Coat of tan leather suede. Knee length or slightly longer. Round neckline with slight band collar. Center front opening with 7 circular metal buttons attached with matching leather thongs. Edges of opening have thong stitching. Two front horizontal, slit pockets edged with same thong stitching as opening with ends hanging as single strands of fringe. Long sleeves with thong stitching at cuff. At upper bust, shoulder, elbow, and hem of coat is leather thong fringe. On collar above upper bust fringe, above elbow fringe, on pocket, and above hem are "stamped and painted" decorative bands. In line above fringe at upper bust is line of round brass studs. Label handwritten at inside center back: "Handmade/ by / Sherri Shelton Heath / © 5-99"

My ceramic works utilize a heightened sensory perception to encourage a prolonged engagement with the handcrafted objects. With an emphasis on repetition, I create individual rings from clay coils and interlink them in complex, radial configurations to produce a malleable, geometric network designed to respond to the user's movements. The work revolves around dichotomies: hard/soft, delicate/strong, inspired by clay's chemical alterations in the firing. Each malleable pattern preserves the fluid movement the pliable clay begins with. Overall, the abundance of ornament elevates the object, transforming an everyday object into something intended for special occasions or moments for the self.

My work as an American artist (Korean diaspora) reflects the interplay of diverse cultures and locations that have shaped my experiences. Through the exploration of photo and video archives from my travels, I uncover patterns and images that symbolize both place and transition. Utilizing digital technology, I fragment and reconstruct visual elements, evoking a sense of longing and disconnection. I also investigate the relationship between the body and space, using multi-modal responses. My work aims to capture dualities and stimulate contemplative meditation through the juxtaposition of tangible and intangible, clear and hazy, large and small, and intimate and distant elements.

Diana Rojas explores the hidden and invisible through interdisciplinary collaboration and conversation across fields such as Philosophy, Music Composition, Physics, Material Science and Visual Art. The tools and environments she creates - by utilizing the archaic and contemporary, the digital and sculptural, known and unknown, and the minute and immersive -culminate in experiential works that prompt viewers to slow down and inspire introspection. The slowing down that these works provoke raises questions about existence, reality and being. By combining materials and elements of theories and devices of exploration, she references their antecedents, but creates new opportunities for viewer investigation. This includes utilizing creative coding, video, 3D modeling, welding steel, kiln forming and soldering glass, and cutilizing sand as projection screens. Additionally, she utilizes sound and light to create captivating installations, inspired by interest in the influence that immaterial forces have on human minds and decisions.

My work explores my identity as a Latino, veteran, and father, and counteracts the lack of positive representation of men of color in society. While they are similar to traditional piñatas in their design and construction, my sculptures are based on abstract representations of my internalized identity. These anthropomorphic forms stand rather than being hung, enacting ownership over their space. This allows them to take on a newly assigned identity and presence. These forms allow me to display, articulate, and communicate. the struggles I have experienced throughout my life because of systemic oppression.

My ceramics are composed of two bodies of work poised against one another, one rendered in porcelain and colored inclusion stains combined in processes rooted within the practices of laminating clay, and the other made of brutal metallic black stoneware. The first are made of landscapes and abstractly depict them, while the latter represent ways in which we consume oil literally and metaphorically. Within myself are conflicting desires for convenient access to my environment and the loss of biodiversity caused by my unsustainable use of it. This is the core of the conflict between my pieces and my intention in making work is to embody my relationship with nature as influenced by my familial context in the US. All of the vessels are designed to be functional, but to serve used motor oil instead of food or drink. If the purpose of the objects is to represent my relationship with nature and the iteration of days, then the performance of them is meant to invoke the recognition of multiform oil consumption and the effect it has on my life.

Titled after a poem by Edgar Allan Poe, From Every Depth of Good and Ill, is an exhibition composed of vignettes created with ceramic sculpture, ephemeral installation works, and printmaking. The work primarily references domesticity and antiquated subjects to illustrate the process of coping with past trauma and the resultant feelings of shame, inadequacy, and incompleteness. Marked by a palette of warm rust and sepia, aged patterning, and worn textures, the tableau of objects presented within the space mimic old familial photographs. Each resulting work serves as a dirty looking-glass for the viewer to peer through.

