grief work, like uncluttering the gutters or cleaning the stove, 2024
clay, glaze, wood, flash paint
The clay body used to make the nine pieces in grief work, like uncluttering the gutters or cleaning the stove, was first used as material in a grief choreography commissioned by Craft Contemporary in May 2023. Working with themes of in/visibility, integration, and sensual becoming-with, water and dreams (2023) was staged over the course of four hours in a public park in Los Angeles. This piece invited viewers into physical encounter with a 500 pound sculptural monument of raw clay. The clay sat atop a canvas ground hand-quilted from the scraps of canvas that had been made to create a nearby set of soft sculptures that spell out the sentence, “where there is sorrow, there is holy ground.”
This clay was then sculpted and fired into the nine iterative ceramic works that compose grief work, like uncluttering the gutters or cleaning the stove. For this work, the writing that accompanied the grief choreography in May was pressed, again and again, into fragments of clay that were then pooled with glaze and water.
This piece is part of grief shapes, an ongoing interdisciplinary project that explores the somatic possibilities of communal & accompanied grief.
Grief as a geography. Grief as an alchemy. Grief as a collective body. Grieving as something we do together, as a daily maintenance. Grief as how we take care of ourselves and each other.