Statement

Ceramics is one of few ways to achieve a kind of immortality in this life. The phase-shifted state echoes the maker into an eternity. To form a figure, in the likeness to myself, I make my fluid and undefined experience of gender undying, tangible, and “real”.

My work explores “queer time as immortality” and subverts “gender as destiny” through the “vessel” as both form and metaphor for my relationship with gender through a nonbinary lens. Both bodies and containers are considered vessels: for offerings, for souls, for expectations and roles. Against destiny, all vessels have functions the can perform, reject, or subvert.

Engaging and reinterpreting my memories of a catholic background, I subvert the archetypes of gender and sainthood and preformative ritual “holy” objects in a narrative rewriting and reclamation. What would queer sacraments look/feel like? What does it mean to be a queer saint in the eyes of a hostile god-narrative?

I choose preexisting, discarded glass forms, and build immortal, queer bodies to present them. Ceramic hands open portals into the viewer’s space and extend offerings of crystal glass, once gifts to celebrate milestones that have varied context in queer time, symbolize expectations of a culture that operates in binary destinies. The viewer is placed in a captured moment of decision: accept, decline, or refuse to engage with such destinies.

Moments of mild, indirect confrontation in daily life are often a reminder of one’s queerness and the continued decision to honor and protect this queerness is a holy sacrament.