Sonya Clark

sonya clark | DOWNLOAD PDF

I investigate simple objects as cultural interfaces. Through them I navigate accord and discord. I am instinctively drawn to things that connect to my personal narrative as a point of a departure: a comb, a piece of cloth, or a strand of hair. I wonder how each comes to have meaning collectively. What is the history of the object? How does it function? Why is it made of a certain material? How did its form evolve? These questions and their answers direct the structure, scale, and material choices in my work.

Charged with agency, otherwise passive objects have the mysterious ability to reflect or absorb us. I find my image, my personal story, in an object. But it is also the object’s ability to act as a rhizome, the multiple ways in which it can be discovered or read, that draws me in. To sustain my practice, I milk the object and question the viewer about these collective meanings. My stories, your stories, our stories are held in the object. I work in series to reframe the object as a mediated compilation of our stories. In this way, the everyday “thing” becomes a lens through which we may better see one another.
—Sonya Clark