Will Aitken, interviewed by Anne Carson
In the tradition of Andy Warhol's Interview magazine comes a conversation that renowned poet Anne Carson conducted with FFOTO artist Will Aitken. Longtime friends, Carson and Aitken warmly cover a lot of ground, making observations about human nature while touching on shared interests, artistic inspirations, traditional Japanese papermaking, mid-life creative pivots, and the importance of cinema in their lives.
A thread of playfulness comes across in this conversation -- a mainstay of their friendship, reinforced again by the response received when I requested a bio for Carson to accompany this interview. The reply: "Anne Carson was born in Canada and often lives in Iceland."
Presented in its unabridged state, enjoy this entertaining glimpse into the relationship between these two fascinating creative forces.
Craig D'Arville
Anne Carson and Will Aitken | credit: Rosanna Bruno
Anne Carson: We should play a game.
Will Aitken: Which one?
AC: Rock, Paper, Scissors.
WA: Really?
AC: Rock.
WA: Oh come on.
AC: Rock!
WA: Paper.
AC: You win. We can go home now.
WA: Don’t we have to do it three times?
AC: Oh, you fuddy duddy. No, this is an interview. We're trying to get to paper.
WA: Paper!
AC: That's better. I like that.
WA: Paper changed my life. In 2020, Joé the barber was cutting my hair, and the Premièr of Quebec came on the radio and said, "Lockdown, everybody go home."
On my way home, I passed a store called Au Papier Japonais - a Japanese Paper Store. I’d never been in. I walked in the door and they had a whole wall filled with shelves of brightly coloured papers. The woman who worked there introduced me to chiyogami papers, which are from Japan. That was already a huge plus for me because I'm such a Nipponophile. The woman told me they come in all different colours and styles, and I was like “Wow!”
AC: This chiyogami paper – how’s it different than other kinds of paper?
WA: The immediate impact is visual, because it’s thousands of different patterns and really intense colours like you wouldn't believe. But after you get over that, it's the actual feel of the paper that’s so great, because it doesn't feel like regular paper at all. It's made from mulberry bark with sulphide added, to preserve the colours.
Traditional Japanese papermakers have been making it for several centuries. Originally they got their colours by using ground up stones or metals, like silver or gold. Or natural dyes extracted from plants or flowers or bugs – indigo came from the indigo plant, and yellow from gardenias, and so on.
Now a lot chiyogami makers use tempera powders for colour because it's quicker and faster than grinding up stones, and cheaper too. The outcome is that when you touch the paper, it feels like silk, but with a slightly chalky surface, and it's really easy to cut, really smooth to cut, but relatively hard to tear. When you try to tear it, it rebels against the tearing. It doesn’t want to be torn.
Beyond that it's highly ornamental and the patterns are so delicate – they're originally from kimono patterns from three or four hundred years ago – and the colorus are made to endure. The Japanese Paper Store has two squares of chiyogami pasted on their front door post. They’ve been out in the elements for several years, and the colours haven't faded much at all. And, you know, Montreal winters.
AC: Yeah, I remember. Wow, that’s cool. It's not just coloured paper though, it's coloured paper with patterns on it, right?
WA: Right. It’s a hugely complicated process to make it. When you first look at it, you think, "They must have printing presses that do that," but no. Like many things in Japan, it's very labour intensive. Chiyogami paper was made the same way Ukiyo-e woodcuts were made back in the 18th and 19th centuries by people like Hokusai and Hiroshige and Utamaro.
An artist drew the design, the design was carved onto a wooden block, and then they’d add one colour at a time to the woodblock where the design indicated that specific colour would be in the final image. They’d print that colour, and then they’d take the chiyogami paper off the wood block, they’d clean the wood block and then apply the second colour and so on, so a single sheet of chiyogami can involve as many as nine or ten separate pressings of nine or ten separate colours.
Nowadays, it's a little more streamlined depending on who’s doing it. It's more like silk screening. There's no wood block, but a stencil, but still a separate pull for each colour. The sad thing is that the families who have been doing this for centuries, they're starting to die out, or the kids don’t want to do it anymore, and different methods and colours are being lost.
Utagawa Kunisada, "Beauties as Artisans in a Printer's Studio", 1857.
But chiyogami is still being made on a slightly larger if not quite industrial scale. I visited a studio in Kyoto once – it was a long room, probably maybe 20 feet, 25 feet, and with maybe a dozen silk screen stations all in a row and everybody pulling impression after impression.
AC: What does it smell like?
