Variations on a form

The Assembly Gallery

Hamilton, ON

May 3rd - May 31st, 2025

This work was made possible with the generous support of the Hamilton City Enrichment Fund

Variations on a Form is a body of work that explores cross-generational craft practices, familial legacy, religious ideology, and queer and disabled identities, and how these forces intersect and diverge through material processes. At the center of the project is a pair of angel wings originally cast in 1999 by my grandmother, a ceramist working primarily in slipcasting. These were given to me as some of her last remaining pieces from her time as a mould maker. Her practice was my first introduction to the process of casting and mould making as a means for mass production.

The angel is the focal point of the exhibition, standing in as a symbol for kitsch and the vernacular of ceramics. At the same time, it becomes a vessel for examining the trauma of religious structures that shaped my early life, particularly in their policing of queer and disabled bodies. The angel is not only a divine messenger but a silent enforcer within the domestic space.

Now recast and recontextualized, these wings serve as both an artifact and a site for reinterpretation. They embody the dual nature of legacy: both tender and fraught. They speak to how familial influence can be a source of inspiration as well as constraint. Casting and mould making form the basis of both my technique and visual language, functioning as a metaphor for the tension between tradition and transformation, both artistic and spiritual.

Casting offers a process of iteration, inviting reflection on what it means to repeat, to reproduce, and to carry something forward. As a queer and disabled artist, I engage these tensions through an embodied relationship with material while also asking what it means to reproduce within the confines of legacy. The casting process, with its emphasis on containment and replication, provides a framework for investigating how bodies and identities are shaped by larger systems: familial, religious, and cultural. Systems that often demand conformity, but through which I find space to question, deviate, and remake.