by Zachary Wilson

Swoon is tired. She sits on a removable back seat of a mini-van, a makeshift mini loveseat barely filling the enormous but (thankfully) air conditioned warehouse serving as her New Orleans studio. Behind us are thousands of intricate paper cuts that will eventually make up a large, reaching lino-cut goddess of water installation planned to fill the New Orleans Museum of Art’s Great Hall. It’s Thursday evening. The installation opening is next Friday, a week away. Did I mention that Swoon is tired? And that the installation is in pieces?

Swoon — who is actually Callie — stretches her arm over her head. She’s covered in dried paint and glue. She picks at the flakes on her pants leg. She spins a splattered box cutter through her fingers. She takes a deep breath and sits up on the edge of the seat. Then she crinkles her nose and lets out a little snort-laugh. Callie is a total nerd.

“Audiobooks are my thing,” she says. “I spent a little over a month carving, drawing, and painting this piece in my apartment in Brooklyn, 12 hours a day, listening to audiobooks.” Snort laugh, crinkle nose.

The sheer size of the piece, which will end up being more than 20 feet tall when its paper tentacles make their way toward the NOMA floor, makes it seem impossible that she carved the whole thing in her tiny New York apartment with its 8-foot ceilings. She rolled out huge pieces of linoleum and carved the negative, essentially making a giant rubber stamp, but the first time she saw the piece as a whole was here in New Orleans. “I was like, Oh, this is what it looks like,” she says. There’s beauty in that.

The drawing is of a giant woman, a goddess, emerging from water and looking upward. Callie’s assistants surround the piece, laid out on its back between two large brown folding tables, cutting it from its backing and securing drawing. In a few days, it will be hoisted up and suspended from the ceiling of NOMA, but today it’s a beautiful flat-backed woman staring at a wall.

“I thought to use the Greek Thalassa, which is the sort of primordial incarnation of the sea in ancient Greek mythology, just in that way of people having a personal relationship with the ocean or the sea,”Callie explains. “I had that as the seed of my thought.”

The water theme came from a sort of subconscious reaction to the Gulf oil spill. “I’m a beach kid,” she says, letting down her hair. It’s stringy and longer than expected, falling to her lower back. She runs her fingers through it as she speaks. “That’s the thing with this piece. My family is like, I dunno, a couple hundred years on the Gulf Coast of Florida, and when the oil spill happened, everyone was devastated by it. And I was no exception. I just felt that I would make a drawing that would sort of recognize those thoughts and feelings. It’s not a direct response, but it’s sort of an emotional, visual response.”

Even resting on the ground the piece moves, and the quiet sound of flowing water is present. Laid out  across the massive Walmart-sized warehouse, I can see and hear water in the dismembered shapes of Thalassa, the piece’s formal title.

We talk for a second about expectations of life and work and she listens intently when I speak. Her eyes respond as we trade anecdotes — she moved to New York from Florida at 19 with encouragement from her mother and an ‘everything happens for a reason’ attitude. Success came at a speedy pace, her street work gaining attention from art world influentials, and now, barely into her 30s, her works shows worldwide. Sandwiching her stop in New Orleans are works in L.A. and Brazil, and the list goes on and on.

I ask her about her connection to New Orleans. She says on first visit with friends when she was around 16, she hated the city. “It was during Mardi Gras, and we didn’t have the concept of the sort of DIY Mardi Gras yet. So it was us, downtown, stuck with all these annoying drunk people. It was hell.” But on the urging of artist friends she finally made her way back a few years ago and has had a connection with the city since.

“New Orleans is awesome,” she says, laughing again. “I feel like the first time I went to a second line was the first time I understood New Orleans. It’s got this really interesting combination of an intense culture, artistic and musical, while being laid back and Southern. It’s wildly different than any other place. It’s just got this kind of beguiling charm. It’s totally singular.” That all links in to her second New Orleans project, a full size musical house on St. Claude that will be open to passers-by and will play host to concerts and events. As this point that project is away in time and in the back of her mind, lined up with the others she is simultaneously undertaking elsewhere.

She sits back. We’ve been chatting for about half an hour and suddenly her eyes focus on something behind me. The piece calls again, and she’s back in work brain. “My neck is falling asleep right now as we’re talking,” she says, rubbing it with her hand and squinching up her nose again, smiling. “I feel like I’m feeling a little overwhelmed.”

She breathes. In less than a week this will all be over and the goddess will be hanging 20 feet over NOMA patrons. But not today. Today, Swoon is tired, and today, Swoon has got to get back to work.