WA: The paper?
AC: The room. You were in the room.
WA: First it smelled like fresh paper, a kind of sweet, almost woody smell, and then like ink or different pigments. When they make metals – if silver leaf’s being applied to the paper – there’s this heady metallic smell. The studio had a very rich and complex smell, but then I think that about most Western art studios too.
AC: Does the paper smell like anything itself?
WA: Not really. I’m looking at a sheet of heavily coloured and patterned paper, and while it doesn’t smell like computer paper, its scent is very light and fresh somehow.
AC: It doesn't it smell like what it's made of.
WA: No.
AC: That's very Japanese, too. Very subtle.
WA: They are.
AC: Anyway, let's get back to Rock, Paper, Scissors.
WA: All right.
AC: My turn: paper.
WA: Scissors! I'm pretty good at this game.
AC: What kind of scissors cut this amazing paper?
WA: Artists I know who also do collage use X-acto knives with a really sharp blade, which is wonderful, I'm told, for fine cutting. Back in my youth, I worked as a layout person for an underground newspaper. They’d give you printed text, and then you had to cut out blocks of text and paste them onto the layout sheet. So you were always using the X-acto knives, and one morning – I'd had a late night you know – and I sliced off the tips of my fingers.
AC: Oh!
WA: It was pain like I'd never felt. I mean, it healed fairly quickly, because it wasn't like the whole finger, just the skin of the tips, but was pretty awful. Messy. Now I use two different kinds of scissors. One set is my Grandmother Armstrong's FARR stainless steel sewing scissors that I’m guessing are from the 1930s. They're eight inches long and indestructible. I remember her using them and the satisfying sound the blades made. They have a really nice heft to them, and you feel like you really can do bold, fast cuts – they're also good for cutting really long sheets of paper. Chiyogami is usually sold in 8.5 X 11 inch sheets, but you can also buy it in larger sizes, like 4 by 6 feet sheets as well. it's so amazing when they pull out a whole sheet of this stuff, and you just go, this is so good. So beautiful you just want to paste it on the wall.
AC: Or wear it and go home.
WA: Yes, I don't know why somebody hasn't done that, to turn the patterns into beautiful shirts and stuff. For the really intricate work, instead of an X-acto knife, I use four inch long stainless steel paper cutting scissors, which you can buy on the internet. They look like nail scissors and come with attractive pink plastic grips. The blades aren't curved like nail scissors. They're very straight and very sharp and pointy, but so far, I haven't cut off a single fingertip.
AC: You manage to make collage be full of trauma.
WA: I can do that with almost anything.
AC: Effortlessly.
WA: It's not nearly as traumatic as writing, which as you know I was doing professionally until that day at the barber in 2020.
AC: Yes, I remember - you fell out of love with writing.
WA: Boy, did I. I got sick of the sound of my own writing voice. Has that ever happened to you.
AC: Yes, it does happen. About every other day, actually.
WA: Well, it was happening to me every day, so it was time to get out.
AC: When that happens, I usually turn to drawing. I don't make things as elaborate as your collages, but just to get out of that side of the brain. So you turned from writing to collage at a certain point. Had you ever done that sort of thing before, making objects?
WA: Not really. In middle school art class we made collages, cutting up National Geographics and stuff. But I wasn't any good. I'm also mildly colour blind. So it was hard for when we tried to paint, I couldn't mix colours. Whatever colours I combined, it always ended up looking like mud. The teacher would say, add this colour to that colour and you’ll get purple and I would always end up with mud.
AC: That must have been very discouraging.
WA: It's the same thing when I look at jackets or sweaters I’ve got and I'm sure they’re green, and people will say, No, actually that's grey, or that's light blue, or whatever. But with chiyogami paper, you don't have to worry because of the weird quality of the design and colour – it's all so intense and intricate that nothing clashes.
AC: You can put anything with anything, and it works?
WA: When I got home from the barbershop that day five years ago, I’d bought a lot of paper. I kind of went crazy because I thought, I don't know how long lockdown’s going to be. I spent like $150 – I'd never spent that much on any art supply. And I took them home and spread them out all across the dining room table.
The thing I hadn't counted on was how the intensity of the colour would have such an emotional aspect to it when you're working with it for very long, or even when you're just looking at it. That day it had an elating effect on me. I was swept away by how beautiful it all was. I'd never felt anything quite like that. And unlike writing, it felt like fun. I didn't feel like I was thinking in the same way I'd been thinking when I was writing. It never felt like drudgery.
