Danielle Callahan

My practice addresses this life of corporeality with frustration, confusion, and appreciation. I break, keep, wrap, revisit, alter, and generally allow my work to be unstable. I voraciously study how things hold together and fall apart and how I'm held together and fall apart. The precariousness of unfired clay feels apt when questioning the unpredictable, but I also turn to materials that immediately surround me. Bricks, sticks, nails, wire, sidewalk cracks, rocks, and tree bark are employed frequently. More personal items, like remnants of fabric from my Grandpa's footstool, or worn clothes of mine and loved ones, are sometimes added to the list. Lines that connect and separate are painted, scrawled, stuck, wrapped, or drawn. Cracks, cuts, and gauges are simultaneously scary, ugly, and beautiful. Aging, weathering, time and impermanence are primary tools. Clay bodies and paper, to which I always return, have limits suited to display impacts of these forces. Some works are made very quickly while others evolve over the course of a decade. I repair, stress, secure, aid, mend, radiate and am irradiated. For me, art is a reservoir.
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