Hungry Souls
This installation was created for the Resident Artists’ Show at the Archie Bray Foundation in June 2023. This work covers new and old territory for me. It’s a little bit raw and, yes I know, weird. I like the potential of drawings to create context for my pots. As part of its 3D nature, clay is tangible. You can hold objects, let them invade your space, and bring them into your home to serve whatever use you might have for them. After they leave the gallery, I cede control of my pots, and they become whatever their new owners require them to be. Drawings feel more ephemeral—a way to quickly present a thought without tangible form. I have a background in drawing and painting, and I enjoy switching between visual languages to express different ideas. As I created this installation, I was thinking about hunger and needs, booms and busts, spiritual dearth and plenty. The baby birds strain their necks forward in a gesture of trust and supplication, and the figures are me feeding…me.
Soul Riot
I installed this project at Queen City Clay as Part of the Archie Bray Resident Artists Show at the 2023 NCECA (Cincinnati OH). The installation consisted of two four-foot drawings and 12 bricks with birds on them. The drawings on birch plywood show two of my friends wearing black block holding bird bricks. I made the bricks (I get a itch to make bricks every couple years). I started making bird bricks as protest objects in 2020. It was nice to see a bunch of them together this way.
Prickly Thoughts
In the fall of 2019, I installed an exhibition titled “Prickly Thoughts” in the Utah State University Projects Gallery, a student gallery operated by the Department of Art & Design. I conceived of the Prickly Thoughts exhibition as a collaborative project between myself and my fellow students and staff. In this project, I invited viewers to anonymously trade anxious thoughts for pocket-sized porcelain cacti. In preparation, I slipcast 100 prickly pears and installed them in two rows wrapping around the walls of the gallery. Each porcelain cactus rested on a slotted peg, and participants were asked to remove a cactus and leave a troubling thought written on an index card in its place. As viewers interacted with the exhibit, the installation changed from a wall of porcelain objects to a wall of messages handwritten in pencil. My intentions were twofold: it was my hope that the gift of the objects would generate a boost in the mood of the individuals who had traded their thoughts for them and that the display of these thoughts would make viewers feel less alone.
Response to this project was a bit overwhelming, in an emotional sense as well as a quantitative one. I opened the exhibit on Wednesday, Dec. 4, in the week between Thanksgiving and finals. Not having asked for viewer participation in a project before, I was tentative in my preparations. The only advertising I attempted was a poster placed outside of the gallery door and an explanation to my 3D Design students as to what I was doing and why. By the end of the day, half of the cacti were gone. By Friday, I was bringing in more cacti from my studio, and participants were leaving responses on the writing table. I noticed that some viewers had left thoughts without taking anything--several pegs held multiple index cards. Participants shared worries about relationships, about family and friends, money, medical news, about body image, and general anxiety about being “good enough” in a competitive field. Some viewers shared accounts of domestic abuse, sexual assault, and loss. Each time I went in to photograph after hours, I locked the door and sobbed.
Several students stopped me in the hallway to talk about the Prickly Thoughts project; some told me that they had visited multiple times to read new responses. One pointed out that the cacti I was offering for trade were about the same size and shape as a cell phone--something that I think must have known intuitively but which I hadn’t considered initially. Several people told me that they saw lines of participants reading and waiting for their turn to write. One viewer commented that watching people moving along the wall was like watching pilgrims in a cathedral.
The profound impacts of stress and anxiety are becoming hard to ignore,1 and the rate of increase in deaths by suicide in Utah is high in comparison to national averages.2 It has been my experience as an MFA student and as a teaching assistant for the Department of Art & Design that students are aware that this issue is affecting members of their age group disproportionately and that they want to talk about it.
This project was created through the support of the NCECA Graduate Fellowship program, which helped me purchase tools and materials and also allowed me to supplement my nascent installation skills with a workshop at Penland.
1 “Suicide Rising across the US.” Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 7 June 2018, https://www.cdc.gov/vitalsigns/suicide/index.html.
2 Nutt, Amy Ellis, et al. “Utah's Suicide Rate Has Shot up 46.5% since 1999 - Making It the Fifth-Highest in the Nation.” The Salt Lake Tribune, https://www.sltrib.com/news/2018/06/07/suicide-rates-rise-sharply-in-utah-and-across-the-countr y-new-report-shows/.