"Corner Man", 2025, Anne Carson. Paper collage; private collection.
AC: I know what you mean about colours and emotion. I remember when I went to teach at Princeton, the first day I was there, I went to the office of the professor next door, and I said to him, just to get to know him. "Why do colours make us happy?" And he just said, "That is not a philosophical question." That's Princeton in a nutshell.
WA: That's so helpful.
AC: Emotion comes out of the colour into your spirits.
WA: It's a very lovely thing.
AC: This was during lockdown, so I guess you had a lot of time.
WA: I did have endless time, and it's kind of embarrassing because I had the most fun I think I've ever had over an extended period of time. like a couple of months. It was kind of indecent, having that a good time. I couldn't really talk about it with my friends who were saying, Oh, lockdown is horrible and I'm feeling so isolated. I’d work all day and then, after dinner, I’d sit down at the dining table and think, Oh, I'm going to work for an hour or two on this collage and then go to bed. Next thing I'd know, it would be like four or five in the morning. So my whole sleep schedule went out the window, and there really was an incredible euphoria that I'd never experienced. not even when falling in love. It was better.
AC: That's something to learn, isn’t it? Even if it’s a bit late.
WA: Yes. Too late. Oh well.
AC: Okay then, a great substitute for love.
WA: There’s nothing like pure, uninterrupted work. Nobody could drop in on me. My dog had died recently too, so I didn't have to walk him either, which was very sad, but it meant that I could work for prolonged streams of time, and in a kind of trance state much of the time. It was phenomenal.
AC: Did you jump right into the work of it, or did you have to sit and plan and sketch?
WA: I'm a horrible sketcher. Nothing I sketch looks like anything, it's hopeless. But I can use a ruler and draw lines and grids and such, and draw circles and ovals to represent people, and that was very helpful. So I might do that by way of layout, but most of the time I’d just dig right in and start cutting shapes, and it was weird because the paper and the colours would suggest what I needed to do in terms of what would look good with what.
Also, chiyogami is such pretty stuff, the tendency is to try to make something pretty, and I thought that could be a kind of trap. I'd start making something and everything would be harmonizing and gorgeous, and then I'd get fed up with it and reach for something gaudy and loud and raucous and stick it in there to offset the loveliness. And the effect was amazing, because it would somehow make the design much more kinetic.
AC: Yes, like they're fighting with each other a bit.
WA: Definitely.
AC: If these first projects were not pretty things, what were they like?
WA: I made a bunch of little ones, like eight-a-half-by-elevens that were fine – fun and scrappy and experimental and weren't really about much of anything. Then I thought I should try something a little bigger. So I got a piece of cardboard that was 24 by 20 inches. And I had a film still from this old French experimental movie called “L’Atalante.”
AC: Yes!
WA: It’s always been one of my top movies. It's from 1934, a young director – he was in his late 20s – Jean Vigo. He shot it on a barge going down the Seine in France, using people who were passing by and professional actors too. It's about a young woman who marries a barge captain, because her village is so tight and horrible and censorious, and she loves him because his life sounds so adventurous and he’s handsome too.
Once she gets on board the ship, suddenly she's in this all-male world, and she can't escape it. She can't get off the damn boat. And there's a scene – it's the night of her marriage. She's still in her wedding dress, and she walks the length of the barge deck at midnight and it's just such an extraordinary sequence – that white dress and the cloudy night and the water. I thought, I'd like to capture that on paper, but how do you make water with chiyogami?
In fact, chiyogami has a variety of water patterns, waves and such, but I didn't want that, it was too easy. It would look too regular, so I got this rough indigo paper from Nepal that's so dark it rubs off on your fingers when you're working it, so you go around with purple fingers for a few days. And I cut it into long, uneven strips and laid them horizontally across the cardboard and then made these little, tiny silver squiggles from a metallic paper and laid those on at random and finally it started to look close enough to an idea of what water looks like.
"Homage to Jean Vigo's L'Atalante", 2020, Will Aitken. Chiyogami paper collage; private collection.
I didn't want to use the woman’s face from the screenshot I’d taken because it was already grainy and maybe too literal too. Since the woman’s all about trying to find freedom, I superimposed a seagull's head over her head. I used strips of white paper of all different textures and shades to create a wedding veil for her. Then I got carried away and the strips of paper ended up creating her actual wedding dress with all these strips of white. The whole thing suddenly became surreal, and I was sold.
AC: It made the image look like it was streaming across the page, just like in the film. It's like water, actually.
