Pew Fellows Shehrezad Maher (she/her) and Kristen Neville Taylor (she/her) both consider the nature of memory and personal and collective histories in their creative work. For Maher, that takes the form of filmmaking that centers multigenerational South Asian characters and commingles documentary and creative storytelling. For Taylor, it’s through visual art installations that are often created with familiar objects, prompting questions around the cultural history of everyday materials and the impact of daily consumption on the natural world. 

Recently, Maher and Taylor had the opportunity to discuss their artistic practices and processes. Their conversation, which has been edited for clarity and length, follows. 

Shehrezad Maher 
Is there a place or activity that helps you free-associate and play with ideas outside the studio? 

Kristen Neville Taylor 
Since becoming a parent almost six years ago, play outside of the studio has been limited and has looked very different. As unromantic as it sounds, driving alone in the car now gives me the ultimate time and space to free-associate. I sometimes drive in complete silence and record my thoughts in voice notes or just use the time to clear my head. If the drive is on the way to a special site, all the better. Over the past few years, the bulk of my work has been born of place: the New Jersey Pine Barrens, a decommissioned sand mine, and most recently the Delaware Bay. A part of my process has been meeting locals and experts out in the field, interviewing them, and touring the area. This practice falls under the definition of “studio,” where studio is defined as “where work happens,” and “outside the studio” being everywhere else. 

Play has also shown up when I allow myself to get distracted from the original goals of the project along the way. Recently, when I was filming at the Delaware Bay, a retired Navy diver stopped to see what I was up to. He shared mysterious directions to a discrete location and said that when I arrived, if I turned left, I’d see bald eagles. I couldn’t resist going even if it felt a little scary to do alone. I didn’t see any eagles, but I discovered a metal plate engraved with “PSEG,” mounted on a timber pole by the water. I later learned that Public Service Enterprise Group (PSEG) purchased the 530-acre site in the ’90s to restore the tidal marsh. Why was an energy group doing the work of restoring this marshland? Some say that this move provides “green cover” for PSEG, which is otherwise known as a major polluter in Central New Jersey. What had begun as an innocent distraction turned into a seed for a new inquiry. In this way, I let play in by remaining as flexible as I can, even if parenting has rigidized my schedule a bit. 

Taylor 
How do you feed the ideas that you don't yet have the bandwidth or support for? 

Maher 
I usually write them down and revisit them later to see if they still interest me. Occasionally, there are ideas or images I'm excited about that don't cohere with the project I'm working on, and I take a detour. That's how my short film, The Curfew, evolved: I felt stuck with my feature, had an image that didn't belong there, and wanted to make a film that would give that restless image a home.

Taylor 
What is most important to you when building your crew for a film project? 

Maher 
Filmmaking is a humbling medium because no matter how much you prepare for production, plans can still unravel at a dizzying pace. This can be stressful but generative because there’s an opening to create something better than what we imagined in the confines of our studios and Zoom calls. I value collaborators who cultivate that documentary filmmaking-like impulse of being radically present on set, attuning themselves to the potential hidden behind fleeting moments or unexpected challenges. I admire people who are ultra-experienced in their craft and comfortable being light on their feet—qualities that don’t always go hand in hand. 

Maher 
Has teaching affected the ways you perceive, shape, or research materials you work with?

Taylor 
What comes to my mind is less related to courses I’ve taught and more about the intimate knowledge I’ve gained from working in the same department in various roles over the past several years. Specifically, I’ve witnessed the amount of resources and energy required to heat and maintain multiple glass furnaces year-round. The furnaces, like a hearth in a home, are central to the conceptual and material underpinnings of many glass departments. From my perspective, easy access to this highly extractive, specialized media has masked its socio-political and environmental realities. 

When I trace my own material choices backward, I realize my most significant connection to glass is my father, who installed windows in skyscrapers. I became interested in the circularity of glass beyond an economic point of view and identified the “blue hole,” a decommissioned sand mine, as a place of extraction and production to tell the stories of labor and leisure that swirl around it. I explore this history in my recent body of work, End-of-Days, a term for objects made by glass factory workers off the clock at the end of their workdays, as well as for small objects meant to test the integrity of the glass. A central component of my installation involved the melting of an unstable glass formula that begins to break down as soon as it's fired. This glass is the opposite of that used in skyscrapers, what Andres Jacques calls a “socio-territorial apparatus,” and a signifier of wealth and power.

Maher 
Is there an unexpected moment or place that recently gave you hope about the climate crisis? 

