Bianca MacPherson

Artist Statement

Existing between worlds requires navigating the projections of others while simultaneously constructing one’s own reality. As a mixed-race Black woman, I inhabit a liminal space, negotiating the tension between presence and erasure, legibility and distortion. This state of in-betweenness is both an existential condition and the conceptual foundation of my work. In a world resistant to the complexities of identity, clay becomes a site of refusal, fluid yet resolute, defying rigid classification. My coiling process is both meditative and declarative, a rhythm of making that asserts agency through accumulation. The resulting forms function as psychological thresholds, unsettling perception and inviting a deeper interrogation of what is seen versus what is assumed.

My work engages with personal and collective histories, confronting racial hierarchies and the imposed constraints of identity. My ceramic forms hover at the edge of legibility, oscillating between presence and absence, intention and ambiguity. The deliberate removal of my hand gestures toward the historical erasure of mixed-race bodies. Yet what remains is not absence but a subtle imprint, a material trace that lingers in space, demanding recognition through its refusal to disappear.

I work in black and white, with gradients in between. This seemingly reductive palette mirrors the societal binaries projected onto me. Yet within these formal constraints, contradiction emerges. The starkness of the palette destabilizes perception, inverting the gaze back onto the viewer and implicating them in the act of interpretation. This interplay of simplicity and complexity mirrors the paradox of identity itself, a construct both fixed and mutable, imposed yet self-determined.

Radical acceptance through radical clarity. Complex form, firm foundation, rippling surface. These contrasts do not resolve but coalesce, reinforcing and destabilizing in equal measure. Like the body’s capacity to absorb and withstand, my work embodies endurance. Each misreading layers upon the last, fortifying the form in its persistence. The work does not simply occupy space; it shapes and reverberates through it, existing beyond the moment of encounter.

What if we relinquished the need for fixed meaning and instead embraced perpetual redefinition? In a world where interpretation is always in flux, I extend an invitation to enter the work, to inhabit its ambiguity, and to confront the discomfort of not knowing. The work belongs as much to the viewer as it does to me, existing in the interstitial space of perception. Through this engagement, transformation occurs, not as a finite resolution but as an ongoing process of becoming.