Messy Babies and Mother-Monsters: Liz McCarthy’s Post-Natal Overload

Liz McCarthy: THE EXPECTANCIES. Roman Susan Art Foundation, Chicago, IL, February 2025. Installation view. Image courtesy of the artist and Roman Susan Art Foundation.

by Matt Morris

“I want more happy children in our country and I want beautiful young men and women who are eager to welcome them into the world and eager to raise them.”

–Vice President JD Vance,
            National March for Life Rally,
          Washington DC, 24 January 2025

“Won’t somebody please think of the children?!?”
                                                                        –Helen Lovejoy, The Simpsons

Liz McCarthy

THE EXPECTANCIES

Roman Susan Art Foundation

February 8, 2025 – March 1, 2025

Babies are messy—literally and symbolically. Conceptualizing infancy—not to mention reckoning with the material realities of reproduction, birth, and the various interdependencies denoted by the newborn body—is to attract a morass of projections and urgencies. These stem from intersecting or opposing frameworks for selfhood, society, power relations, affect, mortality, sentimentality, crime, and whatever other facile means with which the experiment of civilization attempts to apprehend the facts and meaning of life and death per se. Treacherous as these territories may be, Liz McCarthy’s recent exhibition THE EXPECTANCIES on view at Chicago’s Roman Susan Art Foundation delivers this collision of symbolic orders to the fore. The artist has installed an uneasy nursery populated by ceramic infants onto which all sorts of charged collected objects have been adhered, watched over by a group of impassive masks assembled from shards of bricks and solder. The sculptures are also functional, operating not only as vessels to hold and carry sign chains of identities materialized but also through an array of holes across the figures, they operate as musical instruments—whistles that McCarthy encourages audiences to activate and play.

In their approach to these forms and their referents, McCarthy excites the perversity of our societal tendency to overload such evidently helpless and vulnerable newborns with an excess of associations and so many pressures to represent/perform/identify. A non-exhaustive annotation in no particular order of babies vis-à-vis today: capacities for reproduction as biological determinism; miscarriages; access and rights to abortion; genders assigned at birth and subsequent debates around gender-affirming care for minors; parenting; the stigmas and systemic attacks lavished upon single parents, especially Black and Brown mothers; Down Syndrome, spina bifida, anencephaly; fort–da, Melanie Klein’s ‘good mother;’ D.W. Winnicott’s ‘good enough mother;’ filicides from Medea to Casey Anthony; ages of consent; puberty, Bat Mitzvahs, Bar Mitzvahs, quinceaneras, Peter Pan complexes, YA coming-of-age novels, psycho-sexual coming-of-age cinema; adult baby fetishes; Pizzagate conspiracy theories; and the bizarre spate of late nineteenth century deaths of infants and nannies that was eventually attributed to poisonous arsenic used in the fashionable green colored wallpapers of the period. Reconciling even this limited account of disorderly associations is a nightmare of free-floating signification; I am so self-conscious about what the points I do and don’t include here say about me as a childless cat queer. I don’t think Audre Lorde meant it this way, but after the fact of her claim that “We can learn to mother ourselves,” it now means that offspring or not we can all be bad parents.

Liz McCarthy. Ubermensch (II) Whistle, 2025. found infant superhero costumes and artist’s infant memento clothing on glazed porcelain with epoxy putty.
Image courtesy of the artist and Roman Susan Art Foundation.


McCarthy shares in the press materials that they were pregnant at the time the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, and becoming a parent within that political landscape served as context for the impulse to build babies that are literally instrumentalized. The scrutiny and play with which they have approached babies as cultural signs serves as a basis for proposing queer/ed notions of selfhood as assemblages and always fragmentary. Ubermensch (II) Whistle, 2025, dresses a porcelain-and-epoxy putty figure in deconstructed elements of superhero costumes made for babies; the nearby Femme Frill 1987 (II) Whistle, 2025, is dressed in pink and white lace ruffles extracted from clothing the artist wore as a baby. These and other little bodies are displayed on lilac stands in a maternity-ward-cum-baby-store-showroom that offers whimsical and monstrous form to an ethical inquiry that perambulates around babies as signs within intricate political, psychological, erogenous, intergenerational, and materialist systems, while also inscribing a vocabulary of objects with tender reflections of the first years of parenthood. 


Liz McCarthy: THE EXPECTANCIES. Roman Susan Art Foundation, Chicago, IL, February 2025. Installation view. Image courtesy of the artist and Roman Susan Art Foundation.


Even reified into concrete sculptural form, patina, presentation, and use within McCarthy’s prone populace emphasize the always already and ongoing instability of even parent and child and family unit as roles. Scholar John D’Emilio has marked out a concise history of compulsory heterosexual reproduction and family unit as the primary means of production in the early US colonies: “The white colonists in seventeenth-century New England established villages structured around a household economy, composed of family units that were basically self-sufficient, independent, and patriarchal…Men and women needed the labor of children. Producing offspring was as necessary for survival as producing grain. Sex was harnessed to procreation.”[1] Thereafter, a confluence of economics, affect, manufacturing, and social progress sets in parallel the advances of capitalism and the social possibility of lives—homosexual or other others—divested from het norms, “Only when individuals began to make their living through wage labor, instead of as parts of an interdependent family unity, was it possible for homosexual desire to coalesce into a personal identity—an identity based on the ability to remain outside the heterosexual family and to construct a personal life based on attraction.”[2]

Liz McCarthy. Femme Frill 1987 (II) Whistle, 2025. Artist’s infant memento clothing and epoxy putty on glazed stoneware, detail view.
Image courtesy of the artist and Roman Susan Art Foundation.


It’s worth remembering that some of the most deeply held convictions about what babies and families are categorically have emerged only recently in the wake of modernity and industrialization. It is crucial then to understand that McCarthy here shows babies as constructs, upsetting a singular, efficient psychoanalysis of subject-object relations with figurative sculptures laden not only with the exchange values assigned to art within cultural economies, but also dimensions of use value in puncturing the ceramic infants’ genitals, nipples, and fists into mouthpieces for whistle play. What comes to mind for me are the contested relationships between persons, places, and things inflamed by what Peter-Paul Verbeek calls the ‘moralizing technologies’ of the ultrasound and other key medical practices during pregnancy and birth: “All of these technological mediations generate a new ontological status for the fetus. Ultrasound imaging constitutes the fetus as an individual person; it is made present as a separate living being rather than forming a unity with its mother, in whose body it is growing.”[3]

Liz McCarthy. Memory Worn Whistle. Various memento objects from the artist’s childhood collections and epoxy
putty on glazed community studio reclaim stoneware. 2025. Image courtesy of the artist and Roman Susan Art Foundation.


