Through a sculptural practice in clay, I explore the interplay between the materiality of clay and what it means as a human to touch and to be touched. The desire to touch, to explore the tactile realm, is a human instinct. It connects us to the world, bridging the gap between our internal landscapes and external reality. Through touch, the clay is compressed and forms a skin, each handling leaving my fingerprint on the material memory within the clay. The physicality of a human body is imprinted onto the clay and the works become vessels for the immaterial body, replacements for the flesh. 

The identity becomes compactly held, preserved, offered, commemorated, and beautified. 

I engage in a handbuilding process in which square wooden sticks are pounded into blocks of clay. These units are then trimmed down with a variety of wooden and metal tools until walls of various thicknesses and surface qualities form. The structure is both rigid and chaotic, as the clay tends towards bending, cracking, and warping. I encourage this disfiguration throughout the building. It is play and it is brutish. The gesture of the form becomes variable and at times through this confrontation with the material, and destruction and repair are ever-present.

Glazes are mixed individually for each piece and applied by spraygun. The colors exist along a tight spectrum of primaries and greens. Chaos magic seems to be at play. The external performances of the work are in flux.

Textured plains provide space for projecting internal images. Space for patterns, motifs, and references. Space for ritualistic thought, performance, and conformity. The tension between form and surface catalyzes a hybrid identity. One who is masculine and feminine, child and adult, beautiful and ugly. The nostalgic spaces created by the surfacing of the work contradicts its hyper-masculine form.

Resonances -

Childhood Toys 

Green is an intermediary between the human and inhuman, the living and the plastic. *Unexpected results, chaotic magic, attempt to summon radioactivity or green grass, not always appeased.

The square, a shape that exists mostly by human means. The square, with its sharp angles and defined edges, now rounded by the material’s plastic properties, speaks to our innate inclination to impose control on our surroundings, and the high probability of our failure in doing so. The square is masculine, perceived as stable and rigid, stoic and intelligent. I deconstruct this association. Voids form on the surface of the walls, giving way to dark interiors. The squares are simultaneous symbols of static dominance and protean fragility; they embody a dynamic tension between control and chaos, a metaphor for the complexities of human identity that eclipses heteronormative standards.