Anna Hoye is the newest addition to Young Audiences roster of artists. While she joined us just this year, she has 20 years of photography and teaching experience. Anna’s personal artistic practice ranges from building a modern coop for her backyard chickens, creating a life-sized camera obscura, and experimenting with digital and manual photographic processes. For Young Audiences, Anna will teach cyanotype photographic printing – working with students to build images from objects and printing them to treated paper or fabric.

What is your art practice outside of teaching? The practice of my art is really a life approach, though I focus on photography and photographic processes. I’m constantly dreaming and brainstorming of all the ways I am an artist, aside from work I show. After the ice storm Saturday I created a large scale ice sculpture garden around our home just because I live to be in the zone of creation and wonder.

Last summer I designed and built a modern chicken coop and with every detail I sculpted spending hours single handedly joyously in the zone. I’m reworking a life size camera obscura that I had made several years back for a school and I hope to bring this experience to the public. I’m considering a small trailer to bring it to locations for viewing. With the camera obscura you stand inside the darkened circular room and from the small aperture hole on the side of the camera the image in living color is projected upside down and backwards on the walls and ceiling, a scientific marvel.

I’ve lived as a photographer of art, life, and anything interesting for close to 20 years. People are fascinating to me, and I thoroughly enjoy the process of artistically photography their lives, their laughter, and vulnerable beauty. I love the technology of today with digital cameras, computers, and wise software, though with that I feel the desire for the hands on photographic experience of my analog past and its long history. I have a soft spot for the cyanotype photographic process on silks, fabrics, or papers.

How does Oregon inspire your art making? A few years ago I created a body of large format prints mounted on bamboo with the inspiration of rain storms. Ocean coasts, deep forests, hidden lakes, and high deserts have influenced my work. I feel inspired both by the landscape and the community of artists and art lovers.

What fuels your creative practice? Being busy is the biggest fuel, when my mind is rushing with ideas I feel energized so engaged I’m timeless.

If you could be any animal, what would you be? A Mountain Lion.

What is one of your earliest art memories? I was a kindergartner on tour of the Missoula Art Museum where we viewed and talked about abstract art. Then we got to create an abstract collage with ripped construction paper. My paper was red and there were a myriad of colors of paper torn like stalagmites and stalactites and this was my first conscious experience of being lost in the zone. I decided I loved this more than anything I’d ever done, and was fascinated with the idea that this creation was me, unique, my voice. I looked up and my teacher and the docent were watching me as all the kids had lined up at the door. I had no idea I was so focused. They enjoyed my work, but I imagine today they enjoyed my engagement most. I knew I wanted to be an artist then.

What’s the best thing about being a teaching artist? When the projects have everyone engaged and in the zone. I know this act builds voice and confidence. Knowing the happiness that this practice brings to each child is the best part.

Why is art important to kids? Kids are naturally self expressive and the arts are ways to keep them connected to their voice and self expression, developing confidence and appreciation for seeing details.

What teacher or artist was inspirational to you as a kid? Hazel Foley was a watercolor artist who did a residency at our school and over my childhood I took classes from her. I loved that she was committed to being an artist and making it work. Teaching was part of her plan and she brought confidence and expected total respect about each other’s artwork. It was a safe place to be vulnerable.

Who is your art hero now?I love lots of artists and don’t have one hero, choosing would be a painful mental battle, but I will say that I’ve been especially inspired by Tadashi Kawamata‘s instillations [that] turn everyday refuse into collections that challenge space and the eye. He introduces chaos and I’ve been contemplating the benefit of inspired chaos with art so he feeds my soul. The photo shows “Gandamaison” a project made from fruit and vegetable crates through Versailles.

What is a favorite memory of creating or performing? My all time favorite memory creating art was in the last largest rainstorm I remember from several years back. I was the only person out in the city, rain boots, raincoat, umbrella, camera and pounding sheets of rain. The movement, sounds, smells, solitude, reflections, clarity, everything was painterly and layered.

If you weren’t an artist, what would you be? I always dreamed of being an astronaut and secretly I still do, even if I’m not getting younger. Fireman perhaps.

Was there ever a point when you didn’t believe you could make it as an artist? When I was in college I was feeling daunted by my path as an artist. A teacher had said (as a challenge to drive us) statistically only five percent of us would still be practicing art and making a living as an artist in 15 years, and my heart sunk. Listening to my father urge me to go into business for security concerns, seeing the doubt on people’s faces who had sacrificed their dreams for money, and I pulled out of my art classes. For one long, lonely, and uninspired semester I went full steam ahead into business. It was the last night to sign up for the following months courses and I was depressed with the weight of my decision when I opened a fortune cookie out at a local restaurant and inside it read in hot pink “Art Is Your Fate, Do Not Debate.” I have never looked back and I still have that hot pink message. Now I listen to my inner voice and I know I’m doing the right thing.

Learn more about Anna at www.annahoye.com and on her Facebook page www.facebook.com/Anna.Hoye.Photography. Keep your eyes peeled for an upcoming show of Anna’s cyanotype prints! To schedule a residency at your school, contact [do action=”contact-school-liaison”]Josephine Kuever[/do]