Often all the paternalistic presumptuousness, cultural debates, headlines, and orienting devices does reinforce perceived conditions of isolation. Yet this overlooks a priori interdependencies of all life outright that is so deftly evidenced by a life growing inside of a life to which it is intimately connected. Needing is one of the only conditions of the space between birth and death about which I feel certain, and it’s also so scary so much of the time. The babies McCarthy presents are inflected with all the pathos and vulnerability involved in need—in the flailing limbs, exposed intimacies, and collaged materials from a life of ID cards, hair clippings, childhood toys, crafts, costumes, and heirlooms, the artist lays totally bare the dangerous feeling too-muchness into which we are all born, and capacities for compassion and empathy for which that condition begs.

Analyst, artist, and my go-to thinker for the most sensitive and elaborate deconstructions of the maternal, Bracha L. Ettinger, maps the trauma and treacheries of needing, the risks of too little and too much, “Anxiety of abandonment and devouring [by the Ready-made mother-monster] digests and elaborates anxieties of being invaded, dominated and penetrated.”[4] Ettinger characterizes the ‘mother-monster’ as a phantasmatic scapegoat caretaker blamed for the sheer overwhelm of a world defined by ecological meltdown and governed by madness. McCarthy edges this tension to the precipice in the moments between picking up the baby whistle sculptures, ‘playing’ them by placing mouth to nubby mound genitalia and blowing, then putting these doll-like effigies down and walking away.

The meaning-full sculpted babies on display are complemented with several more elusive, abstract, and haunting Face Façade pieces: masks floated across walls and above doorways, composed from silver solder and broken pieces of Chicago common brick—a rough, gritty building material made from clay dredged from the city’s river that came into use following the Chicago Fires of the 1870s and were produced consistently until the early 1980s. In a body of work full of varied mementos and cultural artifacts, this brick perhaps most profoundly evokes the ways meaning and determination are inherited from the histories and other power structures that precede us. In the logic of these works, the self is never singular or independent, never the neoliberal ideal of an alienated unit of capital; rather, babies or subsequent adults who try to mask and repress their own unresolved infantile impulses are characterized most of all as unmanageable excess, both held and made to hold, performative, fantastical, and fragile in the face of immense, compounded forces that would seek to define. Contending with what artist and writer Lise Haller Baggesen describes as “that real feeling of containing and carrying somebody, of the whole oceanic interiority that entails,”[5] Liz McCarthy fosters a zone of objects and actions with which to comprehend what has been done and what is undone in the radical simultaneous operations of giving birth and being born.

[1] John D’Emilio. “Capitalism and Gay Identity.” The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader. New York: Routledge, 1993. Print, pp. 469.

[2] D’Emilio. “Capitalism and Gay Identity.” P. 470.

[3] Peter-Paul Verbeek. Moralizing Technology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011. Print, p. 24.

[4] Bracha L. Ettinger. “(M)Other Re-spect: Maternal Subjectivity, the Ready-made mother-monster and The Ethics of Respecting.” Studies in the Maternal, 2 (1), 2010. P. 18.

[5] Lise Haller Baggesen. “Mother of Pearl.” Mothernism. Chicago: Green Lantern Press, 2014. Print, p. 131.

Clayworx: Fostering Art Education in the Community

The updated exterior of Clayworx: Ceramic Arts Learning Centre in Old East Village.

By Adi Berardini

Clayworx: Ceramic Arts Learning Centre, formerly known as the London Clay Art Centre, is setting a new precedent for clay education in Old East Village, London ON. The charitable arts organization was founded in 1981 to provide a shared studio for members of The London Potters Guild, to host more classes, and foster an appreciation for clay in London and the Southwestern Ontario region. Currently, Clayworx has around 40 active volunteers and runs approximately 70 classes a year, every day of the week, for 300 days of the year.

Volunteers from The London Potters Guild started a capital fundraising campaign in 2003 and purchased 664 Dundas St. in March 2008. Thus began the enormous task of iteratively raising additional capital funds and renovating the Victorian-era building in Old East Village over five years. Clayworx has always had devoted members and volunteers to help build a sense of artistic community thriving in the two-level space, with a retail shop and artist studios on the ground level and a workshop space on the second floor. Clayworx has also been at the forefront of conceiving, financially supporting, and facilitating the large-scale, community-engaged mosaics in Old East Village, led by ceramic artists Beth Turnbull Morrish and Susan Day, making it a landmark neighbourhood for public art in London.

Clayworx Executive Director Bep Schippers and Board of Director John White at the new brand unveiling on March 31st, 2023.

In March 2023, the London Clay Art Centre and The London Potters Guild consolidated the two brands under the name Clayworx: Ceramic Arts Learning Centre. The initiative began under Clayworx’s former executive director, Darlene Pratt. She says, “We felt strongly that we needed to adopt an entirely new name that embodies the wonderful people and the inspiring place that brings them together. We wanted a name that is easy to understand, feels welcoming to everyone, and reflects our standing as the premier location for ceramic arts education in London and the region.” As Clayworx’s current executive director, Bep Schippers, explains, “Our new goal and vision is to provide everyone access to exceptional educational, artistic, and community building experiences with clay.” Schippers explains that the new brand is both playful and approachable featuring bright colours and the fundamental shapes used in all art forms, including ceramics.

Clayworx offers classes and workshops to support beginners working with clay and training and professional development specifically for emerging artists and artists of all levels. As Schippers further explains, “There are some people that just want to come here and make a couple of things and then go home and that’s fantastic. Then we also have artists who want to build their skills and maybe eventually open their own studios and become exhibitors elsewhere in Ontario or [across] Canada.”

Our new goal and vision is to provide everyone access to exceptional educational, artistic, and community building experiences with clay.

The organization aims to provide an accessible space for anyone interested in learning to work with clay and practicing the ceramic art form. Schippers details how Clayworx has been supported by instructors who have devoted countless hours to teaching ceramics to their students. Clayworx also engages BealArt students and alumni who have explored ceramics in their education nearby at H.B. Beal Secondary School.

The Indwell Mosaics project located at Embassy Commons (740 Dundas St).

