Held in the Body: Clay as Witness
Exhibition: 5/15/25 – 8/23/25
Ohr O’Keefe Museum of Art, Biloxi MS
In a time marked by division, displacement, and reckoning with our shared history, Held in the Body: Clay as Witness invites reflection over judgment. Through clay—an ancient, enduring material—the artist shapes vessels, tools, and sculptural forms that speak to inheritance: what we’re given, what we carry, and what we choose to pass on.
Gun-shaped handles, fractured silhouettes, and forms that balance elegance with unease confront viewers with difficult questions: What do we value? What do we conceal? Can beauty and harm share the same space?
These works explore the burdens of ancestry, the silence surrounding trauma, and the layered pride of cultural identity. Whether shaped by migration, conflict, privilege, or loss, we each inherit more than we often acknowledge. In a world increasingly divided by literal and ideological borders, this exhibition asks us to sit with our complexity.
At its core, this is a show about listening—to material, to memory, and to one another. Like our collective stories, clay is shaped by pressure and fire, by intention and accident—yet it remains fragile, surprising, and capable of transformation.
Amid ongoing conversations around justice, belonging, and remembrance, these forms offer no slogans. Instead, they ask for presence—for the courage to hold contradiction, to feel the weight of beauty and truth in the same hand, and to witness what we carry—held in the body, and held in the clay.
