ARTIST STATEMENT

In my creative practice, I adhere to a nonphilosophy of play, an experiment of self-making that invites intimacy through immersive states where the self may dissolve. Inspired by my experience in a trans body, I use my body as conduit across media, developing new intimacies with ideas through shifting formal constraints.

This method moves between constraint (boundaries and guidelines) and moments of release towards liberation. In repetition and variation, I discover meaning emerging from transformation—with what remnants we have, through intention and intimacy, infinite ways of being are possible. My approach to transdisciplinary practice uses slippage and illegibility to generate meaning where our expectations for how things behave may mislead us. My projects contain many iterations, including video, performance and poetry, that culminate as bodies of work. Because form--like a body--has its own expectations and constraints, I search for the edge of limitation and break things open to redefine what’s possible. Play, defined by nonutility, requires uncertainty and in not knowing what’s next, the emergent becoming of self, practice, and interaction shocks us into transformation.

SHORT BIO

Intermedia artist and poet, e clayton scofield (they/them) creates multimedia work that threads together poetic narrative, performance and moving image. Emphasizing the repurposing of material across projects, clay develops an intimacy with objects as they accumulate meaning over time. Slippage and illegibility function in their work to allow forms their own becoming. A word repeated across contexts can become malleable material accumulating various meanings. Trash accumulated over time can be repurposed into a sculptural landscape that is transformed through the camera lens.  Their current work, A Nature Documentary: Elements of Decomposition plays with transformations through redefinition of language: elements of composition are reinvented through slippage and sculptural activation as methods of meaning-making through accumulation and decay. This multimedia artwork activates the text from their manuscript ABOUTNESS. Transforming trash into sculptural objects, they capture these objects in video that skews context, perspective, and scale so that the viewer questions where and what they are seeing, highlighting the ever-shifting in-betweenness of the objects-as-landscapes. In these landscapes, we can linger in the in-betweenness, in which everything-becomes-everything. 

clay’s work has been featured in publications including Number, Wussy, and Dinner Bell. They have performed and exhibited nationally and been an artist-in-residence with Cucalorus, the School of Making Thinking, Lazuli, and the JHU-MICA Film Centre. They hold MFAs in digital art (Indiana University, Bloomington) and poetry (the Iowa Writers’ Workshop) and a BA from Vanderbilt University. They are on the board of directors of The School of Making Thinking and are currently Visiting Assistant Professor at Indiana University in digital art. They are co-facilitater and co-creator of the Deep Play Artist Residency with Thea Fitz-James and the deep play dark play performance salon in Bloomington with Johanna Winters and Megan Young. They facilitate the ongoing collaborative new media writing experiment, The Daily Weather Report.

CONTACT

eclaytonscofield @ gmail.com