Personal BFA Thesis Statement : Understanding the Body

My thesis project took form as a wall of bodily objects and two larger lamp creatures who warm the space with their golden lights. The objects on the wall vary in size, shape, surfacing, color, texture, and method of creation but are united by their ambiguity, monstrous femininity, and exploration of ceramic material. The simple complexity of raw clay throughout references the rawness of human flesh. The candy colored glazes shift this reference into something manufactured, objects created for visual pleasure. They feel wet, goopy, alive as the glass oozes, slips, and crazes across the clay bodies. The purples, pinky-reds, cobalts, mints, and metallics allude to something feminine, decorative, and soft. Their form mimics, abstracts, and distorts different parts of the human body; organs, sockets, tendrils, cavities, and orifices, some more specifically representative than others. There is an intriguing peculiarity to their objectification that comes from the tension of part versus sum. Each piece references a different whole, but when united create a new body, a new story, an amalgamation that is open to interpretation and plays with the idea of what a body can and cannot be. 

The entropic nature of the pieces themselves, with their outstretched, twisted arms, gaping holes, and general unpredictability, is counteracted by their rigid organization and symmetry of their wall placement. They feel alive but contained, chaotic but thoughtful. The grid set up is reminiscent of a specimen wall at a natural history museum.. The objects are stripped of their agency and subjected to inspection. This format speaks to the illusions of one’s control of the natural world and self, the beauty or complexity that is lost when order is imposed,  and what happens to someone or something when it's taken out of its context. I feel this desire as a person and artist to create some sort of order or logic as a way of processing and understanding the world around me. There is a satisfaction of composition. Creating ambiguous and undefined objects is not a natural exercise for me. The grid in some ways acts as a coping mechanism, which I hope is both self-aware and self-critical because it is, in fact, unnecessary. It feels like a colonial instinct. As we look at this wall, we sit with this struggle of control. We sit with the complexities of being human in an ever-changing world, the sadness, the joy, the confusion, the misunderstandings, the imperfections, and find peace in the chaos being a constant to accept our realities as our own. 

The wall pieces are paired with two large lamps that are something in between alien, object, and flesh. They are both witnessing and illuminating the wall. As we observe with them, we too cross lines of animacy. The smaller piece is satin white and lavender leaning into periwinkle and blue, with crackling light gray craters, and a yellowed, crazing gloss that feels liquid and sticky. It is smooth and rough, soft and bumpy, visually tangible. The colors are light, but the form is heavy and deflated. It almost folds in on itself. It feels defeated. It is paired with a large, orb-like, yellow light bulb that tops off the third tier of the sculpture. This head brings an animacy to the piece, bringing it away from its function as a lamp and closer to a luminous creature. The larger piece was constructed with a groggy clay fired in reduction to bring out the rich brown tones of the iron within the clay and accented with a silvery metallic manganese glaze. The raw clay highlights the subtle intricacies of the form, her wrinkles, indents, fingerprints, and imperfections. Her neck is removable and able to be rotated, so the creature's attention can be altered. She shines light on the objects she is attending to. She is watching in the way of a mother or guardian-like figure.  She takes up a human-sized quantity of space and weight. She is there to protect this smaller, deflated piece and the confused forms on the wall. She is sure of her form and self, something the other objects do not necessarily possess. 

Although there are strong conceptual through-lines involving bodies, distortion, feminine expression, chaos, and light, my exploration of ceramic material feels most valuable to me as the creator. I learned so much about the limits of what clay can and cannot do, and it still feels like I have just scratched the surface of the material. 

At the beginning of this year, I had an aversion to glazes. They were unpredictable and didn’t allow for much precision (in comparison to materials that I am more familiar with, such as paint). As an artist, I feel I am most comfortable in the realm of illustrative forms, with clean lines and clear representations. I also was searching for colors and textures that were not readily available to me without my own glaze mixing practice. So I took glaze making into my own hands. I switched to primarily cone six firings and focused on textures and colors that I was passionate about. I discovered that satin matte, heavily textured, metallic, and crazing glazes speak to me most. I also gained an appreciation for raw clay and experimented with the use of glaze in very intentional, sparing, but visually effective ways. Glaze is a really exciting part of the ceramic process for me now. I am looking forward to experimenting in the future with more glazes. Light pink is still proving to be a very challenging color to achieve with the materials available to me. So that is one feat I would like to look into. I have also been interested in creating a skin color with mason stains. I mixed a bunch of mason stained glaze leftovers from a spray booth experiment, and the color turned out very skin-like. Foundation, in the makeup industry, is made with yellow, red, blue, and white pigments. I would be really interested in doing a line blend down to recreate this sort of makeup-like color for more bodily experiments. Post show, I have been experimenting with additives such as colorants and oxides in a porcelain clay body itself. I have had some really promising results, and am excited to take this further with larger projects. 

