Emily Llamazales — Idea Capital Atlanta

This work began in 2021 out of a critical reset for my practice. I had been working with ceramics as my primary medium for over two years, and I challenged myself to begin sculpting again and taking bigger risks with presentation and form. I began with a bell flower shape, an arch, and transparent glazes over underlying surface marks—things I was already familiar with in my practice. Informed by the outlandish spectacle of Arabia Mountain, a site I had been drawn to document repeatedly since my move to the city in 2019, I began to create more organic forms and turn to moon-like, molten, and metallic glazes. I then began documenting my work by superimposing the sculpture onto a photograph I made at Arabia Mountain in order to give the creature-like or flora inspired piece a mythical habitat of its own. By the Spring of 2021, I found the grounding inspiration for this project after reading Swedish poet and critic Aase Berg’s epic poem, 'Mörk Materia'.

Berg’s book-length poem chronicles planet Earth’s upheaval as it is projected to human passengers aboard a spaceship to seek out life elsewhere. Her prose evokes a post-human world of horrific strangeness and malignant renewal as the narrator witnesses images of plant-human hybrids, the upheaval of all matter, and a new order of biology: post-radiation, post-climate disaster. From this imagery, as well as other sci-fi novels, film, and music come my own sculptures with ashen surfaces, mold-like glazes, and embellishments of adhered shells, rocks, and twisted metal as if they too are altered by catastrophe, unearthed from a future where biology has reorganized or broken down.

My goal for this project is to incorporate non-ceramic sculptural elements that utilize my photography practice as well as my exploration of rudimentary holograms by way of transparent photos and screen prints on plexiglass. I recently completed a large mirror-like piece that creates an optical illusion and acts as a portal, shape-shifting as the viewer walks past and obscures the layered screen prints with their eyes. This piece, ‘how do I meet the gaze of another matter machine?’, was my first endeavor in having a component of my work fabricated. Due to the high cost of design fees and laser cutting, I am asking for funding to allow for additional fabrication of plexiglass panels, as well as metal armature on which I will install transparent photographs. Additionally, I aim to display future ceramics and mixed media sculptures inside acrylic domes in order to evoke a portal or give the notion of contaminated artifacts.

The latter portal-like components of this body of work are loosely in response to the work of the late artist Tom Benson. Now a lost artifact of the early internet, Benson was commissioned by Berg to create a site featuring collages and a series of “portals” so the reader could “enter” the book online.