ARTIST STATEMENT
Dalton is a poet and activist working in sculpture, video, and performance, creating sensual environments that use affect and pleasure inviting viewers into an immersive and visceral experience. The body is a medium and methodology in her practice. They engage and explore its capacities through the lens of queer aesthetics. Dalton’s work contemplates the relationships and symbiosis of bodies within human and other-than-human worlds, incorporating collaboration and research while drawing on the intersections of queer theory, gender politics and environmental humanities. Dalton’s practice situates the poetics of materiality within the expanded field of sex ecologies.
Their work investigates the policies and power dynamics that impact autonomy, consent, and bodily form. Body # 9 explores the intersections of gender, body politics, and the poetics of materiality within the expanded field of Sex Ecologies. With roots in the Mono-Ha movement where a response to materiality is shared. This body of work unravels and shares a culmination of four years of research, collaborations, interactions, and experiments. Woven between each one of these, is friendship, deep and fertile. It explores the enduring nature of plastics. Examining broken boundaries, and our understanding(s) of place, land, border(s) and body(s). Connecting how policy intrudes injustices on the body’s right to consenting entry, extraction, and control. The Tennessee River where I live and where this project began, was ranked as one of the most plastic-polluted rivers in the world. Dumping 32 million microplastic particles into the Ohio River every second.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Leah Dalton is a poet and activist working in sculpture, video, and performance, creating sensual environments that use affect and pleasure to invite viewers into immersive and visceral experiences. The body serves as both medium and methodology in her practice, engaging and exploring its capacities through the lens of queer aesthetics. Dalton’s work contemplates the relationships and symbiosis of bodies within human and other-than-human worlds, incorporating collaboration and research while drawing on intersections of queer theory, gender politics, and environmental humanities. Her practice situates the poetics of materiality within the expanded field of sex ecologies, investigating the policies and power dynamics that impact autonomy, consent, and bodily form.
Dalton holds an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She serves on the board of Sculpture Fields at Montague Park in Chattanooga, Tennessee, which houses John Henry’s collection alongside internationally acclaimed sculptures. Additionally, she is a board member of Women Eco Artists Dialog in Oakland, California. Dalton has exhibited and curated works within the Tennessee Triennial, across the Midwest and Southeast, and internationally, with exhibitions in Oaxaca, Mexico, India, and at the Hunter Museum of American Art in Chattanooga, Tennessee.
© Leah Dalton