extended thesis statement
inheritance explores ceramics and clay in reference to climate change. The message behind this work goes back to my inspiration in the medium of ceramics as it holds a real time connection to the earth. Through experimentation in ephemerality, site specificity, and sublime landscape, inheritance contemplates urban landscape and its connection to natural phenomena. The conversation and contemplation that is facilitated around the work prompts the viewer to consider their own relationship with their existence in an urban setting. Inheritance pulls from similar inspiration as other works in my portfolio, toxicity and decay within a natural and precedingly pristine environment. My work at Pratt Institute largely began to be informed by ceramics in the fall of 2019. Soon after starting to work with the medium, natural references became the central role in all of my ceramic sculptural works. As I continued to practice with various clays and glazes, other specific liberal arts and history classes started resonating with my intentions within my practice. Specifically, a class on Sigmund Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams, and German Art and Culture fell into many references within my work. Within this realm, the subconscious and sublime landscape play leading roles. inheritance holds new real time ephemerality and deconstruction in its display.
inheritance’s content portrays a deep moral obligation around the disappearance and understanding of climate change in our current day and age. Symbolically, the work time lapses the decay of a once pristine environment. My generation’s positioning within the degradation of our planet is heavily apparent and whiplasing in its effect as we were born into a seemingly condemned existence. As a young woman, my point of view is voiced within the feminine qualities of the work as a whole. Hints of modernism speak through the work by experimentation as well as the search for a universal truth. Within dancing, weeping, blending in, and disappearing, my relationship with my existence relative to climate change is exposed. The flooring of the work holds impressions of my own dancing as the clay was wet worked exclusively by my feet. The impression of footsteps contains the influential history of humankind on the landscape. In the landscape, cat tails are in reference to a subconscious existence in a natural setting, as well as informed by their connection to ceramics as a fibrous strengthener in greenware clay. V8 engine parts demonstrate one of the most inefficient machines from the past as well as our present. The miniature quarter scale of these objects are in relation to the viewer where they are observing from above physically as well as inherently within our society. The oil slick is the product and culmination of all of these elements coming to a point and offloading into an unknown destination.
The implied audience of inheritance is not exclusive as climate change is a universal boundless imposition. inheritance lies in between public art and installation art, questioning the institutionalized gallery space, as well as in between political art and psychoanalytic fear of our place in time. As our inheritance reaches back in time, inheritance does the same in reference to elements in enlightenment and romantic movements. Through contradictions in reason versus skepticism as well as rural versus urban living, individualism, imagination, and the worship of nature, inheritance’s conceptual content as well as medium are contextualized. Ceramics and clay hold a history of their own mainly as a craft outside of the sculpture idiom. As ceramics lay on the fringe of fine arts, climate change remains on the fringe of political activism, they are ever imposing and prominent in their importance. Through the sustainable elements in practice, clay and ceramics in inheritance speak of cyclical endurance as they disappear and break down throughout the weathering of the work in its exhibition.
gallery opening 4/18/22, and first rain 4/18/22
mixing process for machinery
flooring wet work
ceramic QR code present at entrance to installation