Earthen Clay: As the apple disappears into water and sweetness in our bodies

Artist talk: Monday, September 22, 11-12PM, H101

Artist Reception: Wednesday, September 24, 5-7PM

Free and open to the public

As the apple disappears into water and sweetness in our bodies, Earthen Clay’s first solo exhibition in Massachusetts, includes paintings and sculptures made in the last two years. Clay’s site-responsive installation for the Montserrat Gallery is concerned with the space that is generated from the proximity of beings and objects and the experiences that unfold from these encounters. Folds, stacks, and stains contain embedded material and ask for prolonged acts of looking across unstable ground. Wooden scaffolding hold, fix and bind, allowing for spaces to exist within fragments of exuberant color and texture.

The exhibition’s title is taken from the book, The Wise Heart, by the American writer Jack Kornfield. Clay’s deeply personal work responds to Kornfield’s visual theorization of objects. Kornfield perceives that something like an apple, is on the one hand, a merely static thing in thought. But directly seeing, holding, or eating an apple is a succession of minute and ever-changing colors, shapes, and perceptions that are never still for a moment. Through a series of interrelated works that call to each other, Clay is interested in questioning an unchanging, fixed view that forecloses alternate potential liberatory futures.

Earthen Clay was born in 1988 in Anchorage, Alaska. He received his BFA from Watkins College of Art in Nashville in 2013 and his MFA from Yale School of Art in Painting and Printmaking in 2024. He attended Skowhegan in 2018 and was recently a teaching fellow at Norfolk Yale Summer School in Norfolk, CT. His work has been shown most recently at SUPRS in Beijing, Yossi Milo in New York, and David Castillo in Miami, FL. He works across disciplines including collage, painting, sculpture and site-responsive installation.