WA: Yes.
AC: That's cool. I've seen that movie. It's fantastically beautiful. And the guy died probably two years later, didn't he?
WA: He had tubercular lungs and caught pneumonia during the long damp shoot on the barge in wintertime. And it killed him. He was 29.
AC: I didn't know that. It’s a great movie, and that head of the seagull in your collage somehow works. I don't know why.
WA: Me either.
AC: But it makes a distance between the viewer and the thing. You don't want a literal representation of a movie. You want the feeling of the movie.
WA: Yes!
AC: And somehow it comes out of that dissonance of the seagull head.
WA: Oh, that's interesting!
AC: That’s the surreal part. That's where your collage takes a step off literal facts and becomes something just beautiful, just what it is.
WA: But the funny thing is, when I'm working, I'm not thinking in that way.
AC: Right, no concepts.
WA: No concepts, no big intellectual ideas, no theories. It's just like, What do I put down on the cardboard? Where do I glue this? Why does this go with this rather than that? It’s very freeing.
AC: That’s why it makes you happy, probably. It's something we should have learned a long time ago.
WA: A long time ago, yes.
AB: This was about the time you were making that big collage on the Montreal Métro.
WA: I made that right after the L’Atalante one. There was a brief break in lockdown where we were allowed to go out for a few days, so I rushed back to the paper store and waited in line because they could only allow in three customers at a time. I bought a whole bunch more paper.
The inspiration for it actually came a bit before I started making collages. Not long before lockdown, I had cataract surgery on both eyes. When the doctor took the bandages off, it was the most incredible sensation. A friend had warned me this would happen. All the colours in the world are not only suddenly in focus but also hyper-saturated, and it lasts for, you know, five to 10 days, if you're lucky. I was just stunned.
After the doctor stripped off the gauze, I took the Métro home. Montreal Métro cars, the newish ones, are one long car, and I could see from where I was sitting at the rear of the car all the way to the front of the car, and I could see the faces of all the people in perfect focus.
I suddenly had 20/20 vision after wearing glasses from the age of three. I always assumed that with my corrected vision, with glasses, I’d been seeing what everybody else was seeing. After the surgery I realized I’d never had much depth at all. I was so amazed at what I was seeing, I rode the Métro for four hours that day, gawking at everything I saw – people must have thought I was absolutely mad, which, as you know, is not that unusual, but still –
When I finally got off at my stop, I turned around to watch the train glide away. The detail was mesmerizing. I could see the people sitting next to the windows, but I could also see the people behind those people, the people standing holding the poles and the straps, and I could see the people sitting by the far window of the car, and then I could see beyond them to the opposite platform – people standing on the platform waiting for their train to come in, and behind them I could see all the huge advertisements that they have on the walls of the Métro.
AC: That's too much seeing.
WA: It was just extraordinary. Everything was so individualized and larger than life, because of the brightness of the colours. In that moment, I thought it looked like a big Renaissance painting or fresco. It was like a Giotto, with his ability to take a huge crowd scene and individualize every person in it.
AC: He does cram people in.
"Train Bleu sur la Ligne Verte (Summer Car / Queer Car)", 2021, Will Aitken. Chiyogami paper collage; private collection.
WA: And I could read it all, nothing was blurred. It was like I was having a vision in the most literal sense. When I got home, for the longest time I was thinking, What will I do with this new vision of mine? How to make sense of it in my daily life. But then when I got into collage, it was like, Okay, now I know what to do with that vision.
So I got a seven-foot-long piece of cardboard, and in my inexperience I got the wrong kind of cardboard – its surface was too slick, and things kept falling off – I was forever re-glueing. But it was okay because I felt compelled to make this piece and wasn’t going to stop for minor technical matters.
I made four blue Métro cars with silver trim just like the real thing and decided each car should have a different season. I sourced hundreds of Renaissance images and cut out the people, from paintings by Caravaggio and Raphael and Michelangelo, Leonardo and Masaccio and all that. And then began putting the ones I liked most into the different cars, so they were looking out the windows and also seemed to be interacting with one another.
For the windows on the far side of the car, to open things up I put in landscapes instead of Métro ads. The first car is cobbled together Blaue Reiter autumnal scenes, inspired by guys like Paul Klee and Franz Marc. The second car is winter, so I de-saturated the Renaissance images so they were all black and white, and out the window it's all Quebec artists, especially famous Quebec artists who painted snow, Riopelle and Borduas and on. In the spring car, I used women abstract expressionists like Helen Frankenheimer, Lee Krasner, Agnes Martin and they looked terrific together. When I got to the summer car I thought, This should be the queer car –
AC: Your favourite.
