Artist Statement

Anna Wagner (she/they)

My work operates at the charged intersection of domestic memory, emotional labor, and inherited trauma, unfolding through a series of ceramic sculptures that blend humor, tenderness, and psychological tension. Rooted in my personal