By Alissa Hattman

Mita Mahato is a comix artist and poet who assembles her panels and pages with cut and collaged papers. Her work joins fragments of used and discarded materials in poetic experiments that dramatize entangled processes of death and renewal, specifically within the context of ecosystemic loss under capitalism. Mahato’s newest book, Arctic Play, maps a shifting landscape through woven and layered papers to stage the Arctic’s dynamic setting and invoke nonhuman presences.

I first came upon Mita’s work through her piece “Whale Fall: Sequences 1, 2, 3” in Ecotone no. 34, and was delighted to hear that Arctic Play would join the cohort of artists and writers (myself included) that make up The 3rd Thing Press. This summer, I had the great opportunity to speak with Mita about generative questions that inform multiple projects, the concept of play with regard to creative engagement and the climate crisis, material collaborators and developing a visual vocabulary, subjectivity and representation in art, the grammar of the grid, and how remaining fluid can help with creative endurance. This transcription, modified for clarity, is a slightly edited version of the conversation we had this past July.

Alissa Hattman: Arctic Play is so many things: it’s a drama, a dirge, a log, a poetic experiment, a comic, a weave, a map of the Arctic imaginary, a generous invitation that expands our capacity to be with geographic and creative uncertainty. I know that you began working on this book in 2017, when you were at the Norwegian Arctic of Svalberg for the artist residency. Can you talk more about how the project evolved? Did you have an idea in mind before your residency, or was it something that came together during, or long after, your time on the ship?

Mita Mahato: When I applied for the residency, I had a different project in mind. I had been focused on whales and using my comix as a way to feel into their habitats, thinking about how to understand the distance between this body here—a human body—and a body that moves through and lives in the water. But on the residency ship, it became quickly apparent that the project was not available to me or to the circumstances. I felt stuck creatively and it took me a while to reconcile myself to that and the mourning and confusion it caused. I was on the ship with several other artists; and we were all excited to be there with each other and to talk about ideas that we shared, but there were a few things that were blocking me. Part of it was the reality of “oh, this is not what I expected,” and being uncomfortable with how I was moving through this place, and why I was moving through this place. Most of us there were dedicated to leveraging our art toward the climate crisis and environmental issues, but there was a feeling of “oh, I’m participating in things that I’m critical of”—like cruise tourism, like land objectification—and I wasn’t sure what I should be doing. I wondered: “What will I leave with? Should I still be making art if it’s costly to the causes I care about?” It wasn’t until I returned that I started really thinking through it all. I knew I would come back to my work on whales, but there was something knotty and confused that I needed to process about how to represent these places that we come into relation with and what informs those relations. I started taking notes and looking at my photos and reflecting on that time and then reading what other people had to say and slowly it started building from there.

Hattman: It sounds like it ended up extending so much further outside of your residency than you anticipated. So you were doing these projects engaging with whales. Did you end up putting that aside so you could focus mostly on what ended up being Arctic Play? Or did you work on both projects at once? It sounds like you were saying that this new project could teach you something before you returned to your work with whales. Am I right about that?

Mahato: Yes, but I also found it moved in both directions—that Arctic Play was feeding my other work and my other work was feeding into this newer project. At some point, I realized that Arctic Play was going to be a long-term project. I wasn’t sure how long it would take. I was imagining two or three years and that turned into seven. But during that time, I also made shorter poetry comix—about whales, but also about other species or ecosystems—thinking less about singular animals and more about the interweavings of beings and places. In these shorter pieces, I could experiment with some of the strategies and techniques I would use in Arctic Play or just play stylistically or wonder about the impact of plastic pollution on alligators or “what is this extinct duck that once lived in Bihar?” So it was a place to wrangle with some questions I had or ideas I came across, whether about whales, or marine environments, or extinct species that weren’t necessarily part of Arctic Play, but informed my approach to it.

