when I was fifteen and had Crown Royal for the first time in their dorm room. The return to this side of the industry after seven years has been challenging because it’s not the same for me as the way that I entered it before. Sometimes you try to return to something that’s familiar, and the dreams that once were may just not be the same anymore. Allowing for the release of that is a constant trust fall, and collaborating with friends, healers and radical thinkers brings such relief.
For PENUMBRA, I also desired to alter the light in the space, but wanted it to remain natural as well. When I first visited Venice, I noticed the beauty of Venice’s history through crafts within glass blowing, costume design, and so many other traditions. That legacy of craftsmanship is intentional in the design and the infrastructure of the city when it comes to light. The rose-tinted glass streetlights moved me so much. I wanted to bring in the intentionality of that person making that decision to adorn the streets with rose-tinted streetlights into PENUMBRA. So, on the far side of the room, I had all of the window panes frosted in that same rose colour. There’s a softness and warmth that it gives that’s much like the womb space.
The first time I ever encountered soil in a performance context was when I was eighteen and saw Pina Bausch’s Rite of Spring for the first time. It made me think about my child self. One of my first memories is the sensation of dirt… being in my backyard and digging into the dirt, with my hands in the soil, and I feel like so many of the movements that are happening within this era focus on going back to the soil and returning to earth. So, for the performance, I wanted to make a play pen of soil, rock, and earth, and bring us back to the soil and back to one another. We brought in local soil: from within Venice and from surrounding farms in the foothills of the Dolomites. That soil is already so charged.
CAMILLE: Given that both you and Eartha Kitt hail from the Carolinas, throughout the performance I was recalling how she once said, “I am a dirt person. I trust the dirt. I don’t trust diamonds and gold.” To connect the spark for PENUMBRA – those questions of vulnerability you mentioned earlier – to the physical environment of the performance, I think about how the soil sees the most vulnerable parts of us, right? It sees us from below. It sees our underbellies. It stands as a timeless and sensitive witness. It has a primordial and timeless memory. It has an infinite capacity to cradle us. What better material, then, to evoke the themes the performance was addressing?
I just finished Kin by Tayari Jones in which a character named Aunt Irene tells a story about fleeing from the town in which she was born. Her mother caught wind of her plot and sprinkled dirt from their yard into Irene’s pocketbook, which metaphysically anchored her to her origins and eventually coaxed her back home. There were several moments in PENUMBRA where Josh was pulling you through the dirt. With Kin in mind, it’s like you trusted the dirt to hold you while you performed a return to self and, more specifically, a return to a consistent sense of feeling at home within yourself. Almost as if past and future versions of you put dirt in the pocketbook of your present-tense self to initiate a soil-based spell to rebirth yourself across every timeline.
KELSEY: I really love that interpretation. I have a bit of a hard time forming the language around this because it’s such a physical and spiritual experience. It’s kind of like retelling your dream to someone in the morning; it’s hard to help people understand how deep it was for you.
It’s like the poem that I wrote that was on the obsidian: “TO THE GROUND AND BELOW IT / SKIN AND SCARS STAMPED AND REPULSED, / THIS IS EVERYTHING / GOD IS DEEP INSIDE ME / IN DARKNESS THERE IS NO ABSENCE.” This is everything. Music is everything. Living is everything, and also death is everything. I think about my connection and my acceptance of God again, because the way that God was defined for me growing up was rooted in fear. So within this journey of returning to myself, I’m also returning to the source. The source is within all of us. It’s oneness. And to me, that’s God: oneness.
CAMILLE: Another element that accentuated the resonance of PENUMBRA was the wardrobe. Your stylist, Becky Akinyode, and Hillary Taymour of Collina Strada did such a phenomenal job. How did you all approach sculpting the diaphanous garments that you and your fellow performers were wearing?
KELSEY: We talked about form, flow and fluidity. A lot of it was emotion-based. We were inspired by the Venetian costume tradition I mentioned earlier and specifically by looks that had really elaborate collars that give this elegance to your throat, while also feeling like protection. I was at the Collina Strada show when Hillary introduced ornate collars, and I was immediately drawn to them. I’ve been a fan of Hillary’s work for years and love her, and she’s always been so generous with everything. I just love her model of creating, and how it’s always centred around inclusivity and sustainability, even before it was like a trend. I wanted to feel really bare and for my look to trail and fall behind me. I also wanted it to show the traces of the performance itself, fabric that can hold the impression of the soil. So we all three got together at Hillary’s studio, and Becky brought her thoughts and ideas. That’s kind of how it all formed.
CAMILLE: There were moments throughout PENUMBRA when you’d emerge from the crowd, perched on a stone in the middle of the crowd. Every time it happened, I thought of Sandro Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus. That painting depicts one of the proverbial mythologies of the origin story in a Western tradition. The thing that’s always felt so potent to me about that painting is how he renders light, which reminds me of the Venetian street lamps. The whole composition has this rose gold tint to it. In addition to Rite of Spring, were there other visual references that you were studying as you imagined what the environment for PENUMBRA might look and feel like?