Form has always been a more comfortable part of ceramics for me. I have an instinct for sculpting. Throughout this thesis, though, I dealt with clay in ways I had never before. I sculpted my wall pieces very intuitively. I watched and listened to what the clay wanted to be, and I sculpted it into that. There was not necessarily a vision. It was as a visiting artist, Laurita Cortese, gave words to this process,  “a collaboration with the material.” A good portion of the wall pieces were first thrown with a lip to accommodate wall placement and then altered into their animate forms. This was such a satisfying and freeing process because there was not necessarily something it was trying to be. It was about uncovering what the clay wanted to be in that moment of alteration and following joy as I was manipulating the material. There was a predetermined starting point, but they all turned out so different, exciting, and alive. In the future, I would love to continue with this process, even just as a sketching exercise.

 I was also very excited by my successes in building large this year. The larger lamp is by far the biggest piece I have made out of ceramic. It was such a fun challenge creating it, and I learned so much from the first, smaller lamp to the second, larger one. In the future, I am very interested in creating interchangeable and stackable pieces. I would love to create multiple heads for the body of the large lamp or a leg portion to elevate the torso form. If given the opportunity to continue to pursue ceramics, I will continue exploring bodies, confusion, ambiguity, femininity, and material experimentations. I want to make as much as I can in this lifetime.

Earlier in the year, I believed that my art was too juvenile or unserious to be a part of the professional art world. I really loved making the art. I just wasn’t seeing artists who made the kind of art that I was making or wanted to make. I didn’t understand where it fit into the art historical context. But when I reflect on the artists that I am inspired by, for example, Shane Bronx’s huge colorful biomorphic sculptures, Fiona Hall’s morality dolls, The Haas Brother’s alien furniture, Amias Yokoyama’s gloopy ceramics ladies, Genesis Belanger’s surrealist body fragments, Wade Tulier’s minimalist but impactful stacks, Ruby Neri’s bright and crunchy illustrative gals on giant ceramic canvases, Katie Stout’s playful and heavily textured creatures, I don’t feel like an outsider. My most recent inspiration, who is currently being shown in Eugene’s Maude Kerns Art Center and Gallery, a local Oregon artist, is Hillary Pfeiffer. She is doing incredible series work with wood, metal, and fibers related to bird species preservation. She has a very inspiring wall installation set up of hundreds of nests made out of trash that she foraged off the coast. She also has a wall installation with a series of biomorphic wooden eggs highlighting a specific sparrow that is being affected by our current climate crisis. I would love to transition into creating art about localized issues and having more of a social impact through my subjects.

I don’t have to make art exactly like one other artist who has been recognized in the field. It is much more exciting to me to take little pieces of each inspiration and to create something that feels authentic to myself. This specific project feels situated somewhere in between contemporary, pop, and surrealist art within art historical context. Images that are nonsensical, dreamlike, metamorphosed, and also easily digestible and highly illustrative. Looking into this intersection, I discovered the “Low Brow” or “Pop Surrealist” movement that began in California in the 1970s. “Low brow” as a term feels outdated and demeaning, but it was meant to communicate pushback for art standards of the time and the inaccessibility of the art world. Pop surrealism was a counter culture, street-based movement inspired by what Robert Williams (who is considered the father and wrote a book about the movement) called Bohemia Syndrome, “a romantic virtue out of being contrary to the status quo, and its members have included revolutionaries, malcontents, and parasites.” (33) This bohemian spirit, this desire to make something new and subvert societal standards, has been seen time and time again throughout art historical movements and makes me feel a lot of pride for humanity. I don’t necessarily relate to the artists of the Lowbrow art movement, such as Williams and his illustrative, and almost inappropriate, paintings with women, robots, and hot rods, but if I were to put this project within an art movement, it would probably be this one. My wall of weird, distorted bodily objects paired with alien creature lamps are thought-provoking and socially relevant, but in a camp, unserious, absurd, but digestible way. I also wanted to note that another movement happening at the same time and place, the “Funk” art movement, had similar principles. This movement also rejected minimalism and popular academic styles and pushed for people to make weird or bad art (which was considered bad since it subverted expectations of art at the time). I am also very much inspired by this movement, but it is based more in abstract expressionism, which is focused on non-representational subjects. I am more interested in surrealist but representational subjects, so I believe the “low brow” movement is more accurate. 

Art involves taking a really hard look at who you are and what matters to you. Then, following, there is the confusing question of why. Why do I have these desires for myself, and why does my voice matter? Why do I matter? And I guess the closest that I came to finding an answer for this was that I don’t. Chaos rules, the world was built in contradiction, and because of this, I can do and be whatever I want to do and be. I can make art because it brings me joy, it gives me purpose, and it is central to making me the person that I want to be. Reading “The Creative Act,” Rick Rubin helped me better understand the value of art. He writes, “When we’re making things that we love, our mission is accomplished. There is nothing at all to figure out.” (314). I hope to keep this sentiment with me when I doubt myself and feel inspired to keep making for the rest of my life. 

Bibliography

Dahl, Alia. Clay Pop. Rizzoli Publications, 2023.

