Art Therapy: Talking with Czech artist Kateřina Šedá about her grandmother

Art Therapy
Talking with Czech artist Kateřina Šedá about her grandmother
by Amanda Church

Kateřina Šedá has a history of staging public interventions into everyday life, particularly in and around Lisen, the village outside of Brno where she grew up. She has involved neighboring townspeople in “There is Nothing There” (2003) and her own relatives in the “Gray Commission” (2005), both entailing activities she made up for other people to do. With her project “1 + 1” (2005–6), exhibited recently at Arratia/Beer Gallery in Berlin and the Czech Center New York, Sedá underscores her claim that all her work has a certain therapeutic value.

As exhibited, “1 + 1” consists of a video of Šedá and her grandmother conversing while her grandmother draws at the kitchen table, and a selection of those drawings—of tools and household implements rendered from memory—which number in the hundreds. Her grandmother, who recently passed away, was not an artist; the project grew out of Šedá's desire to find a way to lift her out of the deep depression she had fallen into after her retirement and the subsequent death of her husband. As an adjunct activity to the drawing, Šedá also contrived a series of questionnaires called “1x daily before meals” for her grandmother to fill out every day before lunch. She also made up an exercise called “What’s that for?” that functioned as a sort of early morning warm-up to the actual drawing.

I spoke with Šedá about the project and its various implications, specifically having to do with her grandmother and more generally about its dual nature as art and as therapy.

Amanda Church: Did you conceive of the project conceptually and then apply it to your grandmother, or was it designed specifically for her situation?

Kateřina Šedá: The main impulse was—without question—the long-term problem in our family with my grandmother. She had completely resigned from all activity, and when she finally even stopped speaking to us, it was necessary to think up something for her to do. It was much later that I began to see in it a conceptual project—when, while drawing, she stopped using her most frequent expression, “I don’t care.” My aim was not to come up with some crazy artistic concept, but to find a simple activity that would help bring her back into the family life. And it worked....