BFA, Studio Art
Dual Discipline Focus
Primary Focus: Ceramics
Secondary Focus: Fibers
Aristgermaineart@gmail.com
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Artist Statement
Pieces I Couldn’t Swallow
Pieces I Couldn’t Swallow is a collection of individual ceramic glaze and fabric assemblages that come together on the wall to create a fragmented whole. Installed in a clustered grid, the arrangement dances between colorful patchwork fabrics and lumpy globs of ceramic glaze. Each piece explores the weight of my memories and the lasting effects of trauma through obsessive patterns, dense textures, and systematic layering. Through these pieces, I explore how my past and present selves intertwine and how the burdens I carry shape who I am.
My making process mirrors this tension between holding onto the past and my inability to fully reconcile it. As a child, I would cope by doodling and scribbling entire pages with patterns. I now layer ceramic special-effect glazes that congeal during the firing process, creating irregular surfaces that reflect the traumas that cannot be changed. In contrast, the fabric pieces involve dyeing, folding, screen printing, and both hand and machine sewing. The fabric captures the shifting parts of memory, the ones still vulnerable to nostalgia and idealization. Together, the two materials coexist in the tension between the memories I’m trapped by and those I’m still trying to understand. This creates a physical and emotional juxtaposition between the rigidness and softness of what I carry and what I cannot fully grasp.
Pieces I Couldn’t Swallow is both an act of reclamation and a surrender to myself. I do not seek to understand but to sit in the discomfort of it. Memories are fluid: they blur, distort, and become hazy. Sitting in memories, those events are colored with idealized nostalgia, making it hard for me to decipher their reliability. This body of work does not seek to provide answers but instead asks the viewers to sit with the weight of what cannot be fully understood.
