Jill Greenberg is a photographer, writer, and artist. While she is young enough to be my daughter, she and I seemed to connect on a peer-to-peer basis. Her work as an artist is what I think is most interesting, although the ways she expresses her art in words is also wonderful to read. She does art installations, which means she creates art on the spot for the place in which it is presented.

I first read about Jill in The Philadelphia Inquirer, where she appeared in a photograph posed in front of her installation of soap slivers, which resembled a paisley mosaic, shown here below. Intrigued, I emailed her and set up the interview for June.

While Jill works in many unusual mediums — dandelion fluff, powder puffs, plastic packaging, and cicada exo-skeletons — I am most interested in Jill’s work as a participant in the Accumulation Project, an endeavor of 19 artists from across the US, in which each artist is committed to accumulating an object of choice for a full year between 9/2005 and 9/2006.

Jill proposed to accumulate those annoying last remnants of used soap that people commonly call soap slivers, and now she receives soap slivers from people all over the country and uses them to create mosaic-like installations. Even though an artist generally works alone, the fact that soap slivers are sent to her with stories attached provides a way of connecting with others. Jill revels in this sharing aspect of her art and considers those who contribute the soap slivers as collaborators, the work of many hands.

Among the contributors to her collection are: a woman who lived through the depression and recalls placing saved soap slivers in a mesh bag to make suds for dishwashing, internationally acclaimed mixed media artist Donald Lipski, and the adult children of deceased parents who departed the world leaving their soap sliver collections behind, as well as slivers from such unexpected sources as the prisoners of the Milwaukee County Jail. In lieu of sending soap, Ruth Mullaney (see below) sent a poem she wrote years before, comparing the virtues of a soap sliver with those of a fresh bar of soap.

Here’s what Jill says about soap:
“Bars of soap are a time-based medium. As they are used, they decompose, shrink, change shape, and crack, accumulating the dirt from our bodies in the resulting crevices, like veins in marble. …In addition to the changing with use, the form of soap we choose provides a record of society’s changes in priorities over time. The increased fear of transmittable pathogens has fostered a reticence to come in close contact with objects used by others, thus, in recent years, the simple, economic bar of soap has faced competition from liquid soap in dispensers that guarantee the product we use on our body is pristine — touched by no skin but our own.”

Of her philosophy as an artist and her motivation for working with such an unusual medium as soap slivers, Jill says: “I privilege the visual aspect of my work, and endeavor to engage conceptual significance through the final form each work takes, as well as through the process of creating it….What primarily attracts me to soap remnants as a medium is the variety of pastel colors I expect to encounter: pearly white, pale or golden yellows, pastel aquas, greens and pinks. Above all, I want the work to have a painterly quality. I view soap as a colorful, malleable, medium that gains significance through our reliance upon it in daily life.”

So much significance about soap slivers! Who would have “thunk” it!

Jill has shown her compositions of soap slivers in three shows to date, and between shows, of course the soap slivers continued to, pardon the pun, shower in. Its first public viewing was at Lunarbase Gallery in Brooklyn, NY during the preliminary show for the Accumulation Project, in which the 19 participating artists presented their collections of proposed objects at an early stage in the process, after about 4 months of accumulation.

She presented larger and more complex displays of the collection in later shows in both May and July of 2006, in Baltimore, MD and Philadelphia, PA., respectively. The Accumulation Project’s final show will be held in Jersey City, NJ starting October 6th, 2007. For more information about the Accumulation Project and its final show, go to www.accumulationproject.org .

At the end of our interview, I asked Jill what kind of artist she considers herself. She told me she is a mixed media and installation artist with an interest in working with ephemeral materials. Often, her works only exist for a short period of time, thus they offer only a fleeting opportunity for viewers to enjoy them. Since the soap fragments are not affixed to the display surface after a showing, they are packed away and sorted in boxes. As Jill notes in her essay, “The Accumulation Project: My Adventures in Ephemeral Art, the boxed soaps are merely “…awaiting their next opportunity to manifest a presence as a changed work of art.” She also has her own twist on the ephemeral quality of her soap project, which is that soap’s very nature is ephemeral, “dissolving in our grip, changing shape and size as it performs its function.”

As you can see, I am very much taken with Jill’s work. I think all of life is ephemeral, and the soap is a metaphor for that life, because like soap, we change in shape and size as we perform our (female) functions. As we go from girlhood and our innocence, we are shaped and changed by careers, marriage, children, divorce, death of loved ones, etc. If we go through childbirth and later we experience menopause, our physical bodies also change shape, like the bars of soap do with increased use. Just as Jill sees each of these shapes as beautiful in their changeability, so I think we can love our bodies as they change their shape. Not to sound too deep, isn’t life like soapsuds in water, bubbly or flat, depending on how much you shake the soap in the water? So start moving your bodies and shaking up your mind and enjoy the fragility and fleeing nature of your life, before it all melts away, like soap.

To view Jill’s artwork, please go to www.artfaceoff.com, click on Gallery, and then type in Jill Greenberg in the box on the left, where it says Customize your Gallery. One of her installations will come up in the center box. Click on that photo and the rest of her work will show up on the left margin view, under her name. The soap mosaic is the second one in the margin, on the right. Click on that and it will appear larger in the main display box.

Below is the poem Ruth Mullaney from Virginia wrote years ago and sent to Jill, after reading about her soap sliver accumulation project in a newspaper article.

On Soap by Ruth C. Mullaney

A new cake of soap is a thing of delight,
Its smoothness and shape, a form just right

Seems better to melt away doing its job
Than be carried along an unsightly blob.

Here is the soap mosaic that Jill created for the Philadelphia show, entitled “The Sweetest Fruit.” It is 54″ X 72″X6″.

Jill explains that the title of her piece comes from a Hindu myth about how the mango got its distinctive paisley-like shape, which you can see in Jill’s photo of her soap slivers mosaic.

“The Monkey god Hanuman was hungry and looked up into the trees for fruit. He ate one, which was a wonderful flavor, much better than all the others. It was a mango. To make sure all of his friends could find the same good fruit he went along and squeezed them all into this distinctive shape.”

For Jill, finding this story was a “eureka” moment, since she explains how our grip transform the soft medium of soap to a distinctly different shape, thus she gave the tile of her mosaic The Sweetest Fruit to both her paisley design versions of soap. (The other design was created for a Baltimore show.) When I first contacted Jill for an interview, she read about mangoes in my blog and sent me the information on mango legend. I love when two strangers connect with something mutually of interest to them.

Feel free to contact Jill about her art via her email address:
JillGreenberg27@hotmail.com.

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