Taylor 
I believe it's really important to seek hope in spite of all the barriers in its way. We are witnessing incomprehensible horror, death and destruction in Palestine, Lebanon, and elsewhere, at the hands of our government and our tax dollars, with no clear end in sight. And this on top of recent climate disasters in the American south. Where I have seen hope is in the people standing adamantly and publicly against these forces at great risk in terms of their professional lives while broadcasting the connections between the climate crisis and the petro-military industrial complex, as well as its ties to art and academia. The people challenging and breaking down these systems and the people self-organizing care in their orbits and beyond give me the most hope.

Taylor 
In what ways has your background in sculpture influenced your film practice? 

Maher
One of the things that drew me to cinema was how it brings us visually and sonically close to characters in their quietest moments. In that potent space, the smallest creative choices can vibrate with new storytelling potential. If sculpture is a constant study and experimentation in psychophysics, then it sensitized me to the emotional potential of everyday objects and sounds. It influenced my desire to create lived-in worlds that heighten the presence of the smallest gestures, glances, and unspoken communication.

A process-oriented art practice later encouraged me to explore structure through writing—an approach that helps me discover rhythms, specificities, and surprises that can be richer than details I can summon through an early outline. Making art also taught me to embrace creative uncertainty and take risks even when ideas feel elusive or enigmatic at first—a practice that is challenging in a resource-intensive medium like film. 

We asked the two artists some questions of our own, as well.

For whom do you make your work? 

Taylor 
My work is often made in relation to local happenings, people, or places, and in this way, I am creating for and with these humans and non-humans in mind. When I made work about my neighborhood, Powelton Village [in West Philadelphia], I was thinking in terms of my own family that has roots here but I’m also always zooming out and weaving my personal experience and knowledge into a macroscopic view of place. How does the present view the cultural consciousness of the past? What was left out and how do my current views figure in? I used to be self-conscious about being an artist from Philly who never left Philly, who went to the same school for undergrad and grad school. I’ve been taught from a particular, perhaps elitist, view of art that we have to go far away to be great and of course, I can romanticize this notion, too! But I think this is a myth that distracts us from the value of knowing some place well. I learned recently that Octavia Butler lived in the same place for nearly her entire life! And while I would never compare myself to the imitable Butler, I have her tucked in the back of my mind as an inspirational reminder that to know yourself and a place intimately can be an effective approach to work that can also resist the capitalistic and individualistic pressures of the greater art world. 

Recently, I have focused on building my own support network and making work for and with a small network of friends and fellow interlocutors. This is not meant to be exclusive or elitist, but rather to resist the temptation of “likes” and mass legibility in favor of building an intentional microcosm that models tools and strategies that can be scalable or repeatable. Towards this, I look to “deep local" as a guide, a term coined by permaculturist Tom Ward, which is boldly defined as the slow development of culture towards ecological revolution. I have to believe that in this microcosm we’re creating there is potential for localized impacts that might also reverberate beyond our particular sphere. 

Maher 
I try to make my creative process a respite from that everyday noise of wondering how I’m being read, how I’m perceived, how I perceive people. The attempt is to get to some version of a pure place where I’m not speculating about the relatability of my writing, which requires me to compress not just my identity but someone else’s. At the same time, there’s a way to make work that is generous and expansive and trusts that where you’re from will always imprint your work. Along the way, I hope my work’s attentiveness to the internal lives of its characters offers expression to unarticulated or deeply private experiences in a viewer's life. 

What do you do when you’re procrastinating? 

Taylor 
Procrastination gets a bad rap, but it really is a part of my process. I looked and couldn’t find an article I read years ago about how taking a break from the writing process gives clarity, describing exactly what is happening biologically in the brain. At the time I was a technician in a glass studio and this article resonated in regards to repairing equipment, particularly the tricky electrical components. I learned then that walking away allows some part of your subconscious to continue the work while giving the body and mind space to rest. 

I am always thinking about art problems outside the studio, which allows my brain to tackle them in a passive way in preparation for the next studio session. Procrastination takes many forms: I will say yes to jobs and opportunities I have no business saying yes to, I might bake an elaborate pastry no one asked for, and I will frequently get distracted from my research priority in favor of an entirely new research rabbit hole. 

Maher 
Brush my dog’s hair, overwater my plants. Nap. Brush my dog’s teeth, underwater my plants. Lottery flip through poetry books to land on random lines which may help me free associate/get unstuck. Carve wooden spoons for friends, take showers, give my dog showers. Ambitious furniture building plans to restructure my creative life and space, only to abandon them when an idea hits.