1ST ED. 2023
Lucy R. Lippard
In this book, Lucy Lippard looks back at 60s–70s U.S. land art and reconsiders some of her critical takes from that era. I admire her for publicly revising her ideas more than 40 years later, as well as her commitment to her own local art world in New Mexico, where she lives. I wish more canonized art writers would revise/correct/amend their writing as part of a public practice! Lippard is far from perfect, but it seems like she’s trying to own that.
Ceramic Houses & Earth Architecture: How to Build Your Own
Nader Khalili
Khalili’s interests and experiments have been enormously influential on my practice and its connections between ceramics and soil. As a visionary architect, he merged material exploration with careful attention to how different kinds of people actually live in the world. There’s a section in this book called How to Fire a Room!
Horizontalism: Voices of Popular Power in Argentina
edited by Marina Sitrin
I learned about horizontalism during the Occupy movement in 2011–2012 and immediately recognized in it aspects of the work of Brazilian artists Lygia Clark and Lygia Pape. The different voices edited together in this book have helped me envision alternate ways of living life, of coming together with others, and of supporting all life that is really different to how I grew up. I currently manage a ceramics facility as part of my academic job, and culturing the studio so it is a place where people can be sideways and sensitive (a beautiful phrase from Julius Eastman) is a big part of my job.
The Psychoanalysis of Fire
Gaston Bachelard
Better known in the art world for his book The Poetics of Space, in this volume, Bachelard ruminates on fire and all its metaphoric richness. In my work, I am interested both in harnessing fire and in how objects and ideas get buried and excavated. The psychoanalytic world view is a fascinating one for me—at the very least it highlights how it is not just our brains holding memories and emotions, but our bodies, and every vessel overflows eventually! How do we attend to the leaks and escaping steam? This is a crucial question.