WA: Yes, I had to work that in. It’s full of Renaissance nudes. And just for fun I ran a 1960s photo of people crammed into the Tokyo subway through the summer car, so it looked like they were staring at the Renaissance nudes in shock and amazement.
AC: But these Renaissance figures aren't made from the paper, the chiyogami.
WA: No, that would have taken years and years. These were actually laser- printed images. I have a really cheap desktop Xerox machine that keeps working, miraculously, because it’s quite old and rackety too. I thought because of all the Renaissance art that I wanted everything to be rich and beautiful. I got a ream of satin-y bond paper, the stuff that has a pale shine and feels slick to the touch.
AC: Right.
WA: I printed on that, and it looked way too glossy, like something out of a fashion magazine. It occurred to me that because of the Renaissance colours I was dealing with, the images need to look at least a bit aged. I went to the pharmacy and bought really cheap bond paper. It turned out that the matte finish of bond paper worked perfectly with the Xerox colour – it made them all slightly spongy and soft to look at, and they went well with the softness of the chiyogami paper as well.
AC: Would you say your collages are mostly about the materials? Or as they say in art school, the materiality.
WA: Yes. When I first started working with paper, I kept thinking of that time we went to see Betty Goodwin speak at the School of Architecture at McGill. A quarter of a century ago or more.
AC: Right, about the vests.
WA: Yes! There was a whole crowd of architecture students, and they were asking her these incredibly dense, theoretical questions, and she would have none of that. She was like, No, one day I was looking at my husband's vest, and I thought, "Well, that's really interesting how it's structured." I found out later, her father made vests for a living.
AC: That’s true, I remember that.
WA: She said she took the vest apart to see how it was put together, and that's how she ended up doing this whole series of ghostly etchings of vests that made her international reputation. I really liked her no bullshit approach about art.
AC: Yes, she was so pragmatic. It was really refreshing.
WA: In the late 1970s she took a typical Montreal floor-through apartment and basically hollowed it out, created a new narrow corridor like the entrance to an ancient tomb and constructed an inner sanctum made of thick timber beams – she turned the apartment into an ancient tomb.
AC: She was such a straightforward person. Just like her shoes. You remember she wore those huge black running shoes all the time?
WA: Yes. With the thick soles.
AC: You wondered how she could lift her feet. She was kind of spindly.
WA: She really was. She was very light. You could probably throw her if you wanted.
AC: Now we have to get in the universal question: where do you get your ideas?
WA: The bathtub.
AC: What do you mean, the bathtub?
WA: I borrowed that. Do you know the German writer, Daniel Kehlmann?
AC: Oh yes, he's great.
WA: He wrote this wonderful book called Fame, which is really about writing without being pretentious and meta in the way those things can turn out. It’s actually a collection of stories. In one of the stories, a world-famous author gets so fed up with people at readings asking him, Where do you get your ideas? that he started answering, The bathtub, and that seemed to make everybody happy.
AC: Oh, good, I'll use that. I’d think it would come in handy.
WA: I work more than anything from film images and sometimes just from photographs I like. Early on I did a triptych based on Akira Kurosawa's film noir from the early '60s called High and Low.
"Homage to Akira Kurosawa's High and Low", 2020, Will Aitken. Chiyogami paper collage; private collection.
AC: Oh, great movie.
WA: It's one of my faves, and I've seen it like 3,000 times, and there isn't a bad shot in it. It was shot in black and white, but I added a little colour here and there because I'm not a purist and I don't work in a diktat kind of way. Sometimes I’ll see a photo online – a month or so ago I saw a picture of Venice taken underwater. I think it was in The Guardian – they run a lot of photos just for the hell of it. You could see the pilings underwater, these huge thick trees that have been there for who knows how long, and then at the very top of the image the city of Venice floating above of this underwater world. A really startling photo.
It was really hard to do technically, because I knew how to make water on the surface, but I didn't know how to do it underwater. I had to experiment with a lot of different papers and colours to get that look. It worked out, not as much as I'd like, but it was okay.
While I was making that, it struck me that each time I think of a new project I set out – I don't know what it is in me that makes me think, This has to be perfect. I had that with writing, too, but with writing, it was somehow easier to approach that goal.
"Hommage à Chantal Akerman", 2023, Will Aitken. Chiyogami paper collage; private collection.
AC: But the paper resists that, right?
