We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Jill Foote-Hutton. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Jill below.

Jill, appreciate you joining us today. It’s always helpful to hear about times when someone’s had to take a risk – how did they think through the decision, why did they take the risk, and what ended up happening. We’d love to hear about a risk you’ve taken.

It feels as though we are in the age of spectrums, maybe the age of “iconic” spectrums. I only mean that we might be collectively over hearing these words, but risk-taking is only measured within the context of any given culture, right? One time while ferrying a visiting artist about town, she was apologizing for all of her specific needs: no dairy, no wheat, no sugar, no direct sunlight, no… The list was long and it wouldn’t be considered an uncommon list in 2024, but this was before 2010. The part of her apology that stuck with me was this, “I don’t think I’m particularly special, I just think that I have much less tolerance for how bad these things make me feel.” Yes, sugar does not make me feel awesome in the end, but that doesn’t keep me from it. Her perspective seemed like a way to back into understanding what she needed to thrive.

This is how I view my relationship with risk-taking. If I could abide unchanging status quo, I would take less risks. Conversely, I am not going to be jumping off of a cliff in a squirrel suit any time soon. Decidedly, I am not an adrenaline junkie. My mother did raise us to understand that we can generate work and opportunity wherever we go, so no need to sit around being miserable. We could have been taught how to change the situation, or to change our mindset about the situation, and my upbringing wasn’t void of diplomacy. Nope. We had a healthy combo of stubbornness and diplomacy. We’ll try to change a situation, but after 2-several attempts, my people say, “I’m out.”

In my first academic appointment at a community college, the art students graduated with Associate of Arts degrees, just general education degrees. My colleague and I worked with the Dean to design an Associate of Fine Art degree that would set our art students up for more success when they transferred. Up to this point in time, art students who loved printmaking (for example) could take six printmaking courses and never have any foundation art classes. With the AFA degree they would have a path relevant to their future that would allow them to transfer without having to make-up back courses. It took us about a year-and-a-half to get all the planning and paper work together and then the Dean just needed to take it to the state for approval. We even worked with the Math Department to design a “Math for Artists” class. The students who took it said, “This was the hardest math class I’ve ever taken and I loved it!” I think this is because the problems were relevant to art. Think: proportions of a figure in a ceiling mural.

So, we have the paper work complete and we are waiting for word from the state. We waited. And waited. And waited. And waited some more. Two years, with me checking in, “Have we made any progress?”

One day, in conversation with my Division Chair, he said, “Ya gotta find a different way to put it in front of her.”

I had one student in particular who was transferring to Otis College of Art and Design. She had been following this new degree plan with the approval of the Dean. As she neared graduation, the AFA still was only a dream. Otis couldn’t understand her transcript. I taught my students how to write a professional letter. You know, the whole deal: date, return address, recipient address, salutations, body, closing, the whole bit. We talked about how the Dean had priorities and was looking at the welfare of the whole school, “The Dean is not a monster, she just needs to hear from you why this new degree is important to your future.”

I wish I could tell you that all of my students followed through and wrote letters. In all honesty, I don’t know how many of them actually followed through, but one did. And the Dean was outraged when that one student was not satisfied with her answer. She shouldn’t have been. The Dean needed to keep her promise. But this was the end of my time at this institution. Everything became incredibly volatile one morning, and I got an interview at a clay center out west.

Our combined household income dropped by 66% and we gave up our insurance so we could move to a place with ten months of snowfall. No one really understood why we would do this. By the end of five years, we had insurance again, my professional network in the field of ceramics had grown exponentially, our combined income rebounded to what it had been. It was a lesson in tree pruning. At least that’s how I look at at.

The degree plan did go through before I left. The department received NASAD accreditation the following year. The risk taken brought growth for us all, but it wasn’t without its pain. Still, I would do it again. I have done it multiple times, but with less and less turmoil as my naïveté erodes and my diplomatic skills grow.

Jill, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

Whistlepig Studio, as a concept and a brand, was born in 2010 during a particularly trying time in my academic career. My gift (my curse?) seems to be that I somehow find the boundary in any given situation and push beyond comfortable societal or professional boundaries. I’m usually motivated honestly, by observation, but cursed by naiveté – my observations are processed on a very literal “if-then” level and rarely seem to factor in the limits of the human condition. In short, I have pushed too far in my life on more than one occasion.

Pushing too far is, in and of itself, not a bad thing.

This is how we wind up with the most magnificent discoveries.

Pushing too far is how we develop new pathways.

However, the thing I always seem to miss?

The human condition, as a group or as an individual, doesn’t want someone else to take that last step for us. No one, at least very few people, are going to be grateful you went too far, especially if you carry them along in your process, however unwitting you may be. In forgetting, or overlooking, or being too naive to realize this very crucial point, any boldness I have can be quickly followed by crippling regret when the pushback comes down hard.