Clayworx has also established itself as a leader in public art creation in London, placing Old East Village on the map with their many large-scale mosaics. The most recent mosaic project was installed on the new Indwell Embassy Commons building, by lead artist Beth Turnbull Morrish and assistant artists Taryn Imrie and Cassandra Robinson. This massive project includes three large-scale panels that surround the exterior of the building.

Lead Artist Beth Turnbill Morrish hard at work on the Indwell Mosaics panel.

The mosaic panels comprise over 10,000 handmade tiles, created in workshops by artists and members of the community. As Turnbull Morrish details, “Early on in the design process, I had the opportunity to meet with some of the residents and staff of Indwell, as well as tour one of their other buildings. I asked them to express what is the true essence of Indwell, and the intention for its residents. Hope, belonging, and safety came up again and again, as well as the cycles in life that we all go through.”

The process of creating the large-scale mosaic panels was both a collaborative and labour-intensive one. The design and tile creation took 8 months and installation took 8 weeks. As Beth explains, “panel one depicts the dawn, a symbol of new beginnings, the centre panel shows a mid-day sun, a flowing river and blooming flowers, representing a thriving, love-filled life, and finally, in panel 3 we see birds in the sunset.” She also explains the symbolism behind the elements such as the “native Ontario flowers depicted, the shape of the Thames or Antler River, and the birds that represent peace and freedom, as well as being part of a flock and the ability to fly alone.”

Detail of one of the Indwell mosaics panels.

For Clayworx’s next public art project, look down— mosaics will be inlaid in the sidewalks along the commercial corridor of the Old East Village. The sidewalk tiles were created by different community groups and organizations in the neighbourhood. Inspired by a tree with decorated leaves or “dyad” shapes, reminiscent of the London, Ontario logo, the project will bring a sense of storytelling and colour to Old East Village.

Local pottery and ceramics at the Clayworx retail shop.

Clayworx has expanded its reach in London and beyond by offering accessible clay education while sticking close to its roots. The thread that brings it all together is the passion for arts education and community building. If you’re interested in taking ceramic classes or workshops, check out their upcoming classes and available programming. Make sure to also visit their on-site ceramics shop to view the creations of local artists who use Clayworx as their studio.

To learn more, visit Clayworx‘s website and social media. This article is published in partnership with the Old East Village BIA.

What Do We Discard? Specimen by Susan Low-Beer

Specimen by Susan Low-Beer. Riverbrink Art Museum. Image Courtesy of the artist.

September 10, 2022 – January 21, 2023

RiverBrink Art Museum

By Lera Kotsyuba

Susan Low-Beer’s ceramic sculptures are uncanny forms that play with the tension between anxiety and care. Travelling across Canada, the exhibition Specimen transforms in each iteration. At the RiverBrink Art Museum in Ontario from September 2022 to January 2023, Specimen, curated by Sheila McMath, shows Low-Beer’s ceramics meld into a quasi-domestic space. Their forms recall organs that drape over industrial forms that are a cold substitution for domestic objects of home, a bed, or a table. The discomfort apparent in rest denotes unease, and the forms, between frail organs and technological refuse, link to our anxieties about aging.

The title, Specimen, recalls a cabinet of curiosities of observation, not the clinical study of medical precision but as objects of fascination, inviting closer observation to make meaning. The exhibition embraces humour and the absurd through the familiar made strange. The uncanny nature of organic forms meeting industrial elements is displayed through the tubes and ovoid shapes to the draped ceramic forms to their rigid grid surface patterns and metal assemblage elements. The works invite closer inspection by pointedly asking the viewer to lean into their discomfort, embrace the absurd and disquieting forms, and contemplate age and decay in the Anthropocene in an era of mass waste.

Specimen by Susan Low-Beer. Riverbrink Art Museum. Image Courtesy of the artist.

Walking through the RiverBrink Museum of Art, the space itself seems caught between two worlds, that of a domestic space and a museum. Walking on polished floors in the Georgian-style building, you’re momentarily transported to a liminal space, a space outside of time. Coming upon the gallery space, the rectangular room is adorned with simple wood panelling and an assortment of small tables from different eras arranged throughout the room, the assemblage of draped and balanced ceramic objects adds to the uncanny feeling evoked by the space, both familiar and alien at the same time. The sculptures are ovoid and organ-like, with fibulae and tubes protruding from grid-patterned forms that are not quite organic, recalling metallics and plastics. The ceramic forms are glazed matte or with a high sheen, and the feeling of unease shifts to anxiety where you’re unsure if you’re standing in a medical refuse facility or an industrial scavenging ground. They may be interpreted as curiosities, their half-familiar forms inviting closer inspection. Without the framework of encased forms behind glass, the ceramics are still arranged for display, inviting the viewer’s gaze.

Glossa (2018) is a long ovoid ceramic shape with two tubes extended, searching for something, the form cradled on a stained pillow as if in a hospice. The object rests on a dresser, yet the uncanny organic form’s placement denotes care and the eerie notes of medical decay, a triage of care for an object past its prime. Although a closer look does not resolve the tension, the broken and deflated forms in the exhibition denote a fragility, a slow decay, whether technological or organic is a matter of perspective.


Susan Low-Beer. Ocellus. Image Courtesy of the artist.

Susan Low-Beer’s ceramics have shifted from figurative to abstract, the forms of Specimen are therefore able to convey anxieties that suffuse our age: from aging to climate disaster and mass waste, but not without a humorous touch. Ocellus (2018) is a ceramic ovoid with two protrusions, once the interior of something either organic or industrial. The dark glaze and purposeful patching elicit the understanding that an object’s lifetime of use has shaped the wear apparent on its surface. Balanced on a half-moon wood plinth with a do-it-yourself aesthetic of rough assembly, the sculpture sits on top of a polished dark wood table, in contrast with the cement blocks it rests on. The stacking of disparate objects adds humour to the display, easing the tension of clear meaning, encouraging the viewer to embrace the absurd. Low-Beer’s sympathetic gestures, of patching and the readymade plinths, are acts of care for the aged techno-organic form. Rather than a nihilistic bent, Low-Beer encourages humour as the connective thread of the world evoked by her work. There are no clear answers or solutions, but rather than seeking a resolute finality of meaning, she invites us to share a collective experience of uncertainty, and maybe even embrace it.

