This semester I took a ceramics class with professor Steven Thurston. I concentrated in ceramic sculpture in undergrad and I was excited to reconnect with this way of making while at OSU. I ended up creating sculptural elements for a performance installation to be presented at Urban Arts Space in May. The show, Grieving Landscapes, is a collaboratively curated exhibition with work by myself, Nicole Lawson, Alisha Jihn, Lucy Dillon, Kiki Williams, and Jackie Courchene.
My section of the exhibition will include sculpture, sound art, dance, and live music. The description of the piece is below:
Beasts of the Field is a performance installation that inters and composts the monocropping, extractive, purity culture of white supremacy by resurrecting the body of a strange and unlikely saint. Isa converses in movement, song and poetry with an unburied effigy of the Beast, a god of death, life, dirt, decay, and mischief. Their bantersome back and forth obscures the sensible, rational, and hierarchical to illuminate a tangled love of bodies and beings large and small. They irreverently pray toward the mess and resist simple definitions. The Beast is a humanish creature emerging from a mound of dirt with snakes for arms and a friendly demon mask that resembles a cow, a dog, a lion, and a number of devils depicted in European medieval sculpture. Isa tugs and twists at her cultures of origin (Portuguese Roman Catholic and German Lutheran) to shape a new personal epistemology in which death is a vivid process of sacred decay and the body is an eruption of uncontainable mysteries of sensuous danger and delight. There is no fall, no sin, no punishment for the snake in this story, only tangled guts, warm hands, and unruly life burgeoning out of cracks in the caverns of the dead.
