♪ Opening theme music ♪
Hello, and welcome to this episode of ArtsAbly in Conversation.
My name is Diane Kolin.
This series presents artists, academics, and project leaders who dedicate their
time and energy to a better accessibility for people with disabilities in the arts.
You can find more of these conversations on our website, artsably.com,
which is spelled A-R-T-S-A-B-L-Y dot com.
♪ Theme music ♪
Today, ArtsAbly is in conversation with Lia Pas, a Saskatoon-based Canadian
multidisciplinary artist who works in the field of music, writing, and visual arts.
You can find the resources mentioned by Lia Pas during this episode
on ArtsAbly's website in the blog section.
♪ Piano music ♪
Welcome to this new episode of ArtsAbly in Conversation.
Today, I am with Lia Pas, who is a Saskatoon-based
Canadian multidisciplinary artist who works in the field of music, writing, and visual arts.
Welcome, Lia.
Hi, Diane.
Thank you for inviting me.
Thank you for being here.
Okay, You have a very rich history of connection with the arts,
whether it is by writing or through music.
I wanted to start this interview by asking you to talk about your background.
What did you do for studies and also what led you to your studies?
I know it's in music, and we share that - we share a particular school.
I'll let you present yourself.
Okay.
My background.
It's a long story.
I'll try to keep it succinct.
I love long story, by the way.
Okay. [Laughs.]
I was a musician. Growing up
I played oboe and piano, primarily,
and went through all the Royal Conservatory Music levels
and started playing
oboe professionally in my teens.
I was the alternate oboeist at the Saskatoon Symphony.
I decided to study music at York University because they had a very
different program than most programs.
I wanted to study world music, improvisation, all those sorts of things,
and York was the place for that.
So I went to York University.
And then I ended up moving back to Saskatoon because my husband
got a great job here.
So we moved back to Saskatoon and settled here.
In Saskatoon, I played with the Symphony again on oboe.
I did a lot of [gigs], and I had a small theater company.
We did two productions
based on myths, The Descent of Inanna,
and one called Baba Yaga's Hat.
I wrote the pieces, I wrote the music, I performed in them,
And then we moved to Japan for a couple of years
where we taught English, and I didn't really do anything artistic
except for go see a bunch of cool Japanese theatre
that was my artistic thing in Japan.
And after a couple of years there, I really wanted to get back
into my practice, my artistic practice.
I applied for Master's in theatre programs
because I hadn't had any formal education in theater.
I was accepted to a couple of places, but I chose Dartington College
in Devon, UK, partially because they had a very multidisciplinary program,
and they no longer exist.
They got melded into Plymouth University, I think, but it was
a really tiny arts college.
I think there were four Masters in theatre students,
but we also had multidisciplinary classes with the writing students and the music students.
I actually ended up doing a lot of music there as well.
But near the end of my degree,
I got very, very sick.
And by the time we got back to Canada,
I ended up in hospital a week later with
ulcerative colitis, and I almost died.
That's no exaggeration.
So it took me a couple of years to recover.
So that was my first experience with chronic illness and disability
because I couldn't work for at least a year after that.
Because of that experience, I actually did a video piece because I wanted to get
back into a multidisciplinary practice.
I did a video poem called Susurration about the heart
and my experience of having to be really, really careful about my heart
because I was so anemic, I was at risk for a heart attack,
so I couldn't get my heart rate up, and that took a lot of attention.
And once I was recovered, I started teaching yoga.
I taught yoga before we went to Japan a little bit, but I started teaching yoga
again and started teaching voice as well.
I forgot to say, I kind of switched from oboe to voice at some point.
I had studied a lot with the Roy Hart
School of voice, which is actually
very physical and very psychological and a lot of movement and a lot of
what is your voice and what does your voice mean?
I taught voice and yoga for a while, and I ended up writing a lot of music
for dancers, which was great.
It was great to work with the body.
A lot of the music I wrote for dancers, the dancers would make sounds as well
as they're be hearing recordings.
That was awesome.
And in 2015, I was working with a dance theatre company in Calgary
called La Caravan Dance Theatre.
