Earthly Relics Series

My series of sculptures entitled “Earthly Relics” collaborates with the land around the spring-fed Lake Wingra in Madison, Wisconsin. I create stoneware reliquaries for twigs, branches, mycelium tendrils, soil, and creek water. Working in opposition to my catholic upbringing, I’m interested in denouncing shame and declaring queer earth-sex as something holy. The orifices found in my pieces invite curiosity, and are a place for a finger to explore the natural object within. They also sexualize the clay, which I see as an animate being made of the land itself. A language of gesture, movement, and ritual exists within non-human kingdoms; I make bridges for viewers to experience intimacy with the earth. Unlike traditional reliquaries, “Earthly Relics” don’t lock sacred objects away to preserve them, rather, they cast ordinary non-human beings as animate and hallowed, as collaborators in ritual.