BFA Thesis: The Body is a Conduit
My work begins frequently with language. The Body is a Conduit — the title and work at the center of my BFA inquiry — began as such. Through the course of this terminal year and the space for extensive — if not excessive — critical self-reflection and introspection afforded by quarantine during COVID-19, I've come to recognize that time and work outside of the physical studio space have constituted a significant part of my practice. Projects, which on the surface appear seemingly removed from ceramic process, are intimately intertwined with this body of artwork. Specifically, my work facilitating higher education initiatives in Oregon prisons through UO's Prison Education Program and my work in assault/sexual violence prevention with UO's student-led assault prevention shuttle, Safe Ride, lie at the conceptual heart of The Body is a Conduit and my process this year. It is through my experiences in these activist spaces, coupled with consideration of language and ceramic material research and that my process has functioned.
Existing with and alongside my creative practice, work within activist spaces has served as a place for artistic ideas to flow through. Time spent working in and out of carceral settings on prison education initiatives, as well as on operations or projects for Safe Ride, have catalyzed my practice in unexpected ways. I understand my patterns of thinking through prison education and Safe Ride in part in relation to Mierle Laderman Ukeles' conceptualization of maintenance art. After taking a course devoted solely to her work and the idea of maintenance art earlier in my time at UO, I remember climbing into the driver's seat of a Safe Ride van thinking — for the first time — this work, this cause could be art? Or at the least, connected to my practice? While I stop short of identifying these spaces as themselves art — diverging slightly from Ukeles, who asserts in her 1969 Maintenance Art Manifesto: "Everything I say is Art is Art. Everything I do is Art is Art." — I do critically consider their interconnectedness to my practice. In my own process I attach instead to Ukeles' breaking down of the "separate" role of art from life and other work. Ukeles' assertion that "My working will be the work" sparked me to consider how the social justice work that has been a deep part of my life could feed symbiotically my artistic practice. I found that the work of social justice could "be the work" of thinking through concept for art. This project incapsulates this aspect of my process. Rather than being work about prison education or Safe Ride, The Body is a Conduit is a line of inquiry which seeks to grasp at my own physical position to each — and the conceptual significance of each within, upon and beyond me. The aims, missions, and outcomes of the Prison Education Program and Safe Ride may not themselves be art, but within my practice they have been spaces of creative inquiry, through which I have considered concept and language — ultimately, in this body of work to better understand my own experience as a physical body acting within them.
The Body is a Conduit rests — conceptually and visually — on the cusp of what is interior and what is exterior. Undoubtedly, this conceptualization is influenced by my connection to the vernacular of the national prison education model: the Inside-Out Prison Exchange Program — of which UO was, until recently, the largest practitioner. Within the Inside-Out model, twelve incarcerated students ("inside" students) and twelve students from campus ("outside" students) come together to learn side by side as peers in a seminar behind prison walls. I became engaged with Inside-Out during my first year at UO as an "outside" student in the course, Autobiography as Political Agency, offered through the Prison Education Program. I learned through this course and subsequent work with the program that the title — Inside-Out — is both a programmatic identifier and a larger framework used to understand the peculiarities inherent in gathering college students and incarcerated people of various ages, politics, intersecting identities, and lived experiences together into one unlikely learning environment. Most significantly, the framework of "inside" and "outside" is used in Inside-Out courses in reference to students — collectively shifting vernacular away from convict, prisoner, and criminal as labels applied to incarcerated students. Instead of relying on these labels, "inside" and "outside" identify participants by their positionality, foregrounding inside students' humanity and all students’ place as peers in the classroom learning alongside one another, not about on another. Beyond referring to students, the dichotomy between "inside" and "outside" is often extended as a theoretical and pedagogical tool for understanding individual experience. Literary zines, magazines, scholarly articles, and a full-length book all bearing the title "Turned Inside-Out" have grown out of Inside-Out at UO, each considering individual experiences of personal inversion and transformation within Inside-Out courses. Beyond and in conversation with this, there is a rich history of student participants from inside and outside writing about their lived and classroom experiences through the lens of "inside" and "out." Many use the dichotomy as a metaphor for their bodies, specifically considering the movement of what is "inside" — thoughts, emotions — to the "outside" of the collective classroom environment. The Body is a Conduit engages with this existing framework. I utilize the linguistic dichotomy of "inside" and "out" — within this work, interiority and exteriority — to conceptualize my own experience as a body engaged with Inside-Out and working within the context of prison education and assault/sexual violence prevention. Through concept, materiality, production, and installation I consider the role of my body as a conduit for this social justice work as well as how this work functions deeply within as well as outside of me.
