Collection: Jeannie Pappas
My work reflects the condition of uprootedness and estrangement. It probes the search for meaning and identity within the shadows of the strange and bounded by disruptive narratives of normalcy and belonging. It explores the left-behind refugees, rejects, and delinquents who are drawn to the very norms that have cast them out, characters who reside within a homeless space between past and future, self-possession and alienation, assimilation and native fealty. Working with porcelain clay with light washes of underglaze; my figures suggest narratives of tension: between body and mind, play and drudgery, the grotesque and the beautiful. Both individual and archetypal, these figures repel and attract, giving grace to the human made monstrous by conventions that shun in order to preserve the purity of their systems. In each I invite viewers to write their own stories, to reflect on their masks and their own Janus-faced identities.