Hattman: Right, and inviting new projects, and inviting the everyday into the work, is really part of the work. And part of the play. So, I’m thinking about what is said in Arctic Play’s prologue about the concept of play as something that is “happening everywhere at any moment” and thinking about the players as acting agents. We’re conditioned to think of people as being the sole actors in a play, but your book invites us to think about the players in new ways. So, for example, considering the medium as a player: the grids, lines, words, shapes, paper, ink as acting agents. In the prologue, we see how words overlap and form a wave, break apart and come back together, form new words inside and outside of a scattering of boxes or panels. There’s this idea of the words and panels appearing and disappearing, the actors appearing and disappearing. And I’m also thinking about the line: “I’m always remembering from a state of loss.” This book focuses on animals and the environment, but also allows for your particular subjectivity, that is, we get a sense of you and the concerns or anxieties you might have about your role in the play, but you’re not centered. You’re not the one in the spotlight. Was it difficult to know what of yourself to include?

Mahato: First, thank you for your attention to the details in the work. It’s very touching. Text still has agency even when it’s “done” and printed; it’s shifting and moving from time to time and eye to eye. That textual agency or energy is something I really wanted to exaggerate or open up in Arctic Play. When Anne (the 3rd Thing editor) and I were looking at the print proofs for final edits, we were standing side by side, she looking at one copy and I at another, and we both kept being surprised by what was happening on the page—eruptions or relations we hadn’t noticed before. It was bizarre and also funny—to see that agency at work. I think wanting to let the text play was part of what helped me de-center myself. There was so much play in the creation of the book. Even with a template or a map or script, there was always something surprising, the paper somehow communicating to me in a way that felt new or different. Maybe it was the shapes that were revealed by cutting apart the graphics in a newspaper ad or the unpredictable movements of tissue paper. The process of decentering myself came naturally with the process of working in that open way. Then, any time I did feel centered, it would create this kind of anxiety—and I tried to be deliberate about putting that on the page so that I could deal with it or undercut it. The other thing I would add about including but decentering my voice and perspective is that I wanted to create space in the book to understand “self” as something that is so entangled with “other” that they are indistinguishable—that we’re all part of this heaving, breathing ecosystem or organism. I’m not sure I always got there—but even trying to convey that struggle was important for me.

Hattman: I was struck by your ability to enter into a topic as large as our ecological crisis with such openness and care; and I think this concept of play is one way to do this. There is respect for the environment, and noticing what has been lost, but also what is there. There is also respect for the reader through the invitation to re-see. For example, in Act 1, there are collaged lists describing a passenger’s encounters with Arctic animals, objects, and places. The gridlines invite readers to engage with the accumulated text in new and exciting ways. So, I think that the weave of materials suggests a patterning outside of the grammar of the sentence, or maybe even also the grammar of a panel is comix. There’s this giving and receiving quality of the weave that reminded me of how Donna Haraway describes play in Staying with the Trouble. She says that play is one way to mess with the formal structures in order to “stay with the trouble in serious multispecies worlds.” I wondered if you could talk more about geographic and creative uncertainty as a necessary condition for navigating the climate crisis and play more broadly.

Mahato: Donna Haraway’s Staying with the Trouble was one of the books that helped me face the questions that came out of the residency. In Act 1, I was thinking about how so many of the encounters we witness, through reading or in documentaries, are about mastering something and about having control and having power over the encounter. “How can I use my words to re-form this thing that I’ve seen?” And so, I wanted to use the space of the page as a way to contextualize this proclivity in a field that is much more complicated and entangled and where that kind of exercise of control is bounced around and tangled up and doesn’t have the power that we think it might. Instead of following this impulse to control, what if we just stepped back and witnessed? I’m thinking of these various landings that we took during the residency—those small moments when I was too cold to do anything but listen and look and notice. Everything felt so entwined and integrated. And I think those experiences inspired me to play. It’s an approach that allows for wonder, allows for surprise, allows for multiplicity, for joining, for leaving. I think, with the weaving, it gave me space on the page to disrupt the sense that things are straightforward, linear, or simple to connect.

Hattman: I found that the use of the entire page, and that expansiveness, was another kind of generosity to the reader because it allows for so many different ways of reading. You can follow the text left-to-right, up-to-down, in-parallel. There’s this layering going on; and then specifically in Act 1, the layout of the words sometimes visually evokes the environment that’s being described; for example, the ice “cracking” down the page or the jellyfish that’s poked evokes that breech or rupture. There’s a level of engagement for the reader that I find very open and generous and trusting. And, also, there is a little discomfort involved in choosing how to read, but the ways in which you subtly guide and pace us through the piece is something that I found inviting—and I suspect this guidance has something to do with your background with comix—but even though there were times when I wasn’t sure where to start my reading, I was able to enter into the space of uncertainty trusting that I would be guided to the next page and through the book in this fluid way. I’d love to hear more about your approach to sequencing and juxtaposing images and words.