In Mammilla (2018), two ovoid ceramic forms are linked from within, recalling a symbiotic relationship. An act of care, their connection tube is draped over the other form as if in an embrace, while grey matter pools below. The grid-patterned surface and matte grey and blue glaze with overlaid clay seams gesture to the discard of industry, the plea for care of one form to another, and gestures to an organic tableau. The worn and aged surface once again recalls the age of the forms, their original use disguised by their removal from their original context, yet the ceramics show the maker’s hand in their patched forms, clay smoothed over long-mended wounds.

Susan Low-Beer. Mammilla. Image Courtesy of the artist.

Comb-Plate (2018), made of a ceramic ovoid with two protrusions placed on a woodblock, abstractly looks like an automaton that has fallen on the stairs. The absurdist humour contrasts with the disquiet of discard, whether organic or industrial remains unresolved. Wood and metal chairs, concrete slabs, and hollow wood trunks unsettle the observer, creating the tension between the plinth and artwork, to question where the work ends, and the display object begins. The exhibition offers no respite from the disquieting familiarity of objects, at once domestic and commercial, organic and industrial, clay and metal, art and curiosity, humour and absurdity are the common links.

Low-Beer’s ceramics are transformed in every iteration of the exhibition, domestic furniture unique to this iteration of the exhibition, the ovoid forms shifting the understanding of the gallery space they occupy. The tension between discard and decay and the apparent care of mending instills unease in the visitor. Rather than a finite meaning, can we learn to embrace uncertainty and humour as a form of connection? The exhibition prompts us to consider our relationship to objects and ourselves, to consider the ways and circumstances in which we extend care, and what we discard.

Clay Bodies: Interview with Olivia Turchyniak

Olivia Turchyniak studio portrait by Oriana Confente.

By Oriana Confente

Olivia Turchyniak is a ceramicist based in Tiohtià:ke / Montréal, Canada. As a newcomer to the city who wanted to support local artists during the pandemic, I started a growing collection of mugs by Olivia. I was drawn to the materiality of her pieces, like the organic and grounding qualities of the clay she uses which connect to deeper themes present throughout her work.

While she makes vessels for hot beverages, Olivia’s conceptual projects concern vessels of another kind. I learned her ceramic practice began with abstract representations of bodies – hollow sculptures that take shape as folded, dimpled mounds of flesh. In her artist statement, she declares that the body itself is also a vessel, one we need to “mold into a home.” Olivia’s artworks have been featured in group exhibitions at the FOFA Gallery and most recently, at the Montréal Art Centre.

Curious about her interpretations of human anatomy and the lumpy forms she creates, I wanted to know more. Olivia and I chatted over coffee and cannoli before visiting her studio, our discussion spanning flesh, functionality, and fine arts. The conversation that follows has been edited for clarity by us.

Olivia Turchyniak studio portrait by Oriana Confente.

Oriana: I’d like to start by learning more about your choice of medium. Can you tell me about the materials you work with?

Olivia: Ceramics has been my main medium for about five years now. I work mostly with stoneware clay because I prefer a mid-to high-fire clay with structure to it – I’ve found a clay body that I like.

Oriana: They’re called clay bodies?

Olivia: Yeah! A clay body is a mixture of different materials to make it workable. It’s a man-made product, versus clay, which is a natural resource.

Photograph of Olivia Turchyniak’s studio by Oriana Confente.

Oriana: You’ve drawn striking comparisons between human bodies as fleshy vessels and the organic aging of clay bodies. Can you go into more detail about the themes of your work?

Olivia: I’m primarily working with themes that have to do with the body and the earth, with permanence and impermanence. My most recent project, “SEED/SOIL,” is a self-portrait. The forms are abstract figures that have my tattoos to make them identifiable. It’s a lifelong project. Each sculpture features a different body part, and I’ll keep creating them until I stop getting tattoos.

We tend to view tattoos as permanent but in the grand scheme of things, our bodies aren’t that permanent. Clay is technically one of the most permanent mediums you can work with, it can last thousands of years. I’m playing with that idea of im/permanence. Clay also ages in stages, it matures with time. While clay is sourced from the ground, our bodies also end up in the earth when we die. There are so many parallels between clay and bodies and there’s a quality of clay that inherently reflects the body.

Photograph of Olivia Turchyniak’s studio by Oriana Confente.

Oriana: How does it feel to look back on earlier projects? Do you see yourself reflected differently in those artworks?

Olivia: For some reason, I depict myself a lot, maybe unintentionally. My most recent project is the most conscious self-portrait compared to others, which are reflections of subconscious mental states or reflections of my environment. “MAMMARY,” a series from 2019/2020, is a representation of a female form. It’s a grotesque image that’s strangely appealing at the same time. Breasts are really sensitive in our society and I wanted to represent a feeling of being uncomfortable. From the beginning, what’s tied my projects together is my interest in the human body and how I can express that.

Oriana: I want to discuss your functional wares too because, as you know, I’m a big fan. I’m curious about the connection between your functional pieces and your fine arts pieces.

Olivia: The functional wares started about a year ago, mid-COVID. I really wanted to learn a new skill. I think what I like about the functional stuff is that it’s not conceptual at all. It’s something I do when I don’t want to think too hard, and I just want to make something that serves a utilitarian purpose. I do see the practices as separate, but I think I need both practices in my life – I find that I’m not always inspired conceptually and sometimes I need a break from that. The functional wares are easy to go back to and I can produce work without thinking too hard.

Oriana: How does the making process differ between a thematic project and your functional wares?

Olivia: My sculptural works are hand-built using a coiling technique, which is when you roll out cylindrical, tube-shaped pieces of clay and stack them to make a hollow sculpture. My functional wares are made on a wheel which is very different from hand-building. Quicker, too. I can bust out ten mugs in the same amount of time it would take me to do a tiny portion of a sculpture.

Photograph of Olivia Turchyniak’s studio by Oriana Confente.

Oriana: Which process is easier for you, mentally and physically?

Olivia: It’s physically exhausting either way, but mentally, the functional work is easier because I’m repeating something very technical. With the sculptural work, I’m figuring it out as I go, and I have to think about gravity too.

Oriana: Is it messy?

Olivia: It’s very messy. Very dusty.

Oriana: Do you like that?

Olivia: I love the tactility of it. Making sculptures is meditative for me. It’s very grounding and the sensation is something I’m addicted to, I guess. While I’m working, it’s really like a flow state. My mind is just so hyper-focused on what I’m doing. I think that’s beautiful and I’m constantly chasing after it.