KELSEY: When I started thinking about the visual world of the album, I was in Rome and got to see these Caravaggio paintings I’d never seen before. Judith Beheading Holofernes inspired me to look into him more, and I got really turned on to his use of the play between shadow and light, what was happening in his interpersonal world, and his ability to bring to light the importance of death. I love how he understood the beauty in darkness and the complexities of people. He is often said to use women associated with sex work as the model for the Virgin Mary. He chose someone who was seen as dirty and a woman who’s not “righteous” in the eyes of God. The irony of it all is that he was employed by the church. Caravaggio is just contradiction after contradiction after contradiction, and I love it. So I was really inspired by him and his life and how he literally shifted the way that people looked at light. He also brought death into painting and asserted beauty as a quest for deep observation rather than perfection. Another painter I really love is Danielle McKinney.
On a textual level, I also love the work of Alexis Pauline Gumbs. Pauline Oliveros is someone else that I feel really inspired by. When we were rehearsing for Penumbra, before we would start every day. I’d have us all do different exercises from the book Quantum Listening to tune in to ourselves and to what’s happening around us in a way that isn’t so didactic.
CAMILLE: I learned recently that the cello is one of the instruments that can approximate the pitch of the human voice most closely. Do you ever feel like your instrument is the mouth of your subconscious?
KELSEY: Absolutely. It’s always been an extension of myself. It being my subconscious is so true. I really feel that. Across the eruption of my decision to leave everything I knew behind – everything that I was taught to believe, my whole foundation and core – music has always been the bridge to that next life, that next journey, that next version of myself. It’s been that vessel for as long as I can remember. Trying to find my way and riding those tsunamis, my cello has been that ship, and my song for when I can’t make sense of things orally or in my head. A lot of the music that I make tends to start when I’m playing on my cello, when I’m just freestyling. It’s cool that I chose an instrument that is consistent with the human voice because we’re definitely in tandem.
CAMILLE: Your movements and the texture of your voice throughout PENUMBRA palpably carried this sense that you were exhuming and exorcizing something. When So Help Me God came out in June, I searched for the sonic allegory of that dynamic in the album and found it in the transition that occurs at 5:40 in Reaper. That moment in the song is such a threshold. Listening to it fills my entire body with the catharsis of surrender and the relief of acknowledging that, as daunting as it might feel to let go, we are more prepared to do so than we might think because of how many Gods have your back. What did the process of making PENUMBRA and So Help Me God teach you about surrender and release?
KELSEY: I am a solo artist. I think this performance was activating my desire to not be alone in it. Even though the beginnings of these songs were made alone, just by me, they didn’t end that way. Likewise, in many ways, metamorphosing is an alone process. But even still, the processes of surrender and release that I went through to make PENUMBRA and So Help Me God were not processes I could do alone.
That transition in Reaper, to me, is like moving from this fixed thing… Trauma in childhood becomes this fixed thing that resists time, and there’s this term: Solve et coagula (Latin for “dissolve and coagulate”). Trauma resists the “solve” part of the process to turn the trauma into a memory. To me, I think what Reaper represents is working through and changing that so that instead of it being this overly solid thing, it becomes liquid, and then it becomes something that is in the archive that I can access again, but it’s not fixed there, you know? It’s accessible. I can return to it. It’s not intrusive anymore. I think that point in Reaper is like going from transforming the traumatic experiences and then being transformed into something different. Once going through the liquid form, going from the solid into a liquid, and then into a solid that’s then transformed, that is more hopeful. The goo is really confusing. There’s nothing, you know. It’s very dark. You don’t know where you are. You’re just the goo in the butterfly phase. There’s no spine. There is nothing to grab onto or hold onto. There is just some innate trust and faith and hope that there is going to be something that comes out the other side.
CAMILLE: I recently read Lawrence Burney’s book No Sense in Wishing. He has this gorgeous turn of phrase: “three-dimensional tenderness.”
KELSEY: Wow!
CAMILLE: How did you cultivate three-dimensional tenderness for yourself as you were engaging in healing work and practicing shadow integration to create this body of work? What is the relationship, for you, between three-dimensional tenderness and self-confrontation?
KELSEY: I think that it’s the allowance for messiness and disorder. There are a lot of emotions – like shame, guilt, or embarrassment – that I think that we’re trained to dissociate from. It’s about allowing those emotions to be there, which is so uncomfortable. I think the hard feelings are so much a part of living a real life because you’re whatever you’re doing, whether it’s making an album or writing a book, or getting married or having a baby, it’s something that may be breaking away from an ideal that you may have had at one point, and in a way you may be betraying that idea. There’s some kind of feeling of a sacrifice being made, and I think that being able to accept the shame or to allow disappointment, no matter what it is, is a way of settling down. That’s not a negative thing.
