Refusing teleological functional narratives which flatten beings into productive data points, Clay’s futurity-oriented work is rooted in environmental caretaking and cultivation. His work considers the disruption of capitalist modes of relation which view human and morethanhuman intimacies as property, and a site for extraction and militarization. His installations and objects articulate an emergence of shared conditions. Particularly, of debilitating contamination, the suppression of joy, and complicity of harm across human and nonhuman environments. Sacred and profane forms hold many valences and views extending function beyond form. A return to objects’ intertwined materialities— against a romanticized dichotomy of constructed and the natural. Every new thing is also extracted and ancient; multifarious, reconstituted, historical, and mysterious; something fossilized, refined and processed; mineral pigment mixed and fixed with polymers.
Think of a warm flickering, orange light, dim enough to catch the soft fuzz accumulating on my chin and lip. Low light illuminating a silver dewdrop glinting from your earlobe. Dark enough that our eyes slowly adjust and the shadows register a texture of neither here nor there. Looking for words to describe semidarkness, the thesaurus offers a froth of descriptors with negative valences that tragically fail to convey how it feels to be enveloped in a glow achieved by looking through my own closed eyelids. Maybe it is like before being born? A state of potential. A movement toward more or less light. Away from a describable, identifiable category which will demarcate almost everything. A simulacrum which resists being shrugged off like a coat that is too tight in the arms.