1
Master Of Fine Arts Thesis
Body Like A Thorn
Victoria Walton
Submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirement for the degree of Master of Fine Arts, School of Art and Design Division of Ceramic Art New York State College
of Ceramics at Alfred University Alfred, New York
2023
Victoria Walton, MFA
Thesis Advisors: Stephanie Hanes, Jonathan Hopp, Walter McConnell, Lindsay
Montgomery, Linda Sikora, Adero Willard
2 Acknowledgments
I am thankful to my partner, family, friends, and advisors who helped me get to where I am today. We are more than our thorns. This is only the beginning.
Special thanks to Sam LaPell, Dan Alessi, and David Vuong for all of their help and support.
3
Abstract
Body Like A Thorn encompasses how it feels to be actively in resistance. Through prioritizing narratives of Black queer|trans and disabled persons, I illustrate a push and pull between the constrictive systems from dominant expectations of being to the organic, where there is room and belonging for nonconformity and variety.
This tension is felt in the various installations, wall-hanging textile collages, the nets pulling coiled ceramic vessels, and life-size figurative works. I meld my disability activism and theory into tangible forms. What is natural cannot be contained and cannot be held back. Through the work, I am able to assert that the Black nonconforming person is seen as a thorn to conventional society. Through the subversion of norms, the thorn is activated in a new way, to re-establish agency against normative assimilation, and to accept the beauty of their differences as part of the natural world.
4
Table of Contents
Origins |
Honoring What Exists | Natural |
Like A Thorn | Disability Advocacy | Everything is Connected | Technical Statement
5
Origins |
I came to work with the figure, after undergoing extreme challenges with my health. I felt compelled to translate what I had endured over my lifetime into a material. Clay led the way, like a guide shifting between tangible truth and further utterings that only time would unveil. As I have grown in the practice, a framework emerged to inform what I created. My concepts have deep roots in how Black people interpret themselves despite being in a world that seeks to undermine them. The theory that unfolds moves in the diversity of the media I work with:
ceramic, textile collage, video, mixed media, and prose. My practice pulls from my past, tugging at visceral memory of prior lives: my childhood, from when I made clothing as a career or lived in South Africa, to the hospital beds I have laid in. What I left there lingers and shows up with a new face and a new skin as I digest the current moment.
Artist working in the studio, 2021. Photo: Ashlin Cheyenne
6 The body is central to my work, not just in the utilization of the figure. I am interested in our human vessel's intangible and physical materialization: its presence, how it shifts, how it departs, and the inevitability of our bodies returning to the earth. I cannot divorce the figure from the individual. We are extensions of where we come from, of our ancestors, and are reminders of society's stereotypes and preconceptions of others like us. As Black people, we hold in our bodies the experiences of collective care, the cultural blueprints that mark our habits and traditions, our histories, individual intimate memories, and the effects of navigating racist and restrictive systems. This amalgamation of influences ripples through, sometimes revealing itself outwardly but always inwardly. These reasons are why the figure is paramount. For me,
sculpting the figure is about capturing compounding realities in a way that honors the beauty and integrity of the spirit and the narrative of someone's life.
My work prioritizes Black women and gender-expansive people, conveying the spectrum and intertwining of beauty, pain, community, and nonconformity as birthright and burden. The more I create, the more I see how my ideology, prioritization of nature, and the reclamation of our relationship with our greater environment have evolved. This journey has led me to be open about the intertwining and independent realities of disability within the Black community as well. These influences now are bonded together and remind me how connected many of our experiences are in the first place. My work is a reflection of me.
7
Natural |
Detail Image of Cycle of Life // We Are Portals To What Is Unseen
Like many things, our collective understanding and representations of nature have become curated over time. Most of our interactions with the greater outdoors have been through parks and nature reserves. While there are benefits to these moments, most people have yet to
encounter open and untouched spaces. There, we brace ourselves for beneficial, unfamiliar, and dangerous things. We experience a taste of the unknown the deeper we distance ourselves from our physical comfort zones.