Envisioning my practice this year as one beginning in activist spaces and moving through language and material research to achieve a final product elucidates the role of Inside-Out in the concept of The Body is a Conduit. As both a space through which concept for the piece has flowed and a reference point in my consideration of language, Inside-Out is significantly intertwined with the work. It was while driving a Motor Pool minivan back from an Inside-Out class at Oregon State Penitentiary in Salem that I first conceptualized The Body is a Conduit. The car rides back from Salem have a specific tenor of heaviness and hopefulness precipitated by the depth of discussions in Inside-Out classes and their location within a maximum security prison. This tenor falls in alignment with the assertion of being "turned inside out" that participants have described in writings on Inside-Out. From my own experience I also associate these car rides with tiredness, hunger, thirst, as classes happen in the evening and run usually from 6pm to nearly 9pm, not including drive time or time spent processing into the institution. By the time students are in the car returning to Eugene, they have been away from access to food and drink since entering the prison at 5pm and all after most have attended a full day of campus classes earlier in the day. In my role as a Teaching Assistant for Inside-Out courses, I handled logistics, organized transportation to Salem, and supported students in their writing — among many other practicalities that physically facilitated the functioning of the course. It was in the space of the return drive to Eugene, amongst the tenor of heaviness and hopefulness and the exhaustion of this labor that I first strung together the words: the body is a conduit. This consideration of language reflected a conceptual realization — that the energy which I felt so drained of while driving the minivan had passed through my body into the Inside-Out course itself. I began to explore the implications of this metaphor and consider how the energy — life force — within my body was being conducted into prison education and assault/sexual violence prevention through my work for Inside-Out and Safe Ride.
While the concept of energy — the thing inside of me — moving outside of my body grew out of activist space and language, it was paralleled by material research essential to my studio practice. The Body is a Conduit builds on material inquiry across my BFA year. What began as an interest in the absorbent potential of twine combined with porcelain slip evolved into material tests and eventually, fired work. My first projects involving slip and twine utilized raw clay, dipping long strands of twine into porcelain slip and dangling them from the ceiling of my studio. This process led to consideration of tying nets and weaving through a series of works like Circling, which grasped at the conceptual potential of what would become The Body is a Conduit, but stopped short of fully articulating its dichotomy between interiority and exteriority. Circling — a large twine-tied net dipped in slip was the catalyst for beginning to fire my slip-on-twine works. Works that would become Untitled I and Untitled II — slip on twine that had been entangled, tied in knots, and wrapped around rolls of newspaper — were the first that I fired and I was surprised by their stability when vitrified to cone ten. Seeking to push the limits of this stability ultimately led me back to my initial process of engaging with the materiality of slip-on-twine. Hoping to find the breaking point of fired slip-on-twine, I resumed dipping long strands of twine into buckets of slip and hanging them from my studio ceiling to dry before attempting to fire them to cone ten. Curious about the proportion of strands that would survive firing and the proportion that would crumble into smaller bits, I fired the first strands as an experiment. Upon opening the kiln, I found that all of the strands unsurprisingly had broken apart, but that many remained in longer lengths than I had anticipated to survive. After initially throwing out some of the pieces, I decided to keep the longer lengths of broken strand that made it through the firing. After working through this aspect of the material, I began to experiment with the potential of re-attaching the fractured strands of fired porcelain back together. This was the moment in which my consideration of language in activist spaces met material research.
In the process of re-constructing strands of fired porcelain, I began to view them as conduits — responding to their tubular structure, the hollowness left in the center of the strands by burnout of twine during firing. The unglazed texture on the exterior of the vitrified porcelain has a visual quality reminiscent of bone, which likewise drew me toward positioning it materially as a conduit of the body. With the success of this experiment, I began to produce the porcelain fragments which would become The Body is a Conduit when installed. Following the material research of past projects using slip and twine, I dipped long lengths of twine into slip repetitively. This process of production became integral to the concept of the final work in two ways. First, it directly engaged the concept of energy being conducted from my body to an external object — in this case the piece — through the process of production. Additionally, the material properties of slip engaged my body in the dipping process. Immersing the twine in slip became a physical experience in which the thick, liquid clay became an extension of my own physicality, encasing my hands as well as the twine. Connected by the layer of clay coating my hands and the twine, the strands being produced were at once interior and exterior — moving between the two as I dipped them and hung them from the ceiling to dry. The repetition of producing strands of porcelain to be fired reinforced the conceptual underpinnings of the work.
Once fired strands are reconstructed in the installation space, The Body is a Conduit engages the particularities of the physical space to juxtapose the porcelain conduits against the interiority and exteriority of it. Space is engaged in two ways — through fields of color painted on the surfaces of the space and by positioning porcelain conduits in specific conversation with the existing imperfections, creases, and features of it. Through attention to the corners, lines, dents, stains and shapes of an installation space, such as UO's Washburn Gallery, the installation is sensitive to the space as a body in itself. Installed within the Washburn Gallery, The Body is a Conduit utilized geometric blocks of terracotta red to create breaks in the surface of the white box. These visual interruptions were intentionally angular and linear to engage the parallel lines of lighting tracks on the ceiling, mirror seams on the concreate floor, and frame corners of the space. Terracotta red contrasts with the white walls surrounding it and is intended intertwine readings of human body and materiality alongside the porcelain conduits. As the conduits have a surface quality which oscillates between that of bone and porcelaneous material, the terracotta fields of color engaging the space move between conforming to the bodily evocations of the installation and recognizing the ceramic materiality of its actual composition.