In order to really truly have a lived experience, it’s about being able to understand that we exist on multiple levels of selves. With So Help Me God, it exists in many different realms. Every song exists on a different axis of emotion, a different questioning of purpose and frustration and liberation and confusion and, back to Caravaggio, the contradiction of self and knowing that even though I may not even be answering my own question or providing an answer for myself, it’s just the fact that I even asked it, or that I’m even exploring it in the first place, that’s important.
If we allow ourselves the openness to feel all of these emotions, it leads to empathy. I think that apathy is something that is the destroyer of worlds, and all of these emotions are just bringing us closer to compassion and to that three-dimensional tenderness. My elation around So Help Me God and PENUMBRA, and what I’m really excited for with this tour is bringing in these swells, arcs of emotion and insisting that we have the attention span to hold these ranges of feeling.
CAMILLE: Your approach to the stage design was really unconventional, which created a really hypnotic and participatory environment for the audience. Can you speak more about your decision to obliterate the idea of “centre stage” and about the paper you buried in the soil?
KELSEY: I wanted to mess with people’s expectations of what a stage can be. I love going to the traditional shows where you’re looking at the person on the stage, but I also really love thinking about how those spaces can be altered. I also love jumping into something that feels really extreme, and the performance was quite extreme in different aspects of being. It was very ambitious.
Underneath all our feet were these large rolls of paper that, before they were buried, Josh and I moved across the floor with buckets of charcoal. We laid down a thick layer of charcoal on the paper and then buried it in the soil. As people walked on it, it continued to evolve, creating more evidence and building the archive of presence. But excavating those works was like magic. Like of the self. Seeing the hands, the feet, the body, the pressure. Seeing where people gravitated. There’s one that led into the room, into the gallery, to the far left. And you can see where people chose to walk more from the side, and just like the patterns of human behaviour, a lot of us entering the space and walking, and this sort of walking meditation was also a call to. I did this Meredith Monk workshop a couple of years ago, and we would start each day with a meditation and then a walking meditation, into movement, and then into the day. You know, you’re in a room with strangers, going into these intimate parts of ourselves and our psyche and our beings, and being able to start in a place of togetherness without bringing the energy of whatever was happening outside. A lot is going on.
This is a practice that is so rooted in childhood joy, the part of ourselves that, as we grow older, we start to lose touch with. The drawings were about getting back to the root of the love and playfulness that drawing has represented for me. My favourite mediums to play with have always been charcoal and pastels, things that were messy, that could smudge. I remember them leaving marks on my hands, and the things that were left behind – this evidence. My dad is a portrait artist, and I would steal his charcoals out of his studio, and I would bury them in the backyard.
While unearthing the work, there were a lot of feelings. I was exhausted the day after the performances. There was a part of me where it was like, “This is all I want to do, but this is also not what I want to do.” It was very emotional, unearthing the pieces of paper, seeing the marks of when Josh dragged my body across the palazzo, of Josh’s feet, of the movements of people’s steps, seeing the patterns of where people walked more, like being like, “Wow, you can see people walked more here than they did on the other side. That’s so interesting.” But that goes to show they were following the current of where everyone was walking, and it made me think about the differences between the two performances. For the 3 p.m. one, the other performers and I walked in first, and then everyone followed. For the 7 p.m. one, we allowed everybody into the space, and we were the last to enter. Without us guiding people into the space, then people were just like, “Well, I think I’m just gonna try to figure out where to stand or where to be, and look for the signs of knowing.” And like, that’s a piano. Okay, I’m gonna go there. That means that the stage is happening there. But there was no centre, so people had to decide for themselves; they had to follow their own path.
I love how it’s going to keep living on in all of these multitudes of ways, and it’s really exciting. The drawings are there until the end of November for people to come and experience and see for themselves.
CAMILLE: The album cover for Blood is really umbilical. The cover for So Help Me God feels more monastic. It’s darker. It looks like you’re in a cave.
KELSEY: I do look like I’m in a cave, and through the process of making this, I was in a metaphysical cave. I was also in literal caves, too. I went to Pantelleria for a couple of weeks, and I remember sitting in those caves and listening to the songs. They weren’t finished yet, but they were at a point where I was just listening to them on repeat and trying to understand what I was even referring to, and I did so much of that in actual caves. That’s interesting in thinking about how caves are our origin: our first shelters and also the site of some of the earliest forms of art.
Why do people explore and try to find the earliest forms of our existence, or the marks that we’ve made, and the stories that we’ve told? This album was returning to the personal origin of why I do this and trying to find that connection to existence and to the world and one another.
CAMILLE: PENUMBRA and So Help Me God, then, are like these emotional archeologies of the past seven years of your life… Thank you for sharing them with us and for sharing this time with me.
KELSEY: Yes! Thank you, too.