Maya Lewandowsky was the artistic director
and choreographer and everything.
She's now in Paris, actually, doing a lot of Roy Hart work.
That's how we met.
While we were devising that dance opera,
she got a flu of some sort, and I was
staying with her, and I also got the flu, and I was like, It's the flu.
Went back to Saskatoon, and I never recovered.
I was so sick.
I couldn't do anything. I couldn't sing.
For a while, I couldn't read or write.
I was really, really sensitive to sounds.
Even listening to recordings was too much for me.
I could only do a few minutes at a time.
Maya, actually, she finished producing the dance opera without me.
She did use my music, and I had written the libretto as well.
But there was another musician involved,
Eric Mith, I think his last name is.
Blanking on that.
And he had written some other music.
That's called Fihi ma Fihi. It is what it is.
We're working with the poetry of Rumi.
So that's online.
That dance opera.
But I wasn't able to perform, obviously, because I was stuck at home.
So again, that drive to create
got me, but I couldn't do much.
Like I said, even writing was an issue because of brain fog.
I was watching a lot of period dramas because they're relaxing.
In this one period drama, this doctor told this woman to take to her bed
and work on her embroidery, which I know is supposed to be insulting,
but I was like, I'm in bed.
I know some basic embroidery
from doing some Ukrainian cross-stitch in high school.
And so I called my mom because I knew she still had the materials.
She brought me over a hoop and
some thread, and I started embordering,
and I fell in love with it.
Absolutely fell in love with it because it was something I could do,
and it was restful, and it was slow.
And aside from setting up the pieces,
it doesn't take much energy, and I would
say it's actually restorative to me.
But unlike most people, I did not start with a pattern.
Most embroidery patterns, people think of flowers and words and things like that.
I started with scientific diagrams.
[Laughs.]
So, a big thing that I forgot to mention
throughout all this is I'm also a poet.
I have a couple of books out.
I had been writing about science and anatomy.
My mom's a physiologist, so I grew up around anatomy and physiology.
I started embroidery these
text-image pieces I had made where
I was relabeling scientific diagrams with poetry.
That's where I started with the embroidery.
Then at some point, I was meditating.
I'm a long-time meditator, and I was very symptomatic that day.
Meditation helped me because I would dissect the symptoms
so they would be less overwhelming.
I was tingling all over my body and
rapid heartbeat and all these things happening.
I started to see my sensations as embroidery stitches.
That led me to my symptomatology series where I embroider all my symptoms.
They're invisible.
I look fine.
I have an invisible disability.
But the symptoms of ME/CFS,
which is a post-viral ME/CFS,
that's myalgic encephalomyelitis, also known as chronic fatigue syndrome.
They're quite overwhelming.
I have improved a lot.
ME/CFS is on a spectrum.
There's extremely severe where people need feeding tubes and they can't
handle light or sound or anything, and they can't move because
it takes too much energy to do anything,
all the way up to mild,
where people can work part-time and
leave their houses.
I'm more moderate,
so I would consider myself in the mild form as long as I don't leave my house.
I can pace myself carefully.
But if I leave the house, I'm definitely in the moderate
area because then I can't do anything
for the rest of the day and sometimes a couple of days after because
I just exhausted exhausted myself from leaving the house, even being
pushed around in a transport chair.
I can't.
It's too much.
That's what I was going to say. I have improved.
I was more on the severe spectrum, not extremely severe, but more severe.
At one point, I shaved my head because washing was too exhausting.
But now I can wash myself and make simple meals and things like that.
I've added music back into it, but slightly differently.
I can't sing.
It's too exhausting to sing, though I started doing
some really simple vocal warmups for five minutes every couple of weeks,
but I'm able to play the piano again.
Most days, 10 to 15 minutes at a time, and that's about it.
I've been improvising.
I'm finding writing music is too much
of a cognitive issue, like translating
the music into a score takes too...
There's some disconnect there now where it used to be very, very easy for me.
But I can improvise. I can make up music on the fly and record it.
So that's been my focus with my music.
And broidery and music, and I am writing
some poetry and some essays.
