Protest poems — ADULT GROCERIES

Cort Hartle is a Saint Petersburg, Florida-based artist whose multidisciplinary practice explores embodiment, interconnection, and place. Their work has been exhibited nationally by art spaces such as Field Projects (NYC), Big Medium (TX), the Johnson Fine Arts Center at Northern State University (SD), and the Department of Contemporary Art (FL), among others, and is found in private collections internationally. Notable publications include Saw Palm: Florida Literature and Art at the University of South Florida Press, Creative Quarterly, and the anthology Cipher: The Semiotics of Love and Desire. They earned a BA in Anthropology from the University of South Florida in 2018 and currently work as Collections Manager at Hillsborough Community College Art Galleries. ︎

artist feature 001:

Cort Hartle, they/them

Protest poems
a series of text-based work on hand-built ceramic plates, 2023

AG: how would you describe this body of work? does it build off of other work you've done?

Cort Hartle: Protest poems is a series that I'm still figuring out. It’s a loose collection of prose poems, aphorisms, diary entries, and stream of consciousness yells into the void written on hand-built ceramic plates. It’s one of those series that doesn’t have a concrete goal or an end date, no looming exhibition to answer to or parameters to measure success by.

I first started making art at about 20 mostly just as a way to process some really difficult things I was going through. This body of work feels like it’s coming more from that deeper human place again rather than from an intellectualized one. It’s a distillation of urgent feelings into a stable form.

AG: could you tell us a bit about your process, and how it influenced the pieces?

Cort Hartle: I took up ceramics earlier this year as a way to bring joy back into my artistic practice, something that I felt like I’d lost through navigating the pressures of capitalism. I love clay because it makes me feel like an animal in a way. There’s an immediacy to it—the way it smells, the feeling of wet dirt on my hands—and there’s a delicious freedom in being a beginner at something because you don’t yet know when you’re breaking the rules.

I often write sentence fragments into my paintings as a way to explore how people make meaning through relationships and associations, and how those meanings change, break down, or are reconstituted. When I’m writing into paintings, I spend a lot of time trying to find the exact perfect set of words. That process is painstaking, there’s endless repetition and revision. This series feels like a departure from previous work in that it’s straight from the gut. Clay has been really important in getting out of my head and into my body, and in doing so I’m hearing what my body has to say, and my body is angry and afraid and vicious like something that’s been backed into a corner, and that’s what’s coming out in these pieces.

AG: what themes did you play with for this series and how did you personally come to relate to those themes?

Cort Hartle: Something I’ve thought a lot about over the years is how art can be used to imagine better worlds for us to live in. I think a lot of people individually, myself included, are feeling pretty powerless in the current political climate in Florida, and this series is my own reaction to that. When I’m alone in my apartment and I look at the endless barrage of bad news, I’m thinking, it’s all too much, what can be done, I’m just one person who is really only good at making pictures and words, how can I help, is it enough? I know the answer lies in community, so I want my contribution to be something that can make people feel more connected to each other.

Sometimes my friends all get together and make protest signs on cardboard and paper, and then we march through the streets with them, and it feels powerful because we’re all chanting together. I heard someone make a very astute observation a while back that was like, “We keep holding up signs but they aren’t reading them.” I guess I wanted to speak to that and make something that feels like a more permanent record of our collective fears and desires, something that might last. I wanted to say, maybe they aren’t listening, but we are, and we’re still here.