Rainbows, Stones and Ghosts is a two-part exhibition of multi-dimensional drawings about the almost and the not-yet-made. My Project-in-Lieu-of Thesis exists physically as a series of oil paintings, works on paper, and a site-specific sculptural installation. With recurring imagery of rainbows, stones, and construction debris, the works reimagine their subjects as icons and objects of potential. Highlighting time, labor, and material, my project questions the creation of value, status, and the concept of the ‘ideal’. My drawings dissolve the boundary between the absence and presence by continuously breaking down, expanding, and reimagining their surfaces, subjects, and sites. Rainbows, Stones and Ghosts is an invitation to navigate the ‘almost’ as an immersive space of possibility.

My artistic practice centers around personal history, connection, and identity. I reflect on my experience as a Nigerian who has lived on three continents thus far, and how those experiences have led to the deconstruction, reassembly, and hybridization of my identity. My work pays homage to my tribe of origin, Yoruba, whilst redefining and exploring the hybridity that exists as a result of cross-cultural influences that are prominent in our world today. I incorporate varying objects and materials such as jewelry, sculpture, wood, metal, and fiber. This integration speaks to the multicultural existence of the world I live in the interrelationship between Nigeria and the West.

Constructed Self is an exhibition of life-size forms that blur the line between photography and sculpture while being both stable and on the verge of collapse. These damaged concrete columns, slabs, and hand-formed bricks used to create walls are inspired by architecture's support structures to convey my internal psychic framework. Photographs are transferred on the surface of these forms that depict environments where I have processed and experienced my struggles with mental health. This work explores how to communicate and convey the interior and exterior of my emotional self in visible terms while bringing me healing emotionally through the process of making these sculptures.

I have a desire to make functional objects and seek self-fulfillment through strong craftsmanship. I craft ceramic objects intuitively with an emphasis on the materiality of vessels. I strive to blend expressions of the natural world and the domestic space into functional ceramic wares. My work is a collaboration of material exploration and glaze research. In my practice, I am searching for a balance of human design, nature, and beauty of material. Clay is a seductively tactile medium. I am constantly challenging myself to highlight this characteristic within the finished pieces. Each ceramic piece is full of intentionality and become a record of time. The medium displays a record of moments of impressions and interaction between maker and material. Through the lense of functional ceramics, I create work that is an intersection of maker, object and user within a domestic space.

My artwork uses the traditions of printmaking, photography, and fiber arts to dissect the myths, history, and current moment of American culture. My methodology includes photographing sites where governmental and capital power is most present. Photography is my tool for documenting the present, while quilting and printmaking are my way of reflecting on and digesting ideological concepts that are present in our culture. The quilt is a symbol of comfort in our personal ideologies. My work aims to destigmatize direct action and encourages the viewer to reevaluate how meaningful change can be made today.

Working to unravel my sense of the world and challenge the narratives and beliefs I hold as truths; I have created a reimagined and surreal bathroom that offers a private and vulnerable space filled with hidden horrors. The animated, imperfect, decayed, and cracked bathroom forms bridge the gap between the impermanent fragility of memory and the ongoing beliefs of a personal narrative. I worked to overcome the assumption that, to heal, something must be completely resolved within itself. Instead, I offer that healing is an undescribed area, that is unmeasurable, and it is forever evolving and never finished.

In my work, I create collections of small objects from a variety of materials and curate them into a larger composition in space. These objects are made from clay, wood, paint, sand, beads, cardboard, paper, yarn, tape, and other materials. I arrange these objects into a composition that is informed by painting, which manifests as the wall and floor serving as substrate, along with vinyl shapes delineating areas of the painting as a whole. In these arrangements I aim to break away from taught boundaries in regards to physical space and expectations of familiar materials.

My work explores the interpersonal and intrapersonal relationships we have with our physical, mental, and emotional bodies. Using techniques ranging from traditional carpentry to digital fabrication, the works are created to represent individual traumatic experiences as well as the universality of loss. My pieces are meant to elicit an empathic response from the audience. There are common traumas and pains that bring humans together as a form of bonding.