This book explores contemporary artists in the ceramics world who are creating art within the histories of pop art. This book places the ceramic material outside of the world of craft and into the world of fine art. I have been inspired by a good handful of artists featured in this book and have gone back to it for inspiration my whole time in UO’s ceramics program. The artists in this book are creating outside of ceramic tradition, focusing mostly on sculpture and decorative pieces. Their pieces are colorful, weird, surrealist, and experimental and allowed me to feel like I have a valid voice in this space.

Elderton, Louisa, and Rebecca Morrill. Vitamin c : Clay + Ceramic in Contemporary Art. London: Phaidon Press Limited, 2017.

This is another book on Stacy Jo’s that has inspired me in my years here. It highlights  important contemporary ceramic artists that are relevant and making strides in the current art world. There is a huge range of styles and contexts within this book. Some of the outstanding artists include Sterling Ruby’s drippy, understated by extremely complicated surfaces, Takura Kawata’s large overglazed taffy structures, Grayson Perry’s intricately illustrated and humorous pots. This book has allowed me to explore what is happening in ceramics today for precedence and then relate that back to what I have been exploring in my own work. 

Magsamen, Susan, and Ivy Ross. Your Brain on Art: How the Arts Transform Us. [S.l.]: Random House, 2023.

I've spent a lot of time thinking about the value of art and the real world impacts that it can have on people. Music, as an art form, feels most impactful, but I’ve never had any kind of musical talent. I work most naturally within the visual realm. I know the impact that visual art has made on my life, it has just been hard for me to see the value of it for others (as I do not wish to live my life solely for my own happiness). This book explained a lot about the psychology of emotions, mental well being, and outlined the healing properties of art. I referred back to this book when I felt insecure about why I was making what I was making and gave me validity in my craft.

Miller, Lulu. WHY FISH DON’T EXIST : A Story of Loss, Love, and the Hidden Order of Life. S.L.: Simon & Schuster, 2021.

I revisited one of my favorite books, “Why Fish Don’t Exist” by Lulu Miller. It is a journalistic and autobiographical approach to understanding one's place in the world through the lens and life of David Starr Jordan, a famous and flawed taxonomist in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Taxonomists attempt to study, name and categorize the natural world. They essentially take our by-law-of-thermodynamic entropic and nonsensical world and create clear, understandable groupings of species and phylogenetic trees. Jordan spent his entire life going on adventures, discovering new species of fish, trying to reign in chaos, and bringing what he believed to be order to the natural world. After he died, cladists (taxonomists interested in branches of family trees) discovered that fish, as a term describing a group with genetic familiarity, don't exist. Fish are genetically more similar to different land animals than they are to each other. The category of fish really only refers to them living in the water and their scales. Jordan spent his whole life defining a category of species that don’t exist. His story is a metaphor for what happens when one tries to force order in a world that doesn’t want to be defined or confined. I was thinking a lot about control, chaos, and order when I was making my pieces. I wanted to lean into chaos and create these weird, freaky, ambiguous forms. I created the grid in the installation to illustrate my struggle with this loss of control. 

Natsoulas, John. “John Natsoulas Gallery.” John Natsoulas Gallery, 2019. https://natsoulas.com/the-funk-movenment.

This resource outlines the Funk movement in the West Coast in the 1970s. It helped me better understand the context of the movement and how my art was similar or different from its principles. 

O’reilly, Sally. The Body in Contemporary Art. London: Thames & Hudson, 2009.

This book places the body within art in the context of contemporary art. It shows incredible examples of modern artists experimenting and playing with the body as the subject such as Mickalene Thomas’ (who I have been inspired by for a long time) collages empowering queer, black women, Jenny Saville’s grotesque oil paintings illustrating bodies changing, Sarah Lucas’s iconoclastic sculptural nudes situated on chairs. Although none of these artists were creating formally similar work to me, it helped me contextualize my subject within the broader art world. It also allowed me to understand that the body, as a subject, has been explored in art for a millenia. But this genre of art took a more political term starting in the 1950s coinciding with social change at the time that related to civil and human rights.

Rubin, Rick. The Creative Act. Penguin, 2023.

This book talks through art and its importance in the world. I really struggled with finding my value in my own voice throughout this process and after reading this book, I gave myself permission to create things that I wanted to create simply because they brought me joy or because it felt right. Art is about intuition and being in tune with oneself and your position in the world. Prioritizing this has allowed me to create more freely and authentically. 

Williams, Robert. Lowbrow Art of Robert Williams. Rip Office Press, 1990.

This book outlined what the lowbrow art movement was and the life in history of its “father” Robert Williams. I used this book to figure out where my art sits within art historical context. It taught me about the movement, the inspirations, the story of Robert Williams who has not been very well received by the public for his work being sexist, racist, and homophobic. I have not formed a very strong opinion about the subjects of his art and looked into these claims. There is definitely a lack of diversity in his subject matter and graphic images of sex and violence. There was specific critique about his album for Gun’s N Roses “Appetite for Destruction” album. I do think he should be critiqued about these things especially considering his positionality as a straight white man. That being said,  I really appreciate him for the campiness of his work, the detail, the skill, his rejection of art world social standards, and pioneering the intersection of pop art and surrealism.