That's my very long and complicated background.
I want to ask about the poetry.
Did you start working on poetry before you got sick,
or did it come with this
moment where you wanted to go back to the arts?
No, I've always written poetry
My first book was published in 2003.
Oh, no, there was one before that.
Maybe in the 1990s, I had a chapbook published.
Yeah, I've always written poetry.
My uncle was a poet, and he was a sound poet.
My uncle, through marriage, I shouldn't say that, my uncle, through marriage,
he married my dad's sister,
was bpNichol, who was a sound poet and another poet.
He was very influential on me.
In fact, he was the one who mentioned York University as a good place for me to go
because we had collaborated with some of the music professors there at the time.
He really mentored me with my poetry.
He died while I was a teenager.
But yeah, I've always written.
I've always written poetry and libretto and scripts.
At York University, you did some...
At York, you studied some improvisation, right?
Yes.
So people like Casey Sokol, for example, right?
Yes.
He's amazing.
Casey is great.
Most people don't realize that
there are improvisatory techniques.
There's a different style, there's different ways to do it,
there's different things to think about.
I would say my improvisations now are more melodic and more like
what I would call spontaneous composition.
I'll come up with a theme and return to it again and again
throughout the improvisation, things like that.
My improvisations are more chill than they used to be, mostly because
I want to stay calm while I'm playing, so I don't overextend myself.
But I used to be into really experimental wild stuff.
The wilder, the better.
There's a big range in what you can do through improvisation,
but I love improvising.
How did the evolution of your life
with being sick and feeling the need to
find other ways to create your art,
how did it... I guess your style evolved with that.
How did it impact it?
Oh, that's an excellent question.
I mean, the big...
I think the big sort of
shift
was the susurrations videopoem that I mentioned
about the heart where I...
I mean, I had done a lot of yoga and meditation and stuff.
Like I said, the Roy Hart work is very physical and psychological and full body.
But it made me look at my body as
both instrument and inspiration, I would say.
So making art about my symptoms started with that.
And if it's very...
I remember once talking with
a psychotherapist, and she's like,
I don't know if this is healthy to use your symptoms to make art.
I was like, No, it is probably the healthiest thing I could be doing
because it allows me to both accept and deal with my symptoms.
So a lot of my art involves understanding the physiology
behind my symptoms, understanding my own anatomy and how it's working
or not working, what's going on with it.
And I do think a big part of being someone with a chronic illness is accepting
your limitations, especially
with ME/CFS, because you're so limited.
If you overextend cognitively
or physically or even emotionally,
you get what's called post-exertional malaise or PEM, as we call it.
You basically...
I mean, you feel like you have the flu all the time, but
you feel like you have a really bad flu if you get PEM, if you exert yourself.
So accepting your limitations and
living within those constraints
can actually be very freeing in a way.
I know a lot of artists and writers and musicians even talk about using
constraint as an artistic guide, I guess.
I've taken that to heart.
Constraint equals freedom in some ways, both with chronic illness
and with art, I would say.
Did I answer your question?
I wandered all over the place.
No, it's great.
I love the idea of, of course, it's important to recognize
in what state of mind and of body you are when you create art.
I don't think there is anything wrong in
using the reality of whatever
the situation is to be part of that.
Yes.
One thing that's happened with some of my symptomatology embroideries
is people have taken screenshots of them to their doctors to help explain
their symptoms, which I'm just like, wow,
it's like, oh, my God, I'm tearing up.
That is so amazing because it's easier
for them to just say, Oh, here
is where I'm tingling on my body, exactly like this woman who is tingling.
It really surprised me when I started sharing my symptomatology embroideries online,
how many people were Oh, my God, that's exactly how I feel.
Because I thought I was doing self-portraits, but people
with the same symptoms were like, This is how I feel, which is incredible.
I mean, it blows my mind still.
Can you tell me more about these embroideries that you're making?
What is the process?
You told me that it really came from the
fact that your mom is also a scientist?
Yeah, she's a physiologist.
Oh, physiologist.
You grew up with these imageries of bodies.
Now you have your own body.