Mahato: I began teaching comix before I began making them myself, so a lot of how I approach engaging students with comix plays into my practice. We have certain iconography that works across most comix, but there’s also how an artist might create a visual vocabulary for a particular book or poem. With students, I talk about how we can trace or recognize the visual language that an artist develops, or see where certain motifs show up again, or notice when they’re disrupted. And so, I was very aware of the reader’s position in making Arctic Play. I asked myself: “What is the visual vocabulary that I want to establish for my readers in each of the acts?” Some of that had to do with color choices, some with paper choices, layout—every piece in the first act is essentially a list poem—so having a certain amount of consistency in each act that the reader can identify and find an anchor in. I’m depending on my reader to puzzle through and trace the consistencies and the disruptions. It becomes a game, too. It’s a form of play. So even while play was informing my own approach, I’m inviting the reader to participate in the play as well. Another aspect of comix that I love toying around with is the grid—the way the page is laid out and how the panels are in relation. Because I use cut paper and collage, I love experimenting with the grid by layering papers. Like instead of drawing lines to make a panel, I’ll maybe cut out rectangles and use those as the panels. In layering papers, something is potentially covered or hidden—something that the reader doesn’t have direct access to but can imagine or catch glimpses of. I like the way that those layers acknowledge perspectives that are obscured in any representation. In Act 1, that sort of layering is exacerbated by the woven paper. The shapes that emerge from the interplay of the warp and weft could be seen as panels—as a grid. And then I placed other elements on the page—collaged shapes, the printed words, the connective lines between words—that followed the gridlines created by the weaving. That is, the grid determined how the poems would be told rather than the other way around. Maybe it’s an approach to sequence that isn’t about presenting order or linearity, but that sits in its own puzzle. I’m interested in how people will read these pages. How will they take in the grids? What kind of sequence will they see in them?

Hattman: In Act 2, we see fragments of conversation among passengers; and we notice some of the common iconography with the word balloons. And, in this part, the handmade paper embedded with plastic scraps and food packaging, along with the cut paper images, provide a setting for these disembodied conversations. Throughout the book, you incorporate these found materials of wrapping tissues, newsprint, plastics, items that some might call waste. What struck me is the wholeness that is created from these discrete fragments and the re-forming or recycling of these materials and how this makes explicit our entanglement with waste. I’d love to hear more about when you started to incorporate found materials in your work and anything else about this idea of recycling materials in a creative work.

Mahato: Using found materials came fairly early in my creative practice. I started making comix when my mother died and much of my early work, and my work now still, is about grief and navigating it through my art—understanding it and becoming close to it. Using materials that were otherwise destined for the recycling bin or the trash made intuitive sense to me. I used to get the daily paper delivered to my apartment; and one day, I started cutting paper dolls out of it—and I thought, “Oh, these are characters for a comic.” Taking up something that is lost, or thought to be “of no use,” and giving it new life, or even showing how it is still integrated with what we do. So, when I came back from the Arctic—while we were there, we collected plastics that were on the Svalbard shore—I started thinking: “Why paper? Why not plastic, too?” I had been making handmade paper prior to the trip, and when I got back and was thinking about this section, I had these blue plastic bags from the supermarket and I tried to add it to the pulp. It was so messy and it didn’t work at first. The paper and the plastic kept pulling away from each other. But I sort of realized that the disconnection was interesting—and then when I scanned the pages and saw that the plastic embedded in the paper pulp took on a glacial, ice-like appearance, it felt serendipitous. There was something there about disconnection being a vital aspect of entanglement. I think waste is like that. Something we dispose of, get rid of, associate with impurity and set apart. But it is still here. It still has an impact on the environments in which we live. We tend to privilege new materials—but I wonder about this polarization we construct between old and new and what if we thought about them as feeding each other, as nourishing, as poisoning, as combining, separating, flowing into again, whatever shapes that might take.