In service of positioning The Body is a Conduit at the cusp of what is interior and exterior, the fields of color applied to the surfaces of the installation space are also intended to oscillate between what is inside and outside. By interrupting monochromatism within the installation space, the works seeks to visually rupture the shell of the gallery — instead framing it as a body with an exterior and semi-visible interior. Viewers can step into the space as body which they are both within and outside of simultaneously. The positioning of porcelain conduits in the space seeks to amplify this simultaneity, as the conduits engage inside of, outside of, and traverse the ruptures of color in the space. Likewise, conduits are arranged to appear as though they exist in invisible multiplicity beyond the white walls, ceiling and floor of the space. Conduits interact directly with the intricacies of the gallery space by moving through corners, stitching along floor stains, dangling between entry points to the wall and ceiling. Movement of the conduits in, around, and through surfaces of the space elucidates that ways in which conduits of the body — in this case, the installation space — are inside, outside, and both simultaneously.
Formal qualities which place The Body is a Conduit between interior and exterior are in conversation with other works of contemporary sculpture and ceramics produced in the twenty-first century. Nina Katchadourian's intervention works in the Mended Spider Web Series have been influential within my work and resonate formally with this piece. As The Body is a Conduit is an intervention in the gallery space, Katchadourian's projects intervein within damaged spider webs, repairing them using red thread. Though conceptual underpinnings differ between the projects, formally both rely on contrast for visual clarity — Katchadourian's between red thread against nearly transparent wisps of web, mine between the bone white of porcelain conduits against terracotta red color blocks. Likewise, both works engage non-human bodies — in Katchadourian's those of spiders, in mine the body of the installation space — and traverse the dichotomy of inside and outside. In the realm of contemporary ceramics, The Body is a Conduit resonates with formal strategies at play in Julia Haft-Candell's Bustle, in its construction of interior and exterior space. Likewise, Haft-Candell's use of ceramic material to create fine lines and interconnecting forms which conduct visual movement feels relevant in conversation with my work. While Bustle diverges from my work in being self-contained, its scale and the open space created by the arched form stretching over it places it in conversation with viewers' physical bodies — as though they might be able to reach into the space of the work even if they’re unable to step in. This engagement of viewers' space through ceramic form is generative for my work.
Within the framework of sculpture and installation, I see formal resonance with Lily Martina Lee's cargo nets from her Nets & Flaps body of work. Conceptually, The Body is a Conduit grasps at the personal and bodily where Lee's work considers cultural symbols of the West and relationships to hauling and motion. Regardless of this conceptual difference, Lee’s work offers precedent for use of nets and fine conduit in installation work. The contrast which Lee employs in the colors of works like Net I, Net II, and Rear Threshold against a white box gallery are formally reminiscent of the rupture which I seek to cultivate between porcelain conduits and terracotta red fields of color in my work. Lee's work also moves across the contours of its installation space, engaging corners and ceilings of gallery spaces. In a similar way, Eva Hesse's No Title 1969-1970 installation work engages ceiling, walls and dynamically moves through space. Formally, Hesse's work is even more connected to The Body is a Conduit as tendrils hang in the space tangling and branching in and out of one another as my work's ceramic conduits branch and are connected to one another at a multiplicity of junctures. Distinctly relevant to the production of my work, Hesse created No Title by dipping knotted rope in liquid latex which subsequently hardened, "providing an underlying weblike structure for the sculpture's gracefully arching loops and dense, twisted segments." This process, despite disparate materials, sets precedent for the means of production of The Body is a Conduit. Likewise, Hesse's use of string to facilitate the construction of a dynamic, finely entangled form in the gallery space is especially relevant to my work. While the string used in the production of The Body is a Conduit is burned up during firing, its role mirrors that of the string dipped in latex. Additionally, like my work No Title is designed to respond to the installation space in which it is placed. Hesse constructed the sculpture to attach to the walls and ceiling of the gallery space at thirteen points, but with the flexibility to account for many potential installation arrangements based on the spaces which the piece occupied. Responsiveness to the contours of an exhibition space is formally central to The Body is a Conduit.
Responsiveness to an installation space enables The Body is a Conduit's full facility in traversing the dichotomy between interiority and exteriority. This formal strategy is grounded in the arc of my practice during this BFA year. Beginning with the work of prison education and assault/sexual violence prevention work and building up to the articulation of my body as a conduit, the final visual realization of The Body is a Conduit brings with it the depths of meaning which these programs hold in my physical body. Articulated through material research and a commitment to ceramic properties, the piece physically manifests interior concept passing through the conduit of my body to become exterior. In doing so, the work maps onto the activist spaces where it began, creating a proxy that clarifies the relationship between my labor, body and the causes for which I've worked. The metaphor of my body conducting life force that propels Inside-Out and Safe Ride's work — practicalities like scheduling motor pools, processing payroll — elucidates the relationship between my interior dedication to these causes and their external existence in the world. The Body is a Conduit is a physical manifestation of this relationship which captures the way my interior matter becomes exterior physical matter in the world — often while existing simultaneously as both. Through concept, materiality, production, and installation the piece articulates my practice this year as well as the relationship which my body holds to things interior and exterior.