Art is not what you see, but what you make others see.

   M is a Twin Cities artist who creates ceramic and oil painted works. Her pieces use the human body and color to analyze the issues of our world today, harnessing those themes to connect viewers to themselves and others. Her work has been displayed in the Through a Different Lens exhibition at Inver Hills Community College, as well as various coffee shops around the Twin Cities Area.This education has been partially funded through scholarships she’s earned, such as the Coca Cola Leaders of Promise scholarship and Kopp Family Foundation scholarship.  M will graduate with a BFA at the University of Minnesota in May of 2027. She plans on using this degree to further her education in order to get a job helping underprivileged communities through the arts. M is currently working on a series of 3D paintings utilizing clay to demonstrate how different mental struggles manifest physically. 

        My work is surrealist in nature, and focuses on how touch and sight relate. These pieces often contain the human body, but never the whole form. It is fragmented into hands, eyes, heads, and torsos, painted unusual colors to evoke feelings of joy, sadness, and love. In works like “You Say You Love Me,” red is used to explore the idea of domestic violence through the eyes of a victim, to visualize how the color can symbolize both love and hatred. I made the hands on the side raised to contrast with the two-dimensional prints on the female figure. The idea that the hands creeping in are something physical, while the hands that seemingly caused damage are just prints left on the human form, is intriguing. This play on the senses, and the energy different materials (such as paint, clay, and yarn) hold, are something I explore in all of my works. 

        More often than not, I find myself using more than a single canvas to contain the emotional energy of a painting. I believe emotion and energy are intertwined and that the energy I use while making transfers to the materials. This is why clay is often a material I turn to when looking to add something three-dimensional to a painting. The time I spend manipulating the clay makes the energy palpable to the viewer in the final piece, more so than brush strokes ever would. However, paint still has its value, as the colors carrying their own energy, and it creates a beautiful balance of the immediate and distant senses that cannot be reached with ceramic alone. This complex experience that mixing materials creates is something that I never found when switching between singular mediums. While I have felt myself drifting away from painting towards ceramics, as I value the energy clay brings, I am excited to explore this combining of mediums in the future. 

–M