Hard, equated to a disproportionate and venomous response in one particular scenario. I think I’ve spent the last decade taking tentative steps to get over the explosion I experienced as an instructor in higher education. The specifics don’t matter so much, except I will say I was advocating for my students and empowering them to advocate for themselves. We took on an authority figure we didn’t reckon was an enemy. Pushing too far revealed our enemy and, as I was leading the charge, I took the brunt of the blow.

And here lies the “event center” of the origin story of the Guardian Monsters, because this is the time when I would struggle with my purpose. I was trying to understand how I was wrong. I was afraid to leave the safety of my home, but I did. I had recurring nightmares filled with the most disgusting bathrooms. Having never experienced recurring dreams of any kind, I now know I was worried about my worry.

I looked up the symbolism of dirty bathroom dreams.

It ain’t good.

I started to do the Haka at home before I would go into work on a day when there would be a departmental meeting. The Haka is not of my culture, but the concept resonated with me, and as I mix and match most things, I also painted my face. I created a mask in private, to embolden me in public.

I felt I was at war.

I didn’t understand why and I didn’t know what to do.

The solution, of course, that worked best, was turning to my drawing board in my studio. With charcoal in hand, I created large, organic outlines of random shapes. I just let all the energy and anxiety I was feeling guide my hand, drawing a heavy black outline on a wall that held a five foot by three foot piece of Arches paper, torn from a roll. Inside the outline I wrote, savagely pouring out all of my irrational and rational fears and questions. I drew with text filling up the empty space.

In a stream of consciousness flow, the letters became aggressive texture. But, when I had filled the void, it was too bare, too revealing of my inner voice. I didn’t want an audience to read the text I had committed to paper.

Ever.

I didn’t want to preserve this raw journaling for external viewers.

The texture of the text became the first layer of a growing palimpsest as I painted over the top of the words. Slowly, getting lost in the process of finding an image, of laying materials on top of each other, reigned in only by a self-imposed monochromatic rule, I found the first Guardian Monster. It was the bison guardian I now use as the Whistlepig logo. It is the guardian tattooed on my body. It is the guardian I use repeatedly to illustrate various narratives. It is the guardian I have clung to as we moved around the country over the last decade.

Calling him a bison is not wholly accurate, but it is the most recognizable influence of his physical attributes. His head is improbably balanced, much larger on top than below with his eyes, nose, and mouth all crowded together at the forward-facing base of his skull. Beyond his bison-like qualities though, he has too many horns – six altogether. His mouth is circular with razor sharp teeth, like a modified lamprey eel mouth. He is mostly blue in his original guise, but he has morphed into red. I think red is his warrior color and blue is his natural color, better reflecting him as a symbol of gratitude. Red is when he is in protective mode, when he is on high alert. Of course, his mythology has evolved over the course of a decade, but this way of thinking, of creating an avatar or a spirit guide, is rooted in my upbringing and the foundation of my studio practice.

I was raised in a religious family. Not the kind that was oppressive, but one that believes in an open, affirming, and loving god. The god-head presence was just matter of fact – much more akin to Tevyah in Fiddler on the Roof than anything else. I also grew up on a steady diet of Muppets and fairy tales. Then, when I was becoming an official “art major,” my mentor was a performance artist and showed me the works of Carolee Schneemann and Mary Beth Edelson, among others. Their work was powerful to me, spiritual, and used art to invoke invisible power that is always seated within us as individuals, even if it lay dormant.

Imagine dumping all of these (and trust me, more of the same) into one hopper (my brain) and it all comes together in a time of crisis to realize the creation of Guardian Monsters.

Each Guardian Monster is a variation on an archetype of the human condition. Each Guardian Monster is pulled from the fearful shadows that lurk inside our minds. Pulled out of the darkness, where they can only be meddlesome MONSTERS, into the light, where we can see the gifts they have to offer. Each Guardian Monster can carry, like all art objects really, what we need them to carry – what we put on them. They are intended, at their best, to operate as ceremonial objects, which remind us to rise to our higher power.

From my studio I look out into nature and research the symbolism of the flora and fauna that surrounds the earth, region by region. I take parts from human, animal, and plants; mixing and matching to create unique chimeras. Behind every Guardian Monster-head is a narrative, a world, a purpose. While it’s not important for me to tell YOU each story, because that story can change if you decide one of the guardians speaks to you, I do like to create digital collages sometimes with their visage. Again, giving the guardians a larger context. I like to write or gather flash fiction narratives to accompany the collages, another way to fill in the potential backstory of their existence.

I also like to facilitate the power of creating a personal totem in workshops, where I work with adults who may have forgotten how to call their own power into being in a healthy way. I like to work with adults who need to remember how to do that and who need the opportunity art provides to execute low-consequence, autonomous decisions. So each Guardian Monster workshop is a chance for an adult to reclaim the magic of childhood, when we could easily conjure heroes and gods out of thin air – when we could become them.

The fantastical creatures I make embody empathy for our own human frailties. As my practice grows their forms have evolved and their names are manifold: Guardian Monster, Swefn, Civilized Wildlings. Each body of work is rooted in the literary history of monster. They universally reflect the darkest realms of the subconscious collective, but they don’t stay in the shadows. I refer to my creations as monsters, because monsters are honest in their single-mindedness, as well as their inability to hide faults.

