The Clay Studio : Shop

In an age of environmental precarity, my practice calls attention to the dominant systems and narratives that shape public perception of the natural world. Examining the capacities and limits of science and technology, as well as the role story-telling plays in shaping world-views, I turn toward the power of imagination to inspire resilient futures. I create immersive, multimedia installations that expand the narrative of nature by re-presenting it as complex, emotional and nonlinear. Themes in my work include the failed promise of progress and environmental privilege at work in familiar stories like Frankenstein, both the impact and degeneration of the early environmental movement in the United States, and the history of land ownership and use, particularly in the nearby New Jersey Pine Barrens. In considering my own context as an artist and mother, I create alternative clocks that challenge the role of industrialized time in our lives and aim to make the realities of caretaking visible while confronting damaging hierarchical systems. I employ a specialized glass technique called pate de verre (or “glass pastes”) to concretize ephemera not meant to last the test of time. Recently, I have been experimenting with formulating glass from raw and locally foraged materials to understand and test “transparency” and its historical role in society. I’m committed to the critical consideration of the cultural and environmental history of everyday materials. Through my use of familiar household media such as aluminum foil and plaster I aim to orient my work toward a wide viewership while calling into question the necessity of daily consumption. My work is in dialogue with both social practice collectives and an ecofeminist tradition that criticizes toxic individualism, anthropocentrism, and other prevailing ideologies that have historically shaped predominant narratives of nature. Ultimately, I see my practice as part of a larger art-historical endeavor to rethink environmental art as an enormous, urgent, and multifaceted project, and to orient my works in a way that invokes personal reflection in the viewer.

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Kristen Taylor

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Kristen Taylor

Did you Know?

Can We Help?

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