Artist Statement
Within my body of work, I reference the built environment through the openings, lobes, and protrusions of my forms. I employ thinking which centers the agency and intelligence of nonhuman matter, but employ it with humanist motives, in the hopes of locating new paths to empathy. Tools, masonry, municipal plumbing, and industrial fluids especially call to me as sites of vibrancy containing possibilities of internal transformation. My practice is a means of approaching communion with these materials and structures, a way of cultivating the self-permeability and porosity required to land within the mesh of material, outside of oneself. There is something fleshy and sweet about this intermingling with matter which I believe could reshape practices of compassion and care. I gravitate towards tools that elicit an automatic sensory response–a knife, a probe, a mallet, a dildo–to prime the viewer for tactile understanding that leaks and swells beyond their boundaries of self. I relish in the perversity present in this relationship taken to its extreme. I aim to create objects and experiences that capture the force present within tenderness, the penetration within reciprocity, and the weird compassion of intersubjective experience.
In my ceramic sculptures, I construct abstracted implements and networks of the built environment by coiling and pinching clay, pushing small points of material out into space to visualize the pulsing of vibrancy within built matter, the thrum of large relational networks, the quiet throbbing of a constant anxiety. Material structures enact on bodies, bodies enact on material structures, territory forms and generates perception, perception shapes desire, power vectors crystallize, devolve, and deviate. I become aware of this fragmentary unfolding whenever I attempt to commune with the built environment; it’s at once libidinally overwhelming and ripe with potential to serve as a line of flight from the ravishments of capitalism. The tool shapes integrated in my sculpture are perpetually swollen with these arousing capacities. In performance, I immerse my body in raw material to glimpse an unraveling of these as well. Throughout this work, rectangular containers bind their contents in some fashion. In this way, I ask how stoicism could serve as an appropriate method for stomaching the unrulier faces of matter’s agency. I also use this rectilinearity to highlight the defining edges of acts of care which make them perceptible. By invoking surfaces reminiscent of flesh and burnished metal, I coax my viewer into a playfully stratified space where the congruity between bodies and industrial matter sparks a capacity to step into shared experience.
I invoke craft techniques as iterative and repetitive processes that create transformation in material, maker, and viewer. This experience is close to the core of my practice having been educated primarily by potters. The parallels between the forbearance required to engage in craft processes and the forbearance constantly demonstrated in the built environment are quite rich to me. And, at a time when touch is blunted by physical and digital prophylactics, the haptic, embodied, and undeniable tactility of art objects created with a sense of craft feels increasingly pressing.
Shot Peening Park Companion Text (click to open):
Stoic Affection Af Aff
2022 Undergraduate Honors Thesis:
A Balmy Elsewhere: Restorative Materialisms
I introduce the context of the “material turn” occurring across disciplines alongside the emergence of new materialism from poststructuralist and post humanist thought roughing out a theoretical framework of granting agency to non-human material. This realm of theory critiques traditional Western subject-object relationships and opens the door to non-hierarchical relationships with nonhuman matter. I argue how contemporary ceramic objects, on their own and in combination with performance art and new media, benefit from a new materialist analysis. The recognition of the vast implications uncovered while fully embracing the pull and agency of material demands the creation of strategies to understand newly dynamic and porous relationship with these objects. I frame the activation of material during performance art as a research method, and outline humility and perversity as effective emergent postures to approach the implications of the topic. Throughout this process, I discover nuances, flaws, and contradictions of new materialism, especially in its conceptual overlap with indigenous ways of knowing. I steer towards a recapitulation of the branch of study as “restorative materialism,” serving as a tool to heal the fissure between ourselves and tactility, immediacy, and empathy--a fissure which was created by a slip from meaningful symbolic exchange in our present moment.