To see more of Olivia’s work, visit oliviaturchyniak.com or @_vie_lo and @_vie_pot on Instagram.

Male Fear: Encounters with Roxanne Jackson’s Ceramic Monsters

bark at the moon (1)
Bark At The Moon. (View 1). Ceramic, glaze, underglaze decals, luster, hoop earrings; 19 x 16 x 10 inches. 2016.

By Chloe Hyman

A monster is a personified manifestation of societal fears. Some anxieties are primal, like a fear of death, while others are social, directed towards those whose distinctive appearance or behavior renders them dangerous. Sexual difference has long necessitated the creation of maternal monsters to legitimize a fear of the feminine. This anxiety motivates the policing of women’s bodies, in an effort to enforce a heterosexual gender binary. By transforming women and femmes into demons, patriarchy equates femininity with evil and masculinity with good; monstrous women keep men in power.

That is, until they don’t. Banshees and harpies that subvert monstrosity’s patriarchal parameters dispute the validity of gendered social divisions, threatening male dominance.

Such creatures abound in the oeuvre of Roxanne Jackson, a ceramicist who dissects the politics of monstrosity. In works like Bark at the Moon (2016) and Third Eye Fuck (2019), she oscillates between wish fulfillment and stereotype subversion, crafting figures that embody and disrupt tropes of feminine monstrousness.

The latter’s sexual title accentuates the comingling of fear and desire in monster tales. Film scholars Barbara Creed, Jeffrey Cohen, and Barry Keith Grant discuss how cinematic monsters attract and repulse men, fulfilling their submissive fantasies with the threat of the monstrous woman, and their dreams of domination when said threat is vanquished.[1]

This essay considers how the relationship between straight men and female monsters informs the same audience’s interpretation of Jackson’s work. Analyzing the interaction between an artwork and a particular viewer necessitates an understanding of art as a cultural product; although the artist’s intentions contribute to its significance, its many meanings are also a product of symbolic codes, dominant social ideology, and the viewer’s perspective.[2] By modeling the straight male’s encounter with subversive female monsters, this essay explores what Jackson’s work signifies to a powerful group—the descendants of the architects who constructed the myth of female monstrosity.

bark at the moon 2 (1)
Bark At The Moon. (View 2). Ceramic, glaze, underglaze decals, luster, hoop earrings; 19 x 16 x 10 inches. 2016.

The Archaic Mother

In The Monstrous-Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis, psychoanalyst Barbara Creed describes a number of monstrous cinematic archetypes. Her analysis provides a blueprint for an examination of fear, desire, and monstrosity in the bodies of monsters coded female. Creed’s description of the archetypal archaic mother elucidates how two of Jackson’s ceramic sculptures are implicitly gendered. Furthermore, it suggests that male viewers will respond to Bark at the Moon and Third Eye Fuck with repulsion, arousal, and fear.

The myth of the archaic mother centers parthenogenetic procreation—that is, female reproduction without a phallus. Mythological figures like Gaia (Greek), Coatlicue (Aztec), and the Spider Woman (Navajo) illustrate the historical lineage of self-reproducing mothers.[3] They appear today in cinema in the guise of monsters, like the titular figure in Alien whose eggs require neither phallus nor fertilization, but a human host. According to Creed, the archaic mother presents as “the voracious maw, the mysterious black hole that signifies female genitalia which threatens… to incorporate everything in its path.”[4]

At the center of Bark at the Moon sits such a mouth, its gaping lips emptying into nothingness. Ridged white tubes, caked in muck, wriggle around it like maggots. With their rounded ends, these tubes could be fallopian or phallic, an ambiguity that, paired with the mother’s vaginal maw, points to her self-reproduction. She also threatens to consume the viewer, who cannot escape her slimy hole. If the archaic mother faces him, he risks obliteration, but if she turns towards the gallery wall, then he must be inside her—an embryo-corpse.

The divine symbols ornamenting Third Eye Fuck invoke the archaic mother in a different context. Unblinking eyes adorn the deity’s cheekbones while cobalt spiders traverse her neck—a powerful allusion to her ancestor, the Spider Woman. Furthermore, the creature’s pearly-white face is bifurcated, revealing a fleshy, womb-like cave. The womb’s proximity to the creature’s mouth literalizes the narrative of the devouring mother. As Creed explains, “The archaic mother threatens to cannibalize, to take back, the life forms to which she once gave birth.”[5] Third Eye Fuck embodies this threat, collapsing the metaphor of the vaginal mouth into a single fleshy cavern, capable of consumption and ejection.

Due to their self-reproduction, Jackson’s creatures render the phallus superfluous. And because they layer vaginal and oral imagery, they threaten to consume man whole. According to Creed, this evisceration of man’s social status and bodily integrity appeals to “a masochistic desire for death, pleasure, and oblivion” that is common amongst men.[6] And yet, it is also repulsive and terrifying, which Creed attributes to abjection.

 

Roxanne Jackson. Third Eye Fuck (View 4) Media: Ceramic, glaze, luster; 18 x 15 x 10 inches. 2019.
Roxanne Jackson. Third Eye Fuck (View 5) Media: Ceramic, glaze, luster; 18 x 15 x 10 inches. 2019.

Abjection

The theory of abjection was introduced by the psychoanalyst and semiotician Julia Kristeva, who defined it as “that which evades borders and rules which define identity and maintain order.”[7] When matter passes the skin as it does during birth, people are reminded of their mortality and animal nature. Subsequently, the transgressive matter—in this case, blood and placenta—becomes abject, along with the tools that facilitated the transgression: the reproductive system. Men are more disturbed by abjection because they are less accustomed to the sight of blood than those with ovaries. Thus bleeding, birthing bodies become beacons of man’s inescapable death and epicenters of abjection.[8]

Historically, men in power have expressed their fear of abjection by demonizing the female body. Christian art abounds with womb-like depictions of hell and uteruses adorned with devil horns. Leviticus, for example, associates birthing bodies with decaying corpses, linking femaleness and death.[9] As Creed notes in her analysis of Alien, this trend continues in horror cinema. She describes crewmen entering a spaceship through a vaginal doorway and walking down narrow corridors (echoing fallopian tubes) to an egg-filled, womb-chamber.[10] This intra-uterine imagery roots the alien’s monstrosity in the abject female body.