This honesty, this monster, resides at some strata in everyone’s story. By shining a light into the shadow of ourselves, welcoming the monster to sit next to us as an ally, we step closer to the hero within ourselves, as they are two sides of the same coin: the light and the dark.

Humble earthenware, discarded and found objects, as well as comics are the material elements at play in each object. Once the three-dimensional work is completed, next follows digital collage and verbal language in the form of flash fiction zines. Brought together the visual and verbal tell common, sometimes non-sensical tales of the lives led by each Guardian Monster, each Swefn, and each Civilzed Wildling.

Guardian Monsters seize the power of those objects and beings from an authoritarian state of mind and put that power back into the hearts and minds of the individual. Guardian Monsters are my shibboleth, they drive the darkness away, and they hold the individual accountable to their highest self. Guardian Monsters are objects that carry stories we imbue them with. They are tools of empowerment and reflection. YOU get to name your belief. YOU get to carve your road to enlightenment. The Guardian Monsters are just an interpretation of the talisman, the totem, the god, the demon, the angel, the witch, the hero…the spirit, and I’m proud to explore this rich, historical vein.

Civilized Wildlings are a collection of vessels informed by art nouveau pottery made in Bohemia at the turn of the century by Eduard Stellmacher and Paul Daschel. The forms were harmonious curves crawling with creatures from the forest with thick details and opulent glazes.

The flora and fauna crawling over and growing around the forms are decidedly more anthropomorphized, sometimes comically so. Working in layers, both formally and conceptually, the creatures are portrayed wearing Victorian accoutrements – an allusion to the historic habit of conquering classes around the world to tame and civilize that which has been deemed wild. The effect is darkly comical, demonstrating how ludicrous the narrow margins of establishment are.

Swefn (pronounced swē̆ven) is a word rooted in Old English defined as, “a dream experienced in sleep; a dream-vision, prophetic dream; also, a supernatural vision appearing to one in a waking state.” Swefn are larger than Guardian Monsters, a growing tribe. This is the newest body of work from Whistlepig Studio, and as such, their story is still evolving. But don’t worry, they still have plenty of tales to relate.

And what of the name Whistlepig?

Well, remember the gopher from Winnie-the-Pooh? He was an outlier in the hundred-acre wood. He was helpful to the community, but he went his own way, always working diligently – never missing a break. That gopher had some balance in his life, and he knew who he was. He had a self-awareness the other characters may have lacked.

Also, the love of my life is from Texas and he is prone to using colloquialisms, as am I, being from Missouri. He would sometimes call me “porcupine” as a term of endearment. One day he said, “You should call your studio ‘Whistlepig’,” it made perfect sense to me. I did not give it a second thought. I just said, “YES!”

A gopher is sometimes called a whistlepig because of the squealing noise they make; sorta sounds like a whistle. A gopher has nothing to do with a bison. A bison has nothing to do with a lamprey eel. Somehow, when disparate parts are brought together, our minds miraculously create meaning. Depending on how serious you take the history of totems, which has a long and storied past (see: wishbones, worry stones, worry beads, four leaf clovers, feathers, bear claws, Milagros placed on altars, Nkondi figures from the Congo, rabbit feet, evil eye pendants, etc, etc), will depend on how you relate to the Guardian Monsters.

How much meaning will you give them?

So that’s that.

And the quest, even a decade-plus later, keeps me interested.

Learning and unlearning are both critical parts of growth – can you share a story of a time when you had to unlearn a lesson?

I had to unlearn that words do not belong with visual art. In school my professors were always professing, “If you have to use words, then your visual language isn’t strong enough!” I think this is one way that academia is changing, but needs to change faster-don’t make the student conform to what the masters did, watch the student who has this disposition for processing their lived experience with their hands and imagination and see what they need to get stronger. None of us knows what the next cultural break through will be. I think I have been most shocked in my career at the inflexibility we artists can have. We are not immune to stagnation.

Throughout high school and the first three-and-a-half years of college, I studied journalism and creative writing. OF COURSE I’m going to use words with images. Of course I am.

Is there mission driving your creative journey?

Artists are blessed with the knowledge that they can make something from nothing. I want to hold space for anyone who has the inkling that they might be more self-actualized and empowered by thinking with their hands. I want to help the next generation figure out how to make a sustainable living from their gifts. I want to reimagine academia. And I am. I am working on a business plan, collaborating with my colleagues, to return to an invigorated version of a vocational program for artists. I am happy to be one of the small drips of water eroding the old, static modes of education in favor of something more fluid, more creative, and more generative.

With my art objects, I want to continue exploring ideas swirling around the human condition through the lens of the natural world, creating wholly unnatural beings to better help us understand ourselves.

Contact Info:

• Website: http://www.whistlepigtales.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/p/CulDrTCrz3Z/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/WhistlepigTalesStudio

Image Credits
Photo credit: Jill Foote-Hutton