Finding Art in Life with Shirani Bolle

This summer, two things happened that I never thought possible: I took three kids on an 11-hour flight to Asia without too much fuss, and I met Gloria Steinem in her living room in New York City.

The two-week trip to Asia was great (highlights include my Chinese father chopping apples and pears for my kids in the tiny Beijing apartment I’ve called a second home for four decades, climbing the Great Wall with nary a tourist in sight, and enjoying a meandering walk down the Philosopher’s Path in Kyoto without one kid falling down the ravine) but my one evening with Steinem was just as impactful.

Hosted by Reshma Saujani for Moms First, a small group of women gathered to share thoughts on what you might think would be discussed in Steinem’s home: the state of feminism, how far we’ve really come, and how to make an America that actually works for mothers. I walked away with one main takeaway: we are stronger together.

I’m so proud to be an associate producer of the film No Country For Mothers (find a screening — or host one! — near you) and highly recommend carving out some time to see it. It will educate and move you. And the more of us who are moved, the more we can move, together.

And now for this issue of Finding Art in Life. Today I’d like you to meet self-taught, multi-heritage, neurodivergent artist Shirani Bolle.

Based in Limerick, Ireland with Sri Lankan, Dutch-German, and British heritage, her practice encompasses performance, text, sculpture and sound. Textiles are a central medium and she employs techniques such as tufting, embroidery and crochet. By integrating these into her practice, she questions their historically subordinate status in art, while playing on their associations with gendered labor.

Domestic spaces, particularly the family home, are central to her practice, and her work reveals the strangeness that can exist within seemingly ordinary places, uncovering the layered narratives that exist beneath the surface of the everyday.

In essence, Bolle creates work that exists in dialogue with multiple worlds, just as her own personal heritage does.

Most recently, Bolle presented her first solo show at Sirius Arts Centre, Cork and is currently an affiliate artist with Ormston House, Limerick. In 2027 she will present work at Eva International, Irelands Biennale.

Her answers below are so thoughtful and real. Thank you Shirani, for such great insight into what it means to make art, to mother, and to do it simultaneously.

Being a parent is an experience that in itself is unexpected! It’s nothing like I imagined it to be from the outside or from how I viewed my own parents so I find huge inspiration in parenting because you are faced with so many things at once. I see my children and their internal worlds and their struggles and their joy and it’s as though you are faced with these brand new beings who also embody a sense of who you are/were but are their own separate thing so for me there’s sometimes this weird element of time dissolving when I’m with them.

I feel this deep connection with two worlds simultaneously and in that there is so much inspiration because I see and begin to understand and unravel my own past which was filled with intergenerational trauma due to genocide and colonisation, etc., but at the same time I’m able to keep afloat in that pain and see momentum and light.

I get a lot of inspiration from my children’s questions about life. They’re often existential questions and similar to the questions that troubled me as a child but my family were not equipped to answer those kinds of questions so now I get to explore the ideas with my children without shutting anything down out of fear.

Some of these conversations have directly inspired my work. For example, I was talking with my eldest child who is 8 about death and I was giving her various examples of what people believe. One of the things we touched upon was reincarnation and my child asked me, “Mama, when we are trees, will you be next to me?”

I thought it was such a moving and thoughtful question and it became the title and main influence from a soundscape/film I recently made.

Nowadays I’m careful to let go of self-judgement in regards to my work as quickly as possible. I don’t allow myself to linger inside my own negative thoughts and if I find myself doing so I’ll leave the studio and go for a walk to get some clarity. This usually does the trick and gets me out of that space of negative self talk and back into a space of inspiration and true critical thinking instead of fear or anything linked to low self esteem.

I’ve become very disciplined in the sense of allowing myself the freedom to create the work I truly want to create and not the work that I think I’m “supposed” to make or what others might consider “good.”

Because of this, I structure my days so that I have a set work time in which I create, which helps keep me disciplined and I don’t spend hours sitting around second guessing my ideas. I get to work from the first burst of inspiration and I don’t stop until it’s complete, otherwise I’d pick the idea apart before I’d even started and so most likely would not start at all. I’ve closed that gap now and I’m very disciplined in not allowing it to expand again.