A mass of tubes, holes, and flesh, Bark at the Moon and Third Eye Fuck exude abjection. Furthermore, each contains a passage through which organic matter can be imbibed or ejected. These vaginal/oral mouths repulse and terrify because they are abject reminders of human mortality.

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Roxanne Jackson. Third Eye Fuck (View 3) Media: Ceramic, glaze, luster; 18 x 15 x 10 inches. 2019.

Subversion

While Bark at the Moon and Third Eye Fuck embody the archaic mother, they also subvert stereotypes of female monstrousness. Both are decadently glazed, their uterine linings shimmering like dew or diamonds rather than blood. Bark at the Moon is awash in lime, turquoise, and salmon pink, which almost obscures a floral motif that emerges from its crevices. This blue pattern, an allusion to Delft porcelain, features prominently on the pale skin of the deity that is Third Eye Fuck.

The ornamentation of monstrous bodies with bright, shimmering colors and courtly motifs subverts the binary between beauty and monstrosity.

The ornamentation of monstrous bodies with bright, shimmering colors and courtly motifs subverts the binary between beauty and monstrosity. Jackson’s sculptures occupy a liminal space between the two, where gender and morality also blur; Bark at the Moon is ambiguously gendered and Third Eye Fuck depicts a monster with an eye for Dutch design. The more viewers peer at each, the less frightening, and more intriguing, they become. To understand why this subversion elicits discomfort for male viewers, the theory of abjection proves useful.

Aesthetic codes, which are tied to gender and moral binaries, function like skin. Just as the epidermal layer protects man from blood and, therefore, the recognition of his mortality, social divisions protect members of the dominant group—men—from the knowledge that their superiority is unearned.

Media maintains these divisions by reinforcing the myth of female immorality. It also demonizes the defiance of heterosexual gender roles by giving female monsters traditionally masculine traits, like promiscuity or voracious appetite. Cinema is ripe with archaic mothers and other monsters who elicit fear in a controlled environment, for the sexual satisfaction of men whose dominance is never really at stake. It is expected that the banshee will be vanquished before the screen darkens, reasserting heterosexual gender roles.

But the fate of Jackson’s sculptures is not predestined. By deconstructing the notion that beauty equates goodness and gender clarity, while ugliness signifies immorality and gender ambiguity, the artist produces creatures of ambiguous moral character. Luminescent and bright, Bark at the Moon and Third Eye Fuck engage in an active dialogue with the male viewer. They threaten him, they tantalize him, and ultimately, they will dethrone him.

Editor’s Note: The beginning paragraph has been edited to use more inclusive language,  recognizing and clarifying that these cinematic tropes affect both cis and trans women and femmes.

This feature is an excerpt from our first print issue. If you’d like to grab a copy you can visit our online shop.

Notes

[1] Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, Monster Theory: Reading Culture (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), pp. 7-17; Barbara Creed, ‘Horror and the Monstrous-Feminine: An Imaginary Abjection,’ in The Dread of Difference: Gender and the Horror Film, ed. Barry Keith Grant (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2015), pp. 42.

[2] Janet Wolff, The Social Production of Art (New York: New York University Press, 1984)

[3] Barbara Creed, The Monstrous-Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis, 1993 (London and New York: Routledge, repr. 2007), pp. 104-112; Shohini Chaudhuri, Feminist Film Theorists: Laura Mulvey, Kaja Silverman, Teresa de Lauretis, Barbara Creed (London and New York: Routledge, 2006), p. 95; American Museum of Natural History, ‘The Spider Woman,’ AMNH

< https://www.amnh.org/exhibitions/totems-to-turquoise/native-american-cosmology/the-spider-woman > [accessed 20 November 2019];

[4] Creed (1993), p. 116.

[5] Ibid. p. 83.

[6] Creed (1993), p. 170; 470-471.

[7] Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection (Seuil: Paris, 1980) quoted in Creed (1993), p. 51.

[8] Creed (1993), pp. 190-193.

[9] Kristeva quoted in Creed (1993), p. 184; Margaret R. Miles, Carnal Knowing: Female Nakedness and Religious meaning in the Christian West (Beacon Press: Boston, 1989), quoted in Creed, p. 170; Creed, p. 170.

[10] Creed (1993), pp. 83-85.

In Conversation with Monica Joy Peeff: On Technology and the Tactile

Monica_clay_communication
Monica Joy Peeff. Degradation of Communication. Digital print alongside film & raw clay. 2019.

Questions by Adi Berardini

London-based interdisciplinary artist Monica Joy Peeff combines tangible mediums like ceramics and drawing with the digital sentiment of the iCloud and internet messaging. Always observing their surroundings with a sketchbook in hand, Monica’s work is contemplative and explores queer identity. Peeff specifically focuses on the dependency on technology as an accessible platform to initiate and maintain love and connection. By using the symbolism of cell phones, message bubbles, and cigarette packs, they relate to the topic of addiction to represent these themes. Through their work, they evoke emotion and inspire the viewer to put down their mask and embrace vulnerability.

Additionally, Peeff is interested in deconstructing reliance on coping mechanisms, looking at the juxtaposition of guilt/shame culture, while simultaneously romanticizing/normalizing habits. Using an interdisciplinary approach, they work within the realms of ceramics, printed matter, drawing, painting, performance, and installation. The variety of objects and media provide a physical element to what would otherwise remain hypothetical, in memories, or visually online.

Your work merges more tactile ceramic work with technological references, seemingly commenting on technology and its influence on our relationships.  Could you explain more about your inspiration behind this combination?

This combination derives from an appreciation for the technology we currently have access to. Clay and technology exist as juxtapositions to one another. Clay is this natural substance derived from the Earth, delicate, tactile, and malleable to touch, while our phones, laptops, etc. are a combination of complex hardware and software, manipulated with coding and programming beyond physical visualization. Now, more than ever, am I utilizing my technology to connect with my loved ones almost instantaneously. The ability to maintain our relationships is essentially always in our pockets. A few years ago, I was making ceramic cellphones, exploring my dependency on my technology. [Through this project, there was] a gratification in creating an ever-lasting object with a note of digital memories. Now experiencing the present state of the world, I am ever appreciative of the ability to stay in touch with others and establish new connections with people all over the world.

Monica_installation
Monica Joy Peeff. Send a Message, digital prints graphite, ink & tape. Travelling installation displayed at UPRLFT Design & Photo Studio, Good Sport Gallery & Bealart Year End Show, 2019.