How do you connect that, these two parts of your life in embroidering?
Well, I have a whole shelf of anatomy books.
Actually, It's funny.
My mom loves my embroidery.
She's retired now.
But for my birthday every year,
I give her a list of anatomy art books,
and she'll buy me one for my birthday every year.
I have this great collection of anatomy books.
Some of them are medical textbooks, but some of them are historical anatomy art.
When I'm about to make a piece, I'll usually focus on
wherever I am symptomatic.
If I'm thinking about my tingling, I'll work on a piece about tingling.
If I'm thinking about my liver, I have some liver issues,
I'll investigate the liver.
I'll look through my anatomy books and find, usually, a historical engraving
to base the piece around.
So I've also traced my body parts.
I have a series of hands where I've traced my hand.
And then I'll do a bit of research so I understand how everything works together.
And I'll stitch the base image,
so based on the historical engraving.
And then I'll do the symptomatology stuff on top.
And that's I've usually done freehand.
I don't plan much of it out.
I really go inside my body and it's like, What am I feeling?
And stitch those sensations.
Sometimes I'll work off my medical imaging.
Unfortunately, in Saskatchewan, it's very hard to get the actual images of
your medical imaging, but I will always ask,
and often the radiologist or whoever
will show me the images on the screen.
And then when I get home, I sketch it out really fast.
So, yeah, there's different stages.
Some of the symptomatology stories are more abstract.
There's one about fatigue called neurasthenia.
That's more abstract.
Some of them are very, very visceral and very medical-looking.
I have one called Bleeding Vessel, which is of my uterus.
I took the measurements of my fibroids, beated that on.
I was diagnosed with very, very early stage endometrial cancer
and beated that on.
I actually finished that piece while I was recovering from my hysterectomy.
I show my pieces to my doctors as well.
Sometimes, I know when I was dealing with some liver stuff,
I was working on my liver piece, and I met with this surgeon, and I said,
I haven't seen my imaging, but you have, where are the structures in my biodex?
Can you point them out on this embroidery?
And he was like, It's amazing.
This is great.
So I often start a deeper conversation
with my doctors because they understand that
I understand enough of the physiology and enough of the medical terminology
that there's more communication between me and my doctors.
It's a whole process, and a lot - my pieces keep getting bigger and bigger.
Actually, this one I just recently finished, but it still needs to be
washed some more and ironed.
This is probably my biggest piece to date.
This is a vagus nerve.
I'm just going to scroll it up because it's so big.
The blue is from an engraving,
and all the colors are symptomatology.
Wow, it took about one year?
About a year. Because embroidery is slow.
Yes.
Which is part of also your process of creating, right?
It's something that you can do in your rhythm.
Yeah.
It's something I can do reclining.
I mean, right now I'm reclining back in my studio.
I have a chaise longue.
So my legs are stretched out.
I can lean back and I'll I just hold my embroidery hoop and sit here and stitch.
It's like I'm sitting up in bed.
It's very relaxing.
For those in the podcast, we just saw -
it's a long piece of embroidery, right?
It's a long piece of fabric.
It's green, and the embroidery is blue and yellow, right?
Yeah, there's mostly blue and yellow embroidery. There's some red.
There's a red heart, and in the abdomen area, there's a bunch of burgundy stitching.
Very nice.
Okay, thank you for that part.
I want to switch to the other part now, which is the music,
which is coming back to the piano.
When did you come back and what happened exactly to give you the energy and
the confidence to go back to your piano?
One of the symptoms that is really common in ME/CFS is hyperacusis.
That means you hear too much, which is
probably the worst symptom for a musician.
But it's not just that sounds are too loud.
It's like you can't differentiate between sounds.
They become all muddied together.
And there's also a pain component to it,
but not necessarily pain in your ears.
It can be pain throughout your entire body.
So I'm especially sensitive to low-pitched
rumbling sounds like construction or lawn mowers,
those sorts of sounds.
So if there's roadwork nearby,
which has been happening lately,
I'll use noise-canceling headphones.
But sometimes that isn't enough.
And the next day, my entire body
will ache, and brain fog, can't think,
that sort of thing.