WA: It’s not like paint, you can't get a realistic surface with paper – at least I can't, yet. When I'm working with scraps of paper, I make a vase, say, but no matter how hard I try, it looks like a broken vase that’s been glued back together. I found that very frustrating. So each piece, while I'm working on it, feels like a recording of failure, because everything I construct is just ever so slightly off or sometimes radically off from the original. Not at all what I'm going for. I'm working and looking at the work and I'm saying to myself, This is terrible, this is awful. This is a complete disaster. At the same time, I'm enjoying it hugely. I keep going, and sometimes it really does come together all in a rush when I add the last little scrap of paper. When that happens, and it’s rare, I'm really surprised and relieved and happy and I have to go take a long nap. Most of the time though, I don't know whether it works or not until I show it to other people.
AC: Oh, really?
WA: Their reactions guide me to understanding what I've done because it’s almost universal for the first couple of days after I finish something, I keep looking at it, and I keep thinking, Oh, God, what can I do with this? Is it salvageable? It’s a strange kind of paradox because you're working blind even though you’re working with highly visual materials.
AC: I guess you are, when you have no concepts. You have to be more or less blind, so some other part of your brain is operating, making decisions.
WA: It feels very much like that. It's very – well, I just, I keep coming back to the materials and how they work.
About 10 years ago, I was in Japan and I visited a lacquerware craftsman in this little mountain village. He was this young Japanese guy, he'd studied wood turning at Salt Spring Island of all places. His studio was incredible because at one end of it, separated by a transparent plastic curtain, were tower after tower of wooden bowls that went up to the ceiling – altogether they looked like some strange skyline. These were the bowls before he applied layer after layer of pine resin to create the lacquer effect.
His studio was spotless. There wasn't any sawdust anywhere, there weren’t any paint drips, no pine resin to make the worktable sticky. There were little bottles and jars all lined up in a row, and everything was, with brushes and tools, all in jars and vases. I asked him if it was always this immaculate. He suddenly got very serious and said, Yes, you must always respect your materials – they have a mind and a will of their own – otherwise they’ll turn around and bite you in the ass. I mean, that's a rough translation – my Japanese totally sucks.
I'd forgotten that until the other day. I was going to a friend's house for dinner, and I was going to take her a small collage as a house gift, and I thought, I can do this really fast. I started working and I didn't have the right kind of cardboard so I used a different kind of coated cardboard to mount it on, and the paper wasn't going down right – It was a foil paper, and it was crinkling and there were air bubbles and it looked like hell. But I just kept fighting it, pushing it, and everything I did was really wrong in a basic material way. I did finish it, and then I looked at it, and this time, it was abundantly clear – it was truly horrible. The most satisfying thing about the process was I got to tear it into little tiny pieces. And bin it.
AC: I thought you'd make it over into a different collage.
WA: There was no future in the materials I used. They truly weren’t into collaborating with me.
AC: That's interesting, they have their own dignity. They must have a lot of theoretical statements about this in Japanese history.
WA: I'm sure. It's like the kind of thing they would have mountains of theories and techniques about. If my Japanese were better, I could look these books up. In English, there's some, but it's either so technical it seems aimed at people who are actually making chiyogami, or it's just vague and pretty, and aren't these papers lovely, and you can decorate your dollhouse with them, that kind of thing.
AC: I guess it's an idea that doesn't really translate because it's very non-Western.
WA: Like so many other things in Japan. It's just an extremely different approach to practically everything.
AC: Which is why you like going there.
WA: God, I do, I do. I've been to Japan somewhere between between 50 and 60 times, and I've never had a bad trip.
AC: And you bring back those great gifts.
WA: Yes, there’s that.
"The Truth is a Cloud Went to Troy", 2022, Will Aitken. Chiyogami paper collage; private collection.
AC: Anyway, back to our game. My turn again: stone.
WA: What?
AC: The game, you know Stone, blah, blah.
WA: It's rock, not stone. Can't you get it right?
AC: Ah, whatever. I win.
WA: Why?
AC: Because you're Sister Scissors.
WA: Ah, right, I'd forgotten. So what are you going to do with it?
AC: Do with what?
WA: The rock.
AC: Oh, I'll drop it in the bathtub.
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After many years as a prominent film critic and novelist, in 2020 Will Aitken abandoned writing to apply his creative energies towards a visual arts practice. His interviewer, Anne Carson, was born in Canada and often lives in Iceland.
View all listings by Will Aitken at FFOTO.com/WillAitken.