One of your pieces uses more of a social practice approach where people could write hand-written messages on typing bubbles, facilitating communication where it can be difficult at times. Can you explain your process for this project? What was the outcome?

I began using the message bubble to symbolize communication. These cards were installed in three separate shows at Good Sport, UPRLFT and Bealart with a grey card on the wall, alongside stacks of blue cards, providing an opportunity for response. I kept it open so that people could take cards with them if they wished. During the installations, it was quite funny to see how people responded with anonymous freedom. Especially at the Bealart show, with more traffic of children and high schoolers, they took a very comedic approach to responding, which was amusing.

monica_install2
Monica Joy Peeff. Send a Message, digital prints graphite, ink & tape. Travelling installation displayed at UPRLFT Design & Photo Studio, Good Sport Gallery & Bealart Year End Show, 2019.

It seems to evoke a space to be vulnerable in public but since it’s still anonymous there’s some allowance for that. How do you find incorporating text can convey queerness and aspects of identity in art? Do you find that text is part of your process? How does it function?

It allows me to be really literal and honest in a sense—that’s often really frightening. When outright expressing something, I instinctively seek ways to cover it up. However, especially in the past few years, I’ve had the urge to not be so subtle in implying when a subject is very personal. I hope to grow into a person that is comfortable speaking to my experiences. I am trying to limit the possibility of integral parts of my identity and artwork being brushed over.

val on zoom
Monica Joy Peeff. sketchbook page (Val on Zoom). 2020

Who are some other artists that inspire you?

Jeannine Marchand makes these really large-scale fabric-like works. [Monica brings up a slideshow on their laptop for an artist talk entitled WHAT UP I LIKE CLAY]. She has this amazing piece called Welcome that viewers hesitantly walked on [since it’s placed right in the doorway of the gallery], as a result of these interactions it gets completely destroyed. I think this might have been the same piece [Marchand’s work Bucket] although she doesn’t entirely explain it, but I think someone cleaned it up, placing the pieces in a bucket, with a note reading “I love you and I’m sorry.” I thought that’s so bittersweet. But her intention was fully to have people step on it—some people tried to jump over it since they didn’t know how to interact with it but obviously it just got totally crushed.

This artist, Serena Hughes, [@wamwogs] inspires me whenever I’m in a rut with creating. Seeing their work reminds me of what I love about drawing. They’re so honest with their use of text in their work. It’s a humbling reminder that I can just say whatever I want in my sketchbook, with the freedom to share it or keep it private.

Lynn Park is one of my closest friends and favourite artists. I’ve had the privilege of witnessing them develop as a person and artist, from our time together in the Bealart program to them moving in Montreal. I remember the first time they told me that I am their favourite artist. I was flattered but felt slightly it was nonsensical. Thinking, there is a whole world of artists, creating much more complex, thought out, relevant and skillful work than I am, why me? As a beginner artist, at the time still in high school, barely figuring anything about myself out. After some time, I have grown to understand how powerful that sentiment is. To be someone’s favourite artist? Nothing can make me want to continue creating as much as support like that. I now pridefully share with others that my friends are in fact my favourite artists. Their practices hit home like no other. Recently Lynn began creating a project that is an interactive website as an exploration of their experience of space and friendship in the COVID-19 pandemic.

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Monica Joy Peeff. we are separate but connected, cone 6 porcelain & graphite, 2019.

I think it’s powerful to think of intentionality especially with ceramics, you often see it just displayed on a shelf or a plinth. I notice that your work has a unique sense of tactility since you use ceramics and often reference hands in your drawings. I was wondering if you could speak about this aspect of your work? 

I’m really motivated by the tangibility of clay. I think it is so vital to ceramics because it’s a medium where the artist is directly working it with their hands. This is the main factor that always has me drawn to them as a subject matter, in drawing, sculpting, painting, etc. These objects I made with my hands, I spent time touching, interacting with, and manipulating them into entirely new forms. To just put said object on a shelf/plinth as if it’s a final resting place, where only eyes can see it is so heartbreaking. The texture of it is so important, every crack, bump, carving, drip of glaze, or rawness of a surface unglazed is vital to my own experience with it, and I want others to have the opportunity to understand an artwork in that way.

Do you have any projects planned in the near future?

Yes! As a culmination of ongoing research in the psychology of addiction, I will be creating an installation with found cigarette packs. I have been gathering littered packs for almost a year now, with approximately 200 collected so far. I’ve paused collecting due to the risk with COVID-19 of course. I hope to eventually continue when it is safe to do so. The project explores guilt/shame culture, while simultaneously romanticizing/normalizing habits. In 2020 plain packaging for tobacco products became mandatory in Canada (as well as in Saudi Arabia, Slovenia, Turkey, Israel, and Singapore) which I found to be a really interesting and impactful shift.

monica_oralcancer_cigarette
Monica Joy Peeff. Found Pack of Next Original. Ink and Watercolour on paper. 2020.

186 cigarette packs
Monica Joy Peeff. ongoing collection of cigarette packs. 2020.

One of my friends (and favourite artists as well), Angie Quick in an interview with McIntosh Gallery, spoke to how, especially with her home studio, her life and her practice blends together. In this, she said, “Everything I do can be my art practice; so if I’m making muffins, I’m making art, and if I’m going for a bike ride, I’m making art, and so in this way, it’s like my whole life became the art-making”.

This ideology of every aspect of my existence contributing to my being as an artist has been very impactful to me. I’ve been spending a lot of time dancing, which is something I would like to incorporate into my practice publicly. Although I am still learning to be comfortable recording myself dancing or doing it in front of others. Recently I skyped someone I met online and they had referred to the act of dance as “an unspoken physical connection with another human being”. Self-isolation has made me crave this more than ever, I’m aware of how vital going out to dance was to my mental and physical health, so naturally my art practice [as well].

I am attempting to shift my practice into a more collaborative, cross-disciplinary and performative direction. I think there’s such an invisible barrier between artists and viewers because often when I talk to someone who isn’t an “artist” I hear, “I can’t even draw a stick figure!” In reality that’s not it, you don’t need to be able to draw a stick figure to be an artist. You can draw poorly, or you don’t even need to draw at all. Art goes beyond every medium.

To see more of Monica’s work, you can follow them at @mjpdraws and on their website.

