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

Montserrat Gallery
August 19 – September 27

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 hold embedded material and ask for a prolonged looking across unstable ground. Wooden scaffolding hold, fix and bind, or allow for spaces to exist within fragments of exuberant color and texture that hold personal meaning.

The exhibition’s title is a passage selected from the book, The Wise Heart by Jack Cornfield. Clay responds to Cornfield’s perception of an object, such as apple, that is on the one hand, a merely static thing in thought. But directly seeing, holding, or eating an apple is a succession of minute, ever-changing, subtle 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 the unchanging singular 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.