So this was a very disturbing symptom to me.
So I did a bunch of research
and went through this very long,
month-long desensitization process.
So that involved using pink and brown noise, which are...
Brown noise is like...
It sounds like the rush of a waterfall or ocean waves.
It's fairly low-pitched, but complex,
but it's also very relaxing to the nervous system.
I usually listen to nature sounds in my studio, which is a hyperacusis trick
because it masks sounds that I'm sensitive to,
but it also relaxes the nervous system.
I very, very, very slowly listened to
one minute of music on a speaker
for weeks until that felt okay, and then added a minute, and then added a minute.
So very, very slowly got my body used to
not not only hearing music in headphones
or earbud, but in the air around me.
I was also working with a doctor
who knew about ME/CFS.
It took about a year to get in to see him, and he had supplements and
dietary changes and other ideas to help
improve my energy, and he really helped.
And I'm on a medication that's usually
used for alcohol addiction,
but in a very low dose, it helps heal the nervous system called Naltrexone.
So I'm on low dose of Naltrexone, and that was huge for me.
That changed so much for me.
And then I felt like I could sit up at the piano for, again,
one minute minute until that felt okay.
Add a minute, add a minute, add a minute.
So these are months long each stage.
And now I can do 10 or 15 minutes at the piano.
Though sometimes things happen and I crash.
I have a bad physical crash.
So after my hysterectomy or if I'm hospitalized
because my liver has acted up, I'll sometimes have to build myself up again,
not necessarily from nothing anymore.
I can start with five minutes instead of one minute.
But I've had to do that repeatedly,
build myself up until I get to something that -
I've realized that even one minute is useful.
When you miss something that much, even one minute is like, Oh,
I did it for one minute.
It's amazing.
How do you improvise for one minute?
That's a very small constraint.
Then you can come up with some interesting things.
It was a very, very slow process.
But right now, it's good.
Right now, I'm back for 15 minutes or so. Yeah.
And I think you also have a release that is coming up, right?
Oh, that's right.
[Laughs.]
Yes.
I released my first recording since getting sick.
It's called The Hum.
It's actually based on the hyperacusus symptoms I was talking about before.
Not only am I sensitive to low pitch sounds,
I hear this constant low pitched hum all the time.
It's very quiet, but it's there constantly.
It's a D.
It's a low D.
I also have tinnitus, and that's an A.
Thankfully, they work well together.
The Hum, the piece The Hum.
I have these low-pitched layer drones on a D, and I have a piano line
that's around an A that's quite high.
So the hum masks
my hyperacusus hum and my tinnitus.
It's very relaxing.
I've gotten some messages from people saying,
I've added this to my meditation mix.
I play this before before I go to sleep at night.
I composed it as therapeutic music,
I guess you could say, for myself, but
other people are feeling that as well.
The editing took forever because for some reason, music editing
is very cognitively taxing
for me, even though I like doing it.
I can do 20 minutes and then I'm done.
Getting a really organic drone underneath the piano part.
I think I've got four or five different sounds, and I wanted them
to cycle through each other.
Getting that going took a fair bit
of editing, but apparently, I got there,
according to what the people were saying.
I was very happy to be like, Oh, I finished something.
Wow. It's about 10 minutes long.
Yeah, The Hum.
How long did it take to record it?
Oh, months.
I don't remember.
Maybe, it's probably more than a year.
Yeah, including the editing.
The recording, I think I did the piano because I wanted to be fairly specific
about it, I did it in a few different sessions.
But that probably took about a month.
Then, like I said, the editing of the drone
took a very long time, months and months.
Well, congratulations.
Thank you.
I was very happy to finish it and put it out into the world.
Well, I will put all the links to listen to it and to purchase it
on ArtsAbly's website.
Thank you.
Okay, I have a last question for you before we end our conversation,
which is about collaborations or interesting people in your life
who might have inspired you
to do whatever you were doing today or how things turned in your life.
If you had one or two people to think of and to name,
who would it be and why?
Well, I'm going to mention my husband
because he is so supportive
and so helpful.