To critique convention, I employ the mechanisms of curation. I juxtapose the sterility of the gallery space with organic material. Dirt, tree roots, and plants are strategically placed, some more sporadically than others. The visibility of nature in a white-walled space provides a glimpse of our relationship with the parts of ourselves that exist beyond the bounds of
constriction. Video and projection are a way of writing on the walls metaphorically. Scale in my work in various mediums is how I unapologetically take up space, inserting my physical body and experiences into the larger narrative. These choices are meant to provoke questions. What do we allow ourselves to be in the outside world and how can we push back, even in the face of normative assimilation?
8 The word “natural” has harmful connotations when it is tied to conventional ideals. People use this word to categorize organic beings. It has long been associated with the gender binary, heterosexuals, able-bodied persons, and those who conform to societal standards. This rigid association aims to constrict independent complexities and interpersonal truths outside these lived experiences. Within the disabled community, there is a great desire to reclaim how
"natural" is used.
Disability is not seen as an overarching part of the human experience nor an inherent form of diversity in people. It can affect anyone from the time of conception to any life stage, whether from variations in biology, illness, or injury. From the medical perspective, it is only something to cure and separate those who are healthy and "normal" in society. Difference and/or
impairment becomes a detriment, which places them in a sub-tier status. This ostracization is why advocates, activists, and disabled persons insist they are also natural. Disability and illness are complex and can be challenging for the individual and their loved ones. The greater focus needs to turn toward society's role in fostering acceptance, accessibility, and equity. The way that we respond and perceive differences is a reflection of how we view a person's humanity. Once we embrace our collective humanity, we can understand how disability is a truly natural
phenomenon. The importance and reclamation of nature in my work is a call to a deeper personal and cultural association with the organic beauty around us, but how Black, disabled, and queer people experience these same dynamics and are also part of these frameworks.
Honoring What Exists |
What is it like to live at an intersection? I could not describe the experience for most of my life. But through a series of coming outs and coming to's, leftist ideology has provided me with answers to things I had only known through living. Intersectionality is something that Black people have understood before its popularization, but it is the framework that illustrates how we are in a matrix of domination. Womanism prioritizes and uplifts the perspective of Black| Afro- Diasporic women and the further expansiveness of beings who are/had been socialized as women. Patricia Hill Collins references that in Eurocentric, patriarchal societies, there is a pattern of socialization that emphasizes the categorizations of people along the lines of race (and
9 degrees of color), class, gender, health status, and sexual orientation.1 Groupings are ranked based on their proximity to the ideal: white, cis/hetero, able-bodied, financially stable men and women.
Placing African American women and other excluded groups in the center of analysis opens possibilities for a both/and conceptual stance, one in which all groups possess varying amounts of penalty and privilege in one historically created system.2
Patricia Hill Collins
Based on these established rankings and historical precedent, one can understand the layers of complexity for those who are at the extreme opposite of this Eurocentric idealism:
unambiguous Black, trans nonconforming persons, disabled, larger-bodied, houseless, working poor, and queer folks. This expectation becomes a societal preset for everyone asking for
assimilation and seeking conformity. Those limitations are projected from all angles and all types of people across non-white communities. We live in a society that does not protect nor prioritize those that have these identities, especially those who represent multiple intersections if not all.
I have seen this firsthand. I am the oldest sister to a brother who is 1.5 years younger than me. He was diagnosed with autism when he was a toddler. Along with my parents, I became a part-time caregiver. I was often responsible for retrieving my brother from crowded situations where he could not control his body. By the age of seven, I had seen what stigma looked like towards people like my brother: the feeling that being disabled and Black is unnatural and thus society and our community do not want them, and the isolation that came with that association.
