Kylie Lockwood

Kylie Lockwood (b.1983 Detroit, MI) is an interdisciplinary artist whose work reconciles the experience of living in a female body with the Western History of Sculpture. She received a BFA from the College for Creative Studies, MFA from Hunter College, and attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. Lockwood recently completed a permanent public sculpture at the University of Oregon. She is represented by Matéria Gallery and her work has been exhibited at PS1 MOMA, Long Island City; Cranbrook Art Museum, Bloomfield Hills; Cleopatra’s, Brooklyn; Lord Ludd, Philadelphia, among others. Kylie Lockwood lives and works in Hamtramck, MI.

ARTIST STATEMENT:

The making of an artwork is a performance; a way of testing the limitations of my body. My work is a confrontation of a real, aging, fallible body attempting to interrogate a foundational aspect of Western art history. Engaging in an art historical tradition, I reexamine the past to contextualize my contemporary concerns. This critical investigation focuses on themes of personal history, loss, embodiment, and expanding the sculptural vocabulary of the cannon from a feminist and performative lens.

Porcelain is one of my primary mediums, the material language of doll-making I inherited from my grandmother. To work with porcelain, one must first make a mold. Through the process of directly pulling plaster molds off my skin, I am also making a fossil. The molds capture the performance of that moment; the trace of a living thing engaging in restriction and endurance. My sculptures offer an opportunity at permanence, yet the fate of sculpture is ultimately to break. To break is the point. To empathize with the ancient is to identify with the fragment; to feel the pressure of entropy through an abbreviated form in which time has chipped away.