Artist Statement
These ceramic forms are reflective of the Abject Body - the traumatized body - the Queer body. They act as monuments of resistance towards the limitations of biopolitical structures in order to create spaces of acceptance. Utilizing amorphous qualities, these artworks relinquish figurative notions of the academically rendered, colonially enforced, and socially/politically elected ideas of Body. Challenging social political binary ideals and histories of the heteronormative Body to evaluate how we simultaneously hold identity, trauma, and desire.
The movement of these forms evoke touch and intimacy while also possessing sections of fragmentation, loss, and rough textural erosion. An essence of distorted familiarity exists through the physically opened and hollowed forms. A repeating visual language flows through the work created by the layering of clay slabs that fold together torsos and extremities. Ambiguous beginnings and endings dissolve and appear through the thickly applied glazed and mixed media surfaces. The textured surface reveals landscapes reminiscent of those within my childhood in the Pacific Northwest. Using memories of caves carved from the oceans salt water and the rough terrain of the Cascade mountains, these ceramic forms reveal effects of continual wear that is similarly received by erosions within the landscape and traumas upon the human Body.
Clay in its greenware state holds, imprints, and reflects the effects forced upon it. Once fired, that impressionable material takes into permanence those moments of tactility, violence, and immediacy. Through this transmutation of ephemerality into permanence, these ceramic forms become rendered as Monuments; elevating these notions of identity, body, and landscape to a place of remembrance.
These artworks are created to resist, question, and unbind the self from the biopolitical body. Therefore I mediate with clay to find my amorphous body to validate the experiences of transformation into my own queer identity. These artworks hold the state of acceptance and rejection of what this body - these bodies - have been subjected to. Through this voice, validation, and vulnerability my practice aims to acknowledge the complexities of Queerness, with its lovingness and trauma bringing forth a space that is sensitive and healing.
