Is that a Promise or a Threat?

The art I produced during my MFA is informed by my personal experiences with trauma, grief, gaslighting, and the subsequent inability to interpret my resonant feelings. The title of my thesis exhibition and accompanying support paper – is that a promise or a threat? – is the foundational question and entryway into deciphering the intense, overwhelming, and contradictory states of affect that I was and, to a lesser degree, still am experiencing. In response to these circumstances, my research focuses on ideas of care, fragility, transformation, dis- and re-orientation, and how clay, as a material, is a catalyst and grounding agent for embodied understanding. The content I explore is mirrored in the precarity and material flux of ceramic sculpture, fragile and vulnerable, yet crystalline. The ceramic sculptures and drawings installed in the gallery space are meant to emulate a perpetual oscillation between risk and safety, threat and promise, anxiety and satisfaction – thus mirroring the constant negotiation and exploration of my own affective experience.