Forrest Wallace

Artist Statement

My work is an interdisciplinary sculptural experience at heart. Spanning from wood processes, metalwork, fibre crafts, and mixed media; viewers become immersed in introspection, urgent-yet-tasteful calls to action, and what I call “visual empathy”.
Most often, the themes I am searching through in my practice are based in queerness, mental and emotional health, and the mundane.
As a queer person, my existence is often at stake due to an unkempt breeding of ignorance. I have created bodies of work demonstrating the nuances in lived experience rather than falsified perception, speaking to medical and social transition, my relationship with my body, and the effect of oppressive systems that limit expression on a gratuitous scale.
Throughout childhood, I experienced many traumas and developed C-PTSD as a result. As an adult, I discovered that I am autistic, and with that knowledge (and the guidance of therapy) unraveled years of dissociation, dysregulation, and dysfunction. The subject of ‘mental health’ is far too vast and vague to encapsulate the ways I reference my experiences and advocate for other neurodivergent and disabled folks, so I prefer to discuss individual pieces by concept.
It is between the psychological and mundane aspects that “visual empathy” comes into play. Because of their initial visual qualities and conceptual understanding, many of my pieces and installations evoke empathetic responses as if personified. I infuse a piece or show with the potency of my own emotion with the hope that the viewer goes forward feeling, in some capacity, connected to what they experienced.
All of these influences in my work come together in my third focus, the ‘mundane.’ I exhilirate day-by-day intricacies of individual and collective experience. By sharing the instinctual, unconscious habits of my and others' lives, I hope to instill unification and communal understanding where it is unexpected.