Hattman: Something that came up for me is the idea of the paper and other materials as being a collaborator. You were talking about how, with your students, you discuss creating a lexicon or a visual vocabulary that a reader can learn and follow; and I wonder about that in the creation phase. How do you listen to the materials and notice the vocabulary that is surfacing? And then how is that communicated to readers in a way that is open enough so that they are part of the collaboration as well? I mean, I personally think this is kind of mystical, and I certainly don’t have an answer for myself, but I wonder if you do.

Mahato: I think similarly to you; some of it is sort of mystical or can’t be preplanned or fabricated. There are moments when I’m sitting at the drawing table and I’m working on a page and I realize that something doesn’t work or when I think, “Oh, this is it.” But I’m not sure how to articulate what makes either of those moments arise. You know, I get asked this question a lot, especially with collage work, which feels so playful: “How do you know when it’s done? How do you know when you’ve conveyed this idea clearly or when to stop or when it’s too much?” Part of it has to do with asking myself whether I’ve given enough guidance to the reader where they feel secure and confident in going on this journey of meaning-making. And, also, giving them some deliberate confusion, leaving some things unexplained, so that the journey is active—so they’re engaged and involved in figuring out how to move through the book. In Act 2, there’s so much metaphoric play and meaning slippage: “Is it this or is it that? It seems to be both. Is it plastic or kelp? Is it a rock or a slab of meat?” It’s like when I scanned the blue bag and there was that texture of ice. On some pages, it’s really hard to tell whether that blue is plastic or some other material. And really, it’s ink on paper. Which is which? What is what? Who’s playing what role? It’s a confusion that maybe isn’t meant to be solved. Maybe the idea is not to separate, not to say, “This is this and that is that,” but to think about how all of it is integrated and tangled anyways, and to trace where our minds are wanting to define and wanting to know and where we feel okay with “I don’t know, or I have questions,” and how to articulate and feel into the questions.

Hattman: So the material can be multiple things at once, and working with that tension, and maybe the feeling of discomfort with the unknown comes up because it’s harder to name when it’s many. So that’s part of the material you’re working with, but it, as you mention, comes up in the content of Act 2; for example, seeing the stone as a steak. And how we, when we’re in an unfamiliar environment, attempt to make the thing familiar to be able to acclimate. So, another example in the book is ice breaking sounding like a gunshot, but also sounding like a thunderstorm, and a lion’s roar. The comparisons say so much about the people drawing those comparisons, and their attempts to acclimate, but there’s also the tension of projecting too much of ourselves onto the environment, so much that we’re unable to really see or witness. This comes up in Act 3, which is the visual sonnet featuring the polar bear, where there are two parallel parts—on one side of the page, there is a pen and ink figure of the bear that becomes more and more abstract, and on the other side there is the bear image that turns and looks at the viewer/reader and then turns away. And there’s also this sonnet woven throughout and at the end the sonnet is this beautiful ribbon of connected cursive words. I feel like this piece really gets at what of the bear can’t be captured on the page. The romantic form of the sonnet underscores some of the anxiety around not wanting to romanticize or objectify the bear. So, for example, I think about times when I try to describe an animal; and the more I describe, the further away I feel. But then I go to write in my journal or do collage, and the animal appears everywhere. So sometimes, the urgency or pressure makes it harder to see or witness or be with. And I’m also thinking about this idea, with regard to the abstract form of the polar bear, of the “fading” that can happen after a loved one dies. That feeling of fear when you can’t remember their face, you know—at least that something that’s come up for me. So I guess this question has to do with the anxiety of abstraction, but also grief and memory, and also the sonnet form and poetry as a way to connect without pinning down or defining.