I make work that engages the porous and sensate body. The larger question for me is the interdependency of how we exist within our environment and how our environment exists in us. Caves, deep time, and the feminine landscape factor into my work, as well as thinking beyond a humancentered narrative to address concerns about the earth. My process involves using raw pigment, wax, rain, dirt, and the language of abstraction to point to a raw, interior space. My source material is equal parts imagination and field research, most recently into cave systems.

I combine maternal feminist experiences with hand-built ceramic vessels to create functional ritual objects. Pregnancy, childbirth, and motherhood transformed me. I am not just “mother" but also “artist” and “woman:” this multiplicity is intersubjectivity. I reconciled my conflicting priorities through my art with authentic testimony, memorialization, and activism. Rich red earthenware is clothed with rhythmic, radial pinch marks and stylized floral illustrations. Pottery has a strong association with the body, combining naturally with corporeal forms. My installation and performance pieces use the pot's function as a conceptual vehicle. Perhaps a little solemn reflection kneeling before Vessel of the Female Spirit or listening by Fountain will make my viewers better stewards of their selves, the mothers in their lives, and this precious planet.

In my work, I explore the ancient occult concept of the egregore or collective thought-form and its continued relevance in contemporary life. One might not think of the systems that we operate in today as ritual in nature, especially those that utilize new technology. We may imagine cyberspace as the ultimate rational and objective realm where all things can be categorized, quantified, and monetized. However, it is a place saturated with ceremonial situations upon close inspection. I seek out these ceremonies of niche digital communities and reconstruct them in new forms operating adjacent to their original stream.

My artwork is a record of mundane yet impactful experiences of everyday life. The subject of memory and my interest in pictorial space create a visual narrative of the physical and metaphorical ways I navigate the world. I envision space as sometimes a place of comfort, or at times a souvenir of a distant event. Through my paintings, I process and rediscover the past through the intimacy and tactility of mark-making. Each work presents a bittersweet narrative where I examine the complex circumstances that have brought me to a specific moment in time.

Surveillance capitalism is pervasive within our everyday lives: turning every movement, emotion, or thought into a commodity to be turned into an ad for us. As our meta-data is bought and sold to third-parties, we are coerced into buying products from targeted ads. This system of behavioral manipulation combines human psychology and emotion analytics to make us nodes within an accurate capitalist network. My work scrutinizes current economic structures through videos, installations, AR and digitally printed garments. In my practice, I satirize data collection, extraction, and commodification through an accumulation of my own user information from large tech companies– including Meta, Google, and Apple. This data is used to digitally produce patterns and create a collection of garments. Through this production of clothing, my work visually represents the symbiotic relationship between consumer capitalism and surveillance capitalism.

My work consists of clothing jewelry hybrids that combine the sentimentality and materiality of jewelry with the coverage and protection of clothing.

My artwork dialogues with three topics: climate change’s economic and societal impact, plant genetic engineering advances, and art’s influence on scientific creativity and innovation. These intersect in my focus on the mystery and promise of plant genetic research and the creative innovation needed to advance this research. I manipulate, massage, and mix contemporary mediums and traditional sculpture, fiber and painting mediums. My sculptures often have translucent elements that interact vividly with visible and UV light spectrums. Undulation and emergence figure prominently in my artwork as metaphors of the active living organism coming forth from the genetically altered primordial soup.

I use the domestic as a locale to consider the function of a queer body within the “American Dream.” I frequently remove the objects from their intended uses through various methods of alterations. Breaking things down to queer identity, objects, space, and community, I consider each object as a stand-in for individuals liberated from the pressure of preconceptions and mastery. Each lends itself towards the community identity, serving individually as separate functions within the experience, but also collectively serving as an invitation for on-lookers to join this community that we would define together.

This research project studies ways that space shapes identity by examining a contemporary sculpture using a multicultural theory. The author focuses on analyzing the role of physical space in the construction of cultural identity across time by studying Mariana Castillo-Deball’s No Solid Form Can Contain You (2010) through Gloria Anzaldua’s Nepantilism theory.