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The main themes that my art explores across multiple disciplines include the artistic process as emotional education, the body’s negotiation of space and how these relate to relationships, community, and space making. The process and labor involved in textile work and sculpture allow me to analyze and better understand the body, the spaces and territories that I occupy, my emotional responses to everyday life, and my relationships and place in society. The practice demands the body in action, consciously connecting with it to produce. My body then impacts, creates, and communicates with the materials, showing me that I'm capable of doing the same with the spaces and people with who and where I inhabit. This allows me to create connections and process what happens while interaction and cohabitation exists. Creating objects and art installations becomes then a study on how to occupy and confront space and experiences.
- Andrea Cabrera Manuel (she/they)
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When I approach a series, a multitude of questions ping pong in my mind’s eye as I ground myself into why and how we become us: how does the intermediate space of home and personal possessions and the meaning we place on them factor into daily identity and sense of self? What about the exterior space outside home--the larger culture, human systems, and material objects we encounter? Via large serial works, I collect samples around a central idea. These central ideas over the years have included home, identity, gender, queerness, domesticity, labor, and memory. Humanness is messy and as humans, we have a need to understand and ascribe meaning to the havoc. This endless and vast complexity is what I explore in my work- the why, who, what, when, where, and how of it all. In a way, I’m trying to create order while asserting a claim for difference.
- Lois Bielefeld (they/she)