He makes my life easy enough
that I can do my creative work.
He's very
physically supportive in terms of that.
I mean, marriages often fall apart when one partner gets ME/CFS because
you're not the person you were before.
But he's stuck by me.
He's the cook in the family, so I just have to assemble meals.
I don't have to cook things from scratch.
If I need embroidery threads, he'll either take me to shop
or I'll tell him which colors I need and he'll pick them up for me.
He's just really, really, really helpful.
And he understands how important it is for me to be creative,
because when I'm not creative.
I am a mess, psychologically.
I get very depressed and it's just very bad.
And he knows this about me.
We got married in our early 20s, so we've been married for
over 30 years now, so he gets me.
Other creative people I've worked with, I'm going to mention Opera Mariposa,
which other people may have mentioned on the podcast,
but what they're doing in terms of
awareness campaigns,
their May awareness campaign for ME/CFS and fibromyalgia is incredible.
It's like this little community forms for a month,
and we share each other's work, and it's wonderful.
It's not just opera artist, it's visual artists
and writers and art activists.
They've really created a beautiful thing with their May Awareness campaign.
Yeah, and they're great to work with.
Stephanie and Jacqueline Ko, the sisters who run Opera Mariposa,
they both have ME/CFS, so they get it.
They give us lots of time to get our work to them, and
they're just really wonderful to work with.
I'm always in awe of Jacqueline's singing because I can't sing, but I used to sing,
but she's got this incredibly powerful voice, and she must have
an incredible pacing technique because...
Wow.
I've also met through them, Christina Baltais,
who's a Toronto artist, visual artist. She does collage work.
She has ME/CFS, and she does gorgeous collages.
A lot of it about her symptoms, not all of it, but a lot of it about her symptoms.
Really powerful, beautiful work.
And I think if there is anyone else.
I mean, there's so many fiber artists online
that I love and have connected with.
Laura Bundesen also does scientific
emboideries, mostly about the brain.
Just beautiful.
Very different from my work, but gorgeous.
She's been great helping me figure out the nuts and bolts of things like,
How much do you sell a piece of embroidery for?
Because it takes you hours to do.
She's been really helpful.
There's a really great sci-art community on social media
who has been really supportive of my work.
Glendon Mellow is the guy who started all that.
He's in Toronto.
Yeah, so lots of people, not all disability-related.
But yeah, any art gets done in a community.
Yeah. Thank you so much.
I was wondering, are you exhibiting your embroideries?
Mostly online, to tell the truth.
I am trying to figure out if I have the energy to frame them myself
or if I need to shop that out.
So I've gotten the basic materials
to stretch my embroideries on map board,
but I haven't gotten to the point of actually trying that out yet.
So I do have one piece in the Saskatchewan Arts Board Permanent Collection
but they took care of the framing.
So that was awesome.
So that piece gets rented out as part of their art bank.
So it might be up somewhere right now.
But mostly online, just because of the framing thing,
this is still a hump I need to get over.
My husband was a visual artist.
He's taken a break from that, so he knows what's involved.
So he is going to help me,
but I need to just get over that hump.
So I do share my work online a lot,
and there's some online galleries
of my work in various places.
I did have a bunch of pieces published in a recent anthology
called Sharp Notions.
Actually, one of my embroideries is on the cover, a lung embroidery.
It's an anthology about stitching,
about fiber arts, knitting, all that stuff.
Great essays, really beautiful essays, published by Arsenal Pulp Press
in Vancouver.
There's a bunch of embroideries and an essay about my embroidery
written by me in there.
I would like to show and sell
my work, but it's hard to...
Knowing what's involved in sending work out into the world,
like physically, it's a lot.
It's a lot of physical labor,
let alone cognitive labor.
It seems like a lot.
I haven't quite got there yet.
Digital world, awesome.
Thank you.
Okay, thank you so much for this conversation. It was really interesting.
Thank you.
All the best for all your projects and everything.
Thank you.
Thank you for asking me to participate here.
Have a great day and talk to you soon about future projects.
Yes.
Okay. Bye. Take care.
Bye.
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