The artists in this exhibition use organic and natural materials to memorialize places of personal significance, such as a home or motherland. In her paper pulp reliefs embossed with salvaged textile woodblocks from Tehran, Aryana Minai intertwines storytelling with acts of preservation, using one of the oldest materials for archiving knowledge to recreate the architecture and mosques from her homeland with their vibrant color palettes. In her Nest series, Minai encapsulates seed forms in a nest or womb-like space with a skeletal leaf from her mother’s garden in honor of the slogan from the Woman, Life, Freedom movement in Iran, “You may have burned our gardens, but we still carry the seeds.” Similarly, Pauline Shaw uses wool and other fibers to create large-scale felt tapestries that preserve personal histories, emulating the rootlessness and cultural confusion of the diasporic experience. In her monumental felted tapestry, The Tomb-Sweeper’s Mosquito Bite, Shaw melds imagery from MRI scans of her body with recollections of Taiwan, where her parents emigrated from. Her work transforms these fleeting memories into permanent heirlooms, capturing the essence of migration across place and time. Additionally, Jackie Amézquita’s Combustible Colectivo (Collective Fuel) earthwork series, a statement on the impact of oil drilling in her South Central Los Angeles neighborhood, was made using Amézquita’s signature process of sourcing soil from the depicted site, blending it with masa then gathered rainwater. The tablets are frozen, baked, then charged in the sun, giving the earth new life, while maintaining site specificity within the work.
Another throughline in Mother/Land examines how several artists use clay as a medium to reflect on the physiology of flora and fauna to present new possibilities that address identity and cultural erasure. Maddy Inez is deeply interested in how displaced communities use gardens and their relationship to plants as acts of survival and revolution. Her ceramic work explores the often-overlooked and obscured histories of plants, highlighting their significance for both our bodies and the environment. For example, Imago is inspired by the dandelion, often deemed a weed, yet rife with health benefits such as detoxifying and healing soil. In Gumbo Rising, Inez sculpts an okra plant, drawing attention to its history as a crop brought to the U.S. during the transatlantic slave trade. She notes that enslaved people would braid okra seeds into their hair before being forcibly removed from their homeland, viewing this act as a powerful form of resistance. Erin Jane Nelson’s pinhole camera made from earth materials, Mirror Cam, derived from the vessel as a form with interiority, is a metaphor for a feminist camera. Billy’s Island, the ceramic wall piece contains a pigment print photograph Nelson took using her Mirror Cam of the Okefenokee swamp in South Georgia, a rich ecological site. Nicki Green’s work also examines the intersection of the natural world and the Anthropocene— the human-altered world. In her pieces, vessels made from clay represent the constructed world, while organic textures inspired by mycelium or fungi networks envelop them, drawing parallels between their porous qualities and the interconnected, supportive networks of trans identity, care, and resilience. Similarly, Ayla Tavares hones in on daily tactile interactions between human bodies, built architecture, and the landscape. Her ceramic wall works are sculpted within a deliberate scale that is dictated by the size of the artist’s hands, which serve a metaphor for shifts in perspective between earthbound and celestial realms.
Several artists in the exhibition delve into various mental states —dreaming, meditating, remembering, and intuiting— to forge a connection between the land and the mind, body, and soul. For example, Ragini Bhow is guided by intuition, divination, and meditation. Her monochromatic palette of blue on black, perceptually driven, was inspired by her experiences wandering the desert at night in India. Through an alchemical-like process, she hand-mixes her pigments, combining organic and natural materials such as crushed stones like lapis, azurite, malachite, mica, and crystal, along with iron oxide, herbs, saliva, and ash from ceremonial burnings. In Prophetic Dream II, The Embrace, Bhow channels an ancestral mother spirit that first appeared to her in a dream during a journey with her mother in the jungle near Bangalore. For Bhow, creating art is a means of finding synchronicity within her personal journey, an exploration of life’s forms, and a way of navigating the world with a sense of unknowing, through mark making. Katie Grinnan’s floor sculptures serve as sublime geological self-portraits where the body merges with or becomes part of the landscape. Molds of the artist's body are cast using earth and rocks collected from Death Valley, blending volcanic stones, eroded sand, and borax crystals bonded with plastic. To create Double, Grinnan used an EEG device to conduct a sleep study, capturing eight hours of data, from which five seconds were selected to create a landscape based on the electrical patterns of her dreams. In doing so, she translates sleep data into physical form, exposing the tension between raw information and embodied thought. In both Gestures of a Landmass/Shrug and Mine, Grinnan employs borax crystals, for their ability to hold multiple memories and "re-remember" their form, thus forging a connection between the physical and the metaphysical realms.
Mother/Land presents an exploration of the complex relationship between the body, the land, and memory. Whether memorializing a distant homeland, challenging colonial narratives, or exploring spiritual connections, the works in this exhibition remind us of the land’s profound ability to shape and imprint our lives. In remembering the earth and its histories, these artists create a space where healing and resilience can be expressed through the preservation and transformation of the natural world.