ARTIST STATEMENT
I utilize obsessive texture and organic imagery to examine our shared struggle to find meaning and our desire for a place to belong while we’re here. The tedious work of sculpting every hair on a rabbit’s head becomes a ritual, validating the smallest actions with the impact of the aggregate whole. I gather the resultant marks of multitudinous and inconsequential actions as validation that the constant, minute, and invisible labor required to build personhood will accumulate into something worthwhile. In addition to the ritual of texture, I work figuratively to examine my yearning to feel understood and loved as a multi-racial queer person in the U.S. Employing imagery of plants, people, and animals, I build objects that personify the dissonance, grief, and precarity of simultaneously descending from many countries and many people but having nowhere to belong. With my inquiry into my personal narrative, I help elucidate the complexity of intersectional identity and strive to build a community we can call home.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Kirin Kane is an artist using ceramics, metal, and printmaking to explore mundanity and its meaning through the lens of multiracial queerness. After earning a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Ceramics from Northern Illinois University, they set down roots in Chicago, IL where they currently reside. Kirin enjoys exhibiting with galleries, craft centers, and community spaces as well as creating opportunities for others to do so through community curation projects. Teaching is an integral part of their practice and they take pride in fostering community wherever they are. Kirin has taught or demonstrated at a variety of institutions, including The Digs, Chicago Public Libraries, and Moraine Valley Community College. In their current position as the Director of Ceramics Programming at Lillstreet Art Center in Chicago, they enjoy cultivating a place for all artists to flourish.
© Kirin Kane