Yve Holtzclaw - They/Them

“Drawing is the root of my practice and maintaining the spacial distortion of a drawn image is central to my work and the surreal landscape I am exploring. My ceramic surfaces have been fired repeatedly, often appearing cracked, textured, and bubbling like old paint, wallpaper, and broken sidewalks - evoking and capturing the geology of everyday life.

The desire to control the “wild” is captivating to me, and I imagine a world acting out cycles of conflict, ego, and miscommunication. Amidst world conflict and climate crisis, I see the performance of action as an intriguing and damaging element of American culture. Are they playing, or are they fighting? If so, who wins if nothing changes at all?”

Drawing on early experiences of urban crawl in the metro-Atlanta area and flooding while living on the Chattahoochee river, Yve’s work focuses on the intersecting forces of wild and domestic through interdisciplinary installations of anthropomorphized climate, animals, and architecture. Interested in giving a face to forces and creatures who blend into our urbanized landscape, their work explores the inescapable enmeshment and interaction of the built and grown environment through portraits constructed from materials which span ceramic, fiber, metal, wood and paint.

Yve Holtzclaw (they/them) is a genderqueer artist and educator from Atlanta, Georgia. Since graduating from Massachusetts College of Art and Design with their BFA in ceramics and art history in 2020, they have been awarded the Donis. A. Dondis travel grant and completed a residency in ceramics at the Kalamazoo Institute of Art . They have shown and organized exhibitions locally and nationally, including a solo exhibition at the Dittmer Gallery at Northwestern. They have presented at NCECA, the Indiana Clay Conference, and University of Wisconsin, Green Bay. Yve currently resides in Missoula, Montana where they are a resident artist at the Clay Studio of Missoula.