Another thing that was important to my practice was I stopped looking for external validation and started working on my own sense of confidence in my work. I used to think that it was external validation that came first and that would somehow convince me that my work was of worth but I realise now it’s the other way around and that my own enjoyment from making the work is essential if not the most important thing.

Having external validation is of course great but the creating and making is the most important thing. Everything has to go into and come from that. Everything else is just stuff around that.

Artist Faith Ringgold was a big one. Not only was she the the mother of two children but she also challenged the male-dominated art world by using techniques that were traditionally labelled as craft and elevated them into political and powerful fine art mediums. I relate strongly to this idea and do the same with crochet and tufting.

Learning about how her daughters grew up immersed in her creativity and how that directly impacted their own creativity is very inspiring and relatable to me. My girls are still very young but both are prolific in their creativity. I’ve never had to suggest ideas of things to make, it’s always them that will come and ask me, “Mum do you have a box I can use?” or whatever it may be. They always have the vision in their minds and just need me to provide the medium.

I think when it comes to parenting “showing” is always better than “telling.” You can speak to them about how important art or creativity is or you can just make it a normal occurrence in their life so that they grow up assuming they have the ability, imagination, and space to be creative. It shouldn’t be a separate activity, it should be a constant and something normal that they do without question.

For more from Shirani, follow her on Instagram and check out her website.

• What Happened At The World Cup Is The Fatherhood Bonus Turned Inside Out, by Blessing Adesiyan. “Jeremy Doku was criticized for choosing his newborn over a football match. Here is what that reaction reveals about how we still think about fathers.”

• My Toddler’s Comfort Toy Is My Literal Tit, by Charlotte Stephens. I very much relate to this… I’ve been there/am there and it feels reassuring to know I’m not the only human whose children are attached to my tits.

• 3 Lessons on Writing from Joan Didion’s Notes, by Jillian Hess. Always love a Didion post.

• A Happening, by Sarah Menkedick. A required read from a beloved PPP guest…“Composition as a happening. It’s a pedagogical dare, sure, but it’s also a personal one, a community one: if words are increasingly being sucked dry by AI vampires, how can we renew their life? How can we feel them again, make them urgent, wild, absurd, delightful? How can we bring back the splendor of language?”

• 9 Films to Watch This Summer, by Chamber of Mothers. “Including a look inside a lactation suite at the House of Representatives, a film narrated by Viola Davis, and the state and future of perinatal mental health.”

• America Is A Story We Tell Ourselves, by Harper's Bazaar and Kaitlyn Greenidge. “How do we reconcile the promise of the Declaration of Independence with everything we know about our country?”

• woman. warrior. writer. health, by Dr. Stephanie Han. A recommended read from a friend, Stephanie, who has so many good recs across life and writing.

• “I was definitely taught to care for other people’s feelings over my own,” by Amanda Montei and Julie Buntin. A recommended read from friend and PPP guest, Amanda Montei.

• The Third Trimester, by Amy Bornman. A recommended read from former PPP guest. Love this part so much, even though pregnancy feels so, so far away from my parenting realities now… “The lack of hormonal education offered to pregnant women is staggering. You’d think they’d tell us that at least half of the madness we feel is chemical! Everything that is happening to me right now feels extremely dramatic, because it is. The third trimester is rife with drama. I reiterate, it is one of the most inherently dramatic periods of a person’s life! All leading up to a big splashing eleven-o’clock number, the birth. Then, the applause, and everyone wipes off their makeup and goes home, and you just… live. That’s the part I’ll never get used to.”
  

I recently watched this documentary, Gaining Ground, as part of my MSW social work coursework. Gaining Ground explores the innovative, grassroots organizing efforts of the Dudley Street Neighborhood Initiative (DSNI) in Boston. DSNI was created 25 years ago when the community had been devastated by bank redlining, arson-for-profit and illegal dumping, and has become one of the preeminent models for community-based change. DSNI still supports community organizing and community partnerships and is a wonderful organization to support!