2020 MFA Thesis Work
Logics of Non-Exchange

Collyn Ahrens Aubrey (b.1993) is a multidisciplinary artist, raised in Colorado, currently working as a studio technician for Greenwich House Pottery in New York City. 

To lay the groundwork of my multidisciplinary practice, I focus on clay as a material that has memory of time and place. My intimacy with clay speaks to a process of mourning engaged with contemporary American temporality. Informed by my experience with grief, from witnessing the passing of a brother at a very young age, I continue to enact my role of sister through my relationship with art. By inserting a playfulness into the long lineage of sculpture and craft, I can digest the rhythm and labor of trauma.

As the big sister to my work, I implement a sense of care balanced with agitation. In Groundwork (2020) cast porcelain is carefully placed in an excavated patch of iron-rich subsoil, purity and ideology are reclaimed by the wild clay. My work develops an embodied practice in which I am queering craft through slip-casting as a form of feminine reproduction. The series Mining the Viral (2020) investigates the slippage of digital memory through acts of squashing.

My forms flux between figurative and quotidian objects to investigate animacy and the human desire to see oneself in material. I am hopeful of reshaping social relations around mourning as an acceptance that the physical body is made up of similar matter to our earth. I reflect on a concept articulated by Donna Haraway, that “we (a multi-species ‘we’) are all compost.”