I never anticipated that I would come to join the disabled community. But in 2018, I was thrown into a world of physical impairment, a lifelong prognosis, and various medical
1 Hill-Collins, P. (1990). Black Feminist thought in the Matrix of Domination
2 Hill-Collins, P. (1990). Matrix of Domination
10 to my disability from acquaintances/professionals, the difficulty that loved ones have had in witnessing my journey, the distancing that can occur due to discomfort, the lack of quality care and occurrences of neglect from medical institutions, and the struggle to secure resources and timely accommodations. From learning about disability history and from speaking with others, I know that my experiences are not singular and are a fraction of what others experience in our community.
Many of us who are already tapped into an Afrocentric and leftist lens of seeing the world have internalized these truths as our own. We know we are natural and caught in this matrix of white and patriarchal supremacy. Because of this established awareness of how our land, people, and ideologies have been colonized, some choose not to engage or prioritize giving any more space to discourse that centers Anti-Blackness. The older I have gotten, the more I understand that constant unlearning is like shedding old skin, ideals, and conventions. It does not end. So that the cycle of misinformation can end, there must be a collective shift in how all people perceive diversity. It is a decision that I have made to confront the dynamics of the matrix, as I am interested in disability and LGBTQIA advocacy as it relates to Blackness and otherwise.
Like A Thorn |
I believe that the Black, disabled, queer|trans person is seen as a thorn to conventional norms of identity, presentation, and being. Historically, we have seen the suppression of these independent identities from predominant society under colonization abroad and here in the United States. Through government interference and community enforcement, there is a threat of danger for these people and a push for them to stay closeted, tucked away, killed, or under
control. When we look at the ramifications for people occupying two, if not all, identities, we can quickly imagine how such a person becomes an outward symbol, a pariah, and a warning for others not to model, repeat, or become. They become a thorn in the finger of white society. The State slanders natural dynamics under the guise of a threat. Is it any wonder the rose is seen as optimized without its thorns?
Side Profile of Like A Thorn
11 Black people continually subvert stigma and convention. This manipulation of norms is not simply an automatic reaction to oppression but a way to insert identity into a coping mechanism and a cultural signifier for themselves. It is counter to the outside
culture. True self-acceptance cannot be contingent upon centering the opposing culture's values but rather must be kept alive by internal self-worth, that who they are and what they represent is valuable. In numerous examples, Black and African Americans take a negative term or stereotype and either repurpose how it is used amongst themselves or lean into how the term is used publicly to exude strength and power to that opposing force. In this way of thinking, I believe that Black, disabled, and queer people can decide to embody the thorn in a way that
undermines society's values while also building self-empowerment. As we become the thorn, we use discomfort as a tool to upset, agitate, and undermine the rigidity of conventional mannerisms and expectations. By leaning into our lack of acceptance, we accept ourselves knowing that their politics and ideals are tactics to distract society from the fact that we are natural and deserve access and respect. This strength is in subversion, by embracing the thing they hate or the thing that brings them discomfort is agency, especially in a world where we must take it by force.
Like A Thorn and Tread Lightly are different sides of the same coin. Like A Thorn is a ceramic figure of a Black woman who is an amputee, seated with their legs and the surrounding base as a bed of thorns. Her pose is relaxed yet demanding attention, as her gaze is fixed ahead.
She is wearing a flowing dress, caked and cracking like dried earth. Her skin and surroundings fluctuate between golden bronze, dark brown, and black. The work simulates real life
interactions between people with physical disabilities and those that do not. Are you captivated by her beauty, aware that she is an amputee, or bewildered by the thorns? The work confronts
12 community describe the onset of discomfort that they witness from other people when their disability is perceived. From strangers and even people that know them well, the hyper- awareness of the attributes that make a disabled person different from them becomes a barrier between acceptance, intimacy, and respect. The idea of the thorn, as obtuse, foreign, and threatening, is a subconscious flood of our bias around such people. The thorn becomes the intersection of her Blackness, her body, and the strength of her presence.