Jen Dwyer and Ceramics as Resistance

 

me sculpting

Jen Dwyer grew up in the Bay Area, California. Dwyer attended the University of Washington in Seattle, WA, and received dual degrees in Ceramics and Environmental Science. She is currently completing her master’s degree program at the University of Notre Dame, where she received a Full Fellowship and will graduate in Spring 2019. Inspired by the Bay Area clay scene at a young age, Dwyer has worked with ceramics for over a decade. She has been awarded numerous grants, scholarships and fellowships, including the Pottery Center in Jingdezhen, China, Salem Art Works, in upstate New York, and Trestle Gallery Residency program in Brooklyn. She has also received numerous interviews and publications features, including Create Magazine, Vogue, Hyperallergic, Vice, and I-D magazine. Dwyer is one of the featured artists in the book The New Age of Ceramics published by Hannah Stouffer. When she is not making art, she is dancing or running.

Percephone's pomegranate Seeds

Persephone’s Pomegranate Seeds

You reference how the male gaze has dominated art throughout history, although you seem to take back that notion in a fearless way. Can you explain this further?

In my current body of work, I examine contemporary socially constructed notions of identity by invoking the female gaze and drawing from the Rococo aesthetic. The term “The Female Gaze” was coined by Jill Soloway in response to Laura Mulvey’s theorization of “The Male Gaze” where cinematic depictions of women are seen as the objects of male pleasure. The female gaze is an alternative way of seeing— a way of looking /representing that seeks to give everyone agency and make everyone a subject. I’m really interested in reclaiming self-representation in a variety of ways—the mirror, selfie culture, and the display of Paleolithic figurines (thought to be self-portraits, arguably the original female gaze).

Jen Dwyer _War Paint copy

War Paint

Your work is influenced by Rococo styles like salons and toilettes and introduces a modern twist. Can you explain why you use this reference?

My inspiration behind my most recent installation, War Paint, was inspired by the morning ritual of dressing and applying makeup called The Toilette, an occasion of great social significance for both men and women in 18th Century France. Visitors and close friends were invited to discuss matters of business, politics, or simply gossip—all while watching their host being prepared for public viewing. This performance could be seen as either an act of submission or an act of rebellion. While society wanted to mold the person into one ideal with each layer [through] powdered wigs, corsets, beauty patches–individuals asserted their own sense of agency by redesigning themselves into who they wanted to be. For this body of work, I aimed to explore the armor we wear and the ways we dress and adorn ourselves every day. I examine contemporary, socially constructed notions of identity by invoking the female gaze and drawing from the Rococo aesthetic.

Rococo art was created in reaction to boredom with the austere baroque style, and instead opted to depict humor, wit, emotion, and whimsy. Characterized by its lightheartedness, the Rococo presents itself at a more intimate scale, often in private spaces. My goal for this work is to create a utopic space that blurs the barriers between the private and public, subject and object, and self and other.

In your work, you contrast soft and gentle and threatening. In your series “Objects of Mass Protection,” you form boxing gloves and brass knuckles and juxtapose them with pale pink and flowers. Can you expand on how you are interested in these juxtapositions? How do they relate to resistance?

I’m really interested in the notion of reclaiming—for example the color pink today is seen as a girly, playful, frivolous, color however in the 18th Century, (the time period that a lot of my research stems from) pink was seen as a lighter form of red, one of power [that was] worn by kings. I also like to create hidden elements in my work, such as subtle threats that can be seen in my flower knuckles. At first glance they seem like decorative objects, however upon further inspection, one sees they are actually porcelain knuckles and ironically could potentially be used as a weapon. But that is one thing I love about ceramics, and specifically porcelain—once vitrified it is a permanent and very strong material. Porcelain is unique because it’s simultaneously very fragile and strong. In all of my practice, I’m attracted to contradictions—the material of ceramics and/ or porcelain certainly exhibits contrasts.

Rose Candlestick

Rose Candlestick

It seems like your work uses apples and hands as motifs often. Do these symbolize anything specific to you?

Yes, I’m really interested in mythology and theology that reference allegories of blame and shame. Recently, I’ve been reading about the first women in both Ancient Greek Mythology and Christianity. I find it fascinating that the first woman in one story, Pandora, was created as punishment for men, and in another, it was a woman’s fault that the first humans had to leave Paradise.

 Who are some artists that inspire you?

There are so many! I definitely love some of the classics: Claes Oldenburg, Salvador Dali, Yayoi Kusama, Georgia O’Keeffe and Adrian Piper. I also went through an obsession with photography in my early twenties and fell in love with Francesca Woodman and Nan Goldin but more recently, I’ve been really inspired by Kehinde Wiley and the Mission School artists. I recently started painting and growing up in the Bay Area, I’ve been thinking about my teenage year aesthetic. I love The Mission School artist’s lowbrow illustrative quality to their work. Also just 90’s nostalgia – I recently turned 30, [and] I’ve really been thinking about childhood, and adulthood and where that line is – feeling nostalgia for that playful although faux Utopia that the nostalgia of one’s childhood can create. Also, I should probably mention some ceramicists I love – shout out to Richard Shaw and Ruth Rippon.

Jen Dwyer _Let's Eat Cake copy

Let’s Eat Cake

 It seems like you’ve had projects such as Let’s Eat Cake that involved an interaction with the public involving food. Can you explain this project? Are you interested in exploring this social element more?

I’m currently in my third year of a three-year program of graduate school at the University of Notre Dame. I’ve definitely taken these past few years to explore video, photography, performance and a bit of social practice art alongside my dominate ceramic-based practice. I really love rituals and the act of gift giving, so the installation Let’s Eat Cake demonstrates the ritual of sharing food. Sharing a meal is a simple yet sacred occasion. It is a universal act that is important to build relationships with people. Intentionally eating together creates time and space to engage and share, [which includes] sharing empathy. My goal for this work was to employ the ritual of sharing food as a conscious effort to create empathy as a political tool and decenter the divide between self and other.

Also, who doesn’t love a sweet treat? It became a really fun, playful and engaging element of the opening. I was surprised at how excited people were at the offering of a small cupcake. Although I suppose when it’s embedded in a work of art it’s unassuming, so perhaps the surprise that people could take the small cupcake and eat it was exciting!

Catch Jen’s upcoming show Not For You, Bunny, Co-curated by Stacie Lucas and Nathalie Levey at Lucas Lucas Gallery, NYC, opening Oct 18th from 6-9pm on view through Nov 11th 2018. Follow her work on Instagram @Jen_Dwyer_