Sorrel Stone

Artist Statement

My ceramic sculptures of transgender, feminine, and immigrant bodies resist the impulse
to categorize. They embrace ambiguity and invite nuance over prescription, mourning over
monumentality, and care over classification. Our modern identities function through delocality,
requiring one to choose from options that reflect only the colonist himself. Drawing on Veronica
Gago’s insights in Feminist International, these artworks examine patriarchal connections
between power, territory, and bodies. Considering the body as a territory, I critique our dominant
American value systems and the narratives perpetuated by traditional portraiture.

The figure becomes a ground, and thus, a site to gather the broader narratives of cultural
erasure and identity loss in America today. Immigrant and marginalized communities are not
only disenfranchised but also systematically erased from public consciousness. Carrying the
lived identities of being transgender and an undocumented family in the United States, my work
foregrounds the emotional, political, and spiritual dimensions of making a home within political
precarity. Clay holds its ancestral roots in contested lands and bears the lamination of identities
led by colonial expansion. The gestural nature of my sculpting process entangles with the
concept of erasure, holding liminal space between the human body and clay as a body of land.
Each sculpture becomes a narrative of survival—of how families endure within systems designed
to fracture and erase them.

Elements derived from historical craft practices traditionally labeled as “women’s work”
are frequently woven through these sculptures. By integrating decorative and domestic
handicrafts, such as quilting, cross-stitching, crochet, and weaving, into these works, I
deliberately introduce craft languages and legacies into the patriarchal realm of the gallery space.
Through these practices steeped in American history, the sculptures become vessels of memory,
survival, and protest.

How do we create modern accountability for our histories? What does it look like to
critique these histories? In my practice, I search for how we repair our col