Allowing Chaos to Happen — An Interview with American Artist Kara Kramer
I decided to fly to New York. Before takeoff, at Taoyuan International Airport, I wrote to New York–based picture book artist Kara Kramer: “I am deeply drawn to your collages. Why do you trust intuition? And how do you find order within chaos? As a work gradually takes shape, how do you establish a relationship between form and content in which the two can speak to each other?”
The moment I landed, I received Kara’s reply: “Come to my studio. I love the theme of ‘chaos/order’ too!”
Like her collages—keeping their rough edges, flowing freely, and moving toward the unknown—we opened ourselves to each other just like that, casually and unexpectedly.
As soon as I stepped into her studio, I couldn’t help asking, “When did you decide to become an artist?” Kara tilted her head and said, “I think… yesterday!” Then we both burst out laughing.
When the laughter settled, she answered seriously: “I didn’t really ‘decide’ to become an artist. I’ve been drawing since I was a child. It was more like: this is simply who I am. It was only in the past ten years that I began to clearly feel it as a state of ‘choosing myself.’ And it isn’t a one-time choice. I have to choose it again every day: to return to making, to return to the identity I am willing to claim.”
Large paintings hung on the studio wall. I asked her, “Is this work for a specific project?” She said, “My body wanted to move, so I let my arms extend, letting the movement happen not only from the wrist, but at the scale of the whole person. This is something I made for myself.” Then she lifted a long black box onto the table. It was packed with traces of everyday exploration: doodles, research notes, color tests, storyboards, cut-out hand-drawn images. The tabletop instantly became a temporary construction site: colored grids, running figures, lines erased and redrawn, arbitrary marks. She often uses grids, dividing lines, and borders to break an image into modules, as if making a set of visual notes: each part stands independently, yet they are subtly joined by the way colors answer one another, assembling into a larger body.
Her hand reached into the black box. A sheet of blue paper was lifted out, covering a spiral of interwoven orange and black; a pink paper butterfly was moved by her hand, flying over a green field where the words “It’s a chemical reaction” were written. She said, “Just flipping through them like this is already collaging accident; in fact, it isn’t even me collaging them. My hand simply moves and moves, and they collage themselves.”
At that moment I understood: her thinking is the sum of all these gestures—touching, moving, layering, concealing, and revealing. On her table, materials are not passive media; they are collaborators that respond and lead the way. This also made me think of the picture book biography she made about Ernő Rubik, the inventor of the Rubik’s Cube: Erno Rubik and His Magic Cube. That book does not celebrate a flash of inspiration. Instead, it opens up the inner scene of being stuck, trying, and turning once more: order does not descend from above; it slowly grows out of repeated rotation. Kara’s way of making is also like a Rubik’s Cube—many small cubes turn independently, yet the whole does not fall apart.
She mentioned that while going through historical materials, she discovered that Rubik liked to take walks. So in her drafts, she drew an orange diamond going for a walk, with fine lines shooting out around it: “Those lines are the ideas that burst out of the brain while walking.” In the finished book, Rubik often appears in the act of striding forward, as if “thinking” has been returned to the body—moving, deviating, turning, while the central axis remains steady, like the Rubik’s Cube itself.
Her hand was still turning pages. “Making a book isn’t linear for me,” she said. “My mind is mixed with many things. I play with materials on all kinds of paper, make marks, collage, let my hand move. It’s a very bodily way of working—like dancing. I’m dancing on paper. There’s no pressure there. I don’t need to turn anything into what it ‘should’ be. It feels like breathing freely. Only after things have accumulated for a while, when I need to move forward more systematically, do I begin to use the structure of ‘a book’ to organize my black box. My method is: allow chaos to happen first, then slowly transform it into structure.” So she likes to draw first, preserving the texture of the handmade, then scan the images one by one into the computer and reassemble them—moving, resizing, changing colors—so that every element becomes a flexible component that can be arranged and dispatched quickly into different versions.
Later, Kara opened another black box and took out the sketches she had prepared for Make Meatballs Sing: The Life and Art of Corita Kent. The subject of this picture book biography is Corita Kent, a nun-artist who placed the sacred and the everyday on the same print. In her sketchbook, Kara repeatedly drew the same face of Kent, continually adjusting the hairstyle, face shape, and gaze, as if placing Kent in a fitting room, trying on different proportions and expressions to see which one could best draw the inner spirit onto the surface of the face. On a nearby page, a photograph of Kent was pasted down, layered with colored dots and hand-copied quotations, testing how image, words, and color press against one another on the same plane to produce a “message” rather than decoration.
Then she opened the finished book and compared it with the sketch of the same scene. In the sketch, pencil lines filled the space—walls, window frames, easel, floor tiles—as if all the noise of the room had been gathered onto the page. But in the finished spread, the page was greatly muted. The background was simplified, the easel and the figure’s movement were emphasized, and the blocks of color became clean and directional. As soon as the reader’s eye enters the page, it is led to one thing: Corita is painting.
Watching her move from “filling the space” to “leaving only the necessary lines,” I understood that she was not removing chaos. Rather, she first lets the materials make noise for a while; once the subject stands firmly, she leaves only the few lines that truly work. That is not simplification. It is a movement toward precision.
Invention is no longer mysterious: it is a series of choices that can be traced.
Kara’s work does not begin from “a complete image,” but from “a pile of components that can be transformed.” Creation here is not “What do I want to express?” but “What conditions can I create so that something may generate itself before my eyes?” This form of expression contains a strong worldview: the work is not a passive landscape waiting to be depicted, but an organic system composed of fragments, traces, and memory.
She said, “Many things in the black box will not be used in the end, but they are not wasted. They are necessary attempts and accumulations. What the reader truly receives is not one important element, but the overall experience formed by the sum of countless small details. You may not be able to say exactly what you feel, but it will leave some kind of echo in your body.”
I asked Kara, “You are so free and so protective of chaos. Aren’t you pulled away by mainstream voices?” She smiled. “It is indeed difficult. Especially now, with social media, I keep seeing what everyone else is doing, what is popular, and I also feel pulled by that. So the important thing becomes a long-term practice: I have to put in the effort to distinguish what is ‘right’ for me, what truly ‘belongs to me’ and feels real, even if it does not fit the mainstream, even if it does not match what others think I should become. I think this may be a lifelong lesson!”
At this point, she suddenly asked, “What about you?” It was not a polite transition in the conversation, but a question full of kind curiosity: how does a completely different kind of creator live, feel, and form her own belief system? It was no longer simply me interviewing her. We were exchanging our routes of thought and our ways of responding. She had pulled me into her working method as well—placing two systems side by side and seeing how strange, fresh ways out might naturally form.
“Not knowing” is our teacher, leading us to explore the vitality of the unknown. I told her that when I get stuck, I dance aimlessly and throw away all thought. She said that creation is also like improvisational dance—you cannot fully grasp the dance before you begin to dance it. For her, “trust” is not a one-time decision, but a cycle: life pulls you away, and you bring yourself back—back here, to trust once more, to make once more.
Before leaving the studio, I looked back at the stacked black boxes and told Kara, “Do you know the iceberg? Your picture books are like that small white tip visible above the surface of the sea; what is truly vast and immense is hidden beneath the water—your black boxes.”
Walking onto the streets of New York, fine white snowflakes landed on my shoulders and melted at once. I reminded myself: be like Kara. Treat making as part of thinking. Allow chaos to happen. Trust that the deepest intention can understand the order within chaos. Before the work takes form, become an iceberg that does not measure its own boundaries.
Originally published in OKAPI Reading Life Journal.