A Balmy Elsewhere: Restorative Materialisms
I introduce the context of the “material turn” occurring across disciplines alongside the emergence of new materialism from poststructuralist and post humanist thought roughing out a theoretical framework of granting agency to non-human material. This realm of theory critiques traditional Western subject-object relationships and opens the door to non-hierarchical relationships with nonhuman matter. I argue how contemporary ceramic objects, on their own and in combination with performance art and new media, benefit from a new materialist analysis. The recognition of the vast implications uncovered while fully embracing the pull and agency of material demands the creation of strategies to understand newly dynamic and porous relationship with these objects. I frame the activation of material during performance art as a research method, and outline humility and perversity as effective emergent postures to approach the implications of the topic. Throughout this process, I discover nuances, flaws, and contradictions of new materialism, especially in its conceptual overlap with indigenous ways of knowing. I steer towards a recapitulation of the branch of study as “restorative materialism,” serving as a tool to heal the fissure between ourselves and tactility, immediacy, and empathy--a fissure which was created by a slip from meaningful symbolic exchange in our present moment.
I make work at a time when touch is increasingly blunted by physical and digital prophylactic matter. Yet the proliferation of haptic surfaces grants skins a new primacy, offering an opportunity to resensitize ourselves to materiality, to step into the reciprocity possible within human and non-human interactions. My work cultivates an attunement to the agency and intelligence within ceramic materials, centering the self-permeability and porosity necessary to experience a fleshy, and sweet intermingling with clay. I relish in the perversity present in this relationship taken to its extreme, and I aim to create objects and performances that capture the force present within tenderness, the penetration within reciprocity, and the weirdness of intersubjective experience. Coiling and pinching contain a rhythm that is akin to devotion and the dimensions of discipline within a faith practice. By invoking surfaces reminiscent of flesh and stone, I coax my viewer into a playfully stratified space where the vessel acts an orifice, deviance performs sanctity, and mercy abounds.