Mahato: That struggle of how to represent was with me throughout the creative process. Like the aspects of Act 1 you were talking about, the poems there that remind you of the subject in indirect ways. How can we get at what ice sounds like or feels like—the whole experience of being with ice—with only paper and words? During the artist residency, we barely witnessed the polar bear that inspired Act 3, but we were so ecstatic for what we did see of it. It’s so strange—there was this feeling that the residency would be a failure if we didn’t see a polar bear. Yet I can open my phone, type “polar bear” into a search engine, hit return, and then see as many polar bears as I want to, you know? Why is proximity so important—this need to capture or witness in a way that confirms closeness to an animal. I think sometimes we mistake proximity for intimacy. I went through several revisions of this act. Every time I drew the bear, it looked like a teddy bear—not what I had in mind. So then I tried to go a little more abstract to mitigate that cuteness. But really the bear we saw was not all that legible without camera technology anyway; and so the question was whether to portray it more accurately or less. In organizing these pages as funhouse mirror images, I wanted to get at: “How am I representing this being that I’m claiming to be in love with? To have deep care for? And what is my responsibility, if I do care for this creature, in how I represent it? And is capturing an animal in a poem or a photograph or a drawing the best way to express love for it?” There’s some paper weaving in this act, too—along with giving the polar bear different shapes, I wanted to create multiple planes for it to inhabit.

Hattman: Something that comes to mind to me, when I was experiencing Act 3, was being able to have the abstraction and also a layering of planes on the other side and a layering of the paper that makes up the bear on the right side of the page. I’m not sure how you did this, but there is such a tenderness to the movement of where the bear, on one page, looks at us, and then later, on another page, turns away. There’s something with the layering and the emotion that I found deeply moving.

Mahato: The pacing and the eye contact were given to me by the bear. What we saw of it was from some hundreds of feet away, and it was walking along the shore; and every now and again, it would lift up its head; and it appeared to look at us in the boat; and then after a while, it turned and climbed up the mountainside. There was this deep desire to connect to that bear. Like, “Oh, it’s turning its head toward us. It sees us—we see each other.” So it felt like some desire for mutual recognition was fulfilled—but how actualized was that? So I wanted to capture that tension—that desperate but unreciprocated desire—and matched the volta in the sonnet to the turning away of the polar bear. Before the turn, there is a more realistic cut paper bear—a shape that most people could recognize as “polar bear.” And then after it turns, I use tissue and it becomes more abstract. Its face is gone and its head is replaced by this green halo. There’s almost a kind of ghostliness to it. And I guess one of my questions is: “Is this abstract representation more accurate?” To have this more haunting presence rather than a recognizable polar bear—the bear as something that I can only yearn to be close to. And then I want to know how yearning can be a form of deep connection. And I think that’s also where grief and mourning come into play. And how to be with grief in a way that is not about fulfilling or replacing longing, but accepting and honoring it.

Hattman: It makes me think about grief as a kind of practice. And thinking about ways we can allow for it in our day-to-day, whether it’s climate grief or grief for an individual or for animals or the land; to allow, and expand. I feel like reading Arctic Play expanded my capacity for grief because there was this balance to the work—the seriousness of the topic, but the approach is done with a lot of love and care so that it activates those feelings as well as my curiosity; and this is energizing. It also makes me think of the line “this play never ends” in the prologue. So, in your naming of this as a never-ending project, you invite us to think about it as ongoing. Even though we have this artifact, this book, there are so many questions and spaces for us to sit and be with the grief and/or play. I’m wondering, also, if you might have any words of advice for writers or artists who are working within artforms that are less product-oriented or consumer-based and more interested in art as a practice for social and environmental change? Any thoughts about endurance, or how to prevent overwhelm, or cope with dismissal, or other social pressures regarding this kind of engagement with art and the environment?

Mahato: I love this question about endurance and other ways of directing art practices than toward the marketplace. My comix-making was cultivated through DIY scenes—copying and binding my own books and sharing them at comix and zine festivals. And that context—and probably also my teaching background—has helped me think about art-making and writing as partners to community-building rather than the means to elevate an individual artist or writer. As a way to find others with whom you not only feel resonance and affinity, but who also inspire new thoughts, new questions, new ways of working, new ways of being involved. And so, what endurance means in this context is not about staying power, but about a kind of mode that is resilient because it moves, transforms, connects, and grows with its circumstances. If we can look at endurance in this way, does it change how we experience loss or grief? Like what if loss is a kind of opening up or a turn instead of a shutting out or closing off? I’m not sure if there’s advice here—but I think what we’re getting at is that there’s something important about keeping ourselves open to movement and connection and transformation and supporting practices that are also working in those more fluid, adaptive, playful directions.