Detail Image of Like A Thorn, 2023
Tread Lightly conveys the power of subverting the stigma of the thorn and the understanding of non-conformity as birthright. The representational Black, full-figured ceramic sculpture looks like bronze and rich soil, with thorns protruding outward from the gauges in her ears and her body. Remnants of her struggle with constriction are worn as fragments of fabric on the thorns on her arms. The thorn takes on another meaning, as one of protection. Here there is a full acceptance and a defiance of convention, from the prominence of her stature to her features, and body posture. As she looks out over the world, she is aware of the thorn and may even use it to her advantage, but she will not be defined by it.
13 Detail Shot of Tread Lightly, 2023 Side Profile of Tread Lightly, 2023
Disability Advocacy |
My understanding of trauma dramatically changed as I undertook a personal responsibility to know more about disability history. Through discovering Tobin Seibers' scholarship Disability Aesthetics- this past fall, I divorced myself from my preconceived understanding of
fragmentation. Like many artists before me and many after me, the body is used in sculpture as a device or a metaphorical symbol. This symbol often is mutilated at our will for our purposes. We cut up the body, fragmenting it repeatedly, until sometimes it is no longer recognizable or too recognizable. Artists do this in the name of intrigue, emotional trauma, internal battles, and surrealism.
14 of the ground–Unearthed sculpture was nearly always broken. Rather than turning away from them in revulsion, they fought to preserve their fragmentary state rather than make the slightest effort to restore them to wholeness, who began to mutilate their own works to imitate the
perfection of the ancient broken bodies. The "whole project of making art," Barkan concludes, is reoriented "in response to broken bodies" (209). Call it "disability aesthetics," the sea change affecting the history of art that increasingly provokes a preference for disabled bodies over non- disabled ones as we enter the modern age."3
The most perplexing part of this phenomenon is the fascination and popularity of this aesthetic and the coinciding societal discomfort that we have when we see disabled people with physical differences, injuries, or impairments. This disconnection is also an extension of societal conventionality. We are better at observing the symbolism of trauma or bodily diversity in inanimate objects. This one-way transaction ends when we have reached our comfort level, unlike encountering discomfort in a living being, which is an exchange. How does that moment permeate memory? What are the effects of that moment?
After taking in this knowledge, I knew I needed to shift my aesthetics and become more conscious of my choices as a disabled person. As someone who sculpts their body at times, I can play with fragmentation in a way that highlights invisible illnesses or internal issues of my own body. There, consent is not an issue. While referencing other disabled persons, I can take more of a whole-body viewpoint. I can create work that goes beyond fragmenting the body to illustrate overarching trauma, particularly as it relates to abled-bodied people, but as a representation of actual disabled persons, the manifestations of our conditions, and the constraints from society that we face on the outside because of our bodies.
3 Seibers, Tobin. “Disability aesthetics and the body beautiful-Signposts in the history of art.” (2008): pp 330
15 The piece, Body Stigma: What I am and am not, was an opportunity where disability advocacy has been at the forefront of my practice. In this work, the figure is partial and is based on references of my body, from the feet to mid-torso. Two hands display different qualities of pain, one through surface and the other through engaging with the wound on the side of its body. My decision to stop the figure at the torso was to illustrate difference, the root of our
nonconformity as an embedded part of the backbone of the body. Here the spine
becomes the remnants of a tree trunk, and the feet are like roots, extending into the soil.
This soil fills the vessel of the body and surrounds the piece, transporting us and speaking to Blackness and disability as foundational occurrences in the framework of
nature. Various glazes and spray paint are splashed on the body, like tar. I wanted a distinction between the brown skin tone and what is thrown on the body. The tar is not placed by the individual but by invisible participants. The amount of tar, as a stigma against the body, is intentional and significant but does not deter from the overall power of the figure. The tapestry behind it connects to the spine and consumes where the upper body would be.
16
Everything is Connected |
Pulling from such a wealth of theory, personal experience, and community sharing has allowed me to speak on the nuance of living in a body that is a source of discomfort to others. In my life and in my studies, I have found an overwhelming silence around the experiences of these intersections of identities, which positions them even more on the fringes of society. The aim of my work is to reclaim the necessity of nonconformity in opposition to the dominant societal standards. The cultural and aesthetic qualities of Blackness and the occurrence of disability and queerness are forthright, timeless, and corporeal. Their presence and complexity are an extension of the diversity of being alive.
17
Technical Statement
Although I have an MFA in Ceramic Art, I will always work with many mediums. In grad school, I don’t know if I would have had time for this type of exploration, if it hadn’t been a part of my background. I came to Alfred my knowledge of the figure from making clothing.
Patternmaking translated very clearly into how I work with slabs. Coiling developed in my practice during my time here, and I have Trevor Bennet to thank for pushing me in that direction.
I believe in testing yourself and giving many mediums a voice in your work. There is a wonderful mixed media world out there.
Below are some of things that helped me the most:
Anatomy for Sculptors, Understanding the Human Figure by Sandis Kondrats and Uldis Zarins
Clay Bodies
Laguna - Max’s Paper Clay (expensive) fired to cone 1-6 for my work.
I started off working with this body, but it quickly became out of my price range for the scale of work I was creating.
Fires gray-stony-white in reduction at cone 10, off white at cone 5 oxidation, and bright white at cone 05 (raku). It is a medium textured, low shrinkage body designed for large-scale hand-built sculpture and tile work where thick cross sections (up to 1 inch) are anticipated. Contains a moderate amount of fine and medium mesh grog.
Characteristics
Cone: 06-10
Wet Color: Light Gray
Firing Color: Oxidation: Light Gray - Reduction: Dark Gray/Black
Texture: Coarse
Penetrometer Target: 6
Avg. Shrinkage ±2%: 14%
My Alternative (more economical) 539 (Alfred Recipe) can add 1% paper pulp fired to cone 1- 6 for my work.
Great for large sculptures. Without paper pulp it has a more plastic texture. Paper Pulp is a great benefit when making larger work. I have used both in combination through one sculpture without issues.
18
19
Bibliography
An Aesthetic of Blackness: Strange and Oppositional: bell hooks
hooks, bell. “An Aesthetic of Blackness: Strange and Oppositional.” Lenox Avenue 1, no. 1 (1995): 65–72.
This text was highly informative in how it gives attributes to the nebulous nature of making something “black”. Bell hooks describes the discomfort and the beauty involved in being an artist of African descent, based on a history of avoidance in art history and otherwise invalidating the various achievements of those artists.
Disability aesthetics and the body beautiful: Tobin Siebers
Siebers, Tobin. “Disability Aesthetics and the Body Beautiful: Signposts in the History of Art.”
Alter, vol. 2, no. 4, 2008, pp. 329–36, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.alter.2008.08.002.
Siebers breaks down the canonical use for fragmentary sculpture, particularly of Greek and Roman inspiration, and highlights the disconnection between praising sculpted broken bodies and showing disdain for disabled bodies.
Black Feminist Thought in the Matrix of Domination: Patricia Hill Collins
“Patricia Hill Collins’s Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness and the Politics of Empowerment.” Ethnic and racial studies 38, no. 13 (2015): 2314–2314.
A cornerstone text for Black feminist thought and makes links to subversion and undermining tools of domination used white supremacy.
Disability as Diversity: Erin E Andrews
Andrews, Erin E. Disability as Diversity : Developing Cultural Competence. New York, NY:
Oxford University Press, 2020.
Overall best text I’ve read on any disability history/ disability practices/culture/identity. Truly a comprehensive work on the broad subject of disabled people’s lives.
The Master's Tools Cannot Dismantle The Master’s House - Audre Lorde
A necessary text on how systems of oppression retain their power and how to find agency and stop feeding into fruitless attempts at creating change.
Disability Studies Reader, Chapter: Disability and the Justification of Inequality in U.S.
History - Douglas C. Baynton
