Artist Statement

My current body of work explores the relationship that queerness and queer intimacies have to space and place through the use of ceramic sculptures, installations, and functional objects. Specifically, the place one calls home has a complex relationship to being and belonging in the American South when it comes to living in a queer body. My work draws on architectural elements and kitsch objects found in Southern domestic spaces to examine the complexities of inhabiting environments that may only offer conditional acceptance.

Although I work across a range of processes and modes of making to subvert and reorient objects toward queerness, my primary method is moldmaking and porcelain casting that is driven by an interest in replication and the transformation of an object’s material history. My functional wares are informed by similarly operational objects found in the domestic homespace such as novelty dinner plates, saucers, and teacups. The objects are then placed in installations predicated on recreating architectures of domestic interiors like spackled walls, crown-molding, and door-trim. I also employ the use of kitsch objects such as ceramic cat sculptures, wall text, and various other knick-knacks to gesture towards campy endearment residing naturally within queer culture. With this in mind, slipcasting and pressing techniques are employed as a mode of making due to the nature of copying, mimicking, and recreating that is inherent to the process and thus emulates how queer people may assimilate and mimic dominant culture as a means of survival. Objects, both found and fabricated, carry histories that shift as they are molded and recast, just as queer history is reshaped within the lens of survival. Through the molding of domestic objects, I both reflect on and resist the pull to assimilate into the heteronormative structures embedded within, choosing instead to replace and recreate within a queer reorientation.

The recurring palette of purples and pinks in my work intentionally references their historical and social associations with queerness. Deep purples and violets take root as a queer color in the 7th century with the imagery of floral violets being tied to the Lesbian poet Sappho. Purple finds its way to queerness more contemporarily with the historical reminiscences of “lavender” being slang for gay men and lesbians as early as the 1920s and into the 1950s with the lavender scare where the United States Government fired federal employees for their presumed or explicit queerness. The pink triangle, used during the Holocaust as a signifier for gay men in concentration camps, was reappropriated and reclaimed as a symbol of resistance in the 1970s by multiple queer liberation movements, a political symbol for AIDS awareness by ACT UP! in the 1980s and 90s, and is still used today as a Pride symbol. Besides these historical ties, pinks and purples shifted their gendered prominence as the 20th century progressed, thus marking effeminacy (and queerness by association) when cis men associate with them. Through the prominence ofpurples and pinks in my work, I gesture toward the historical and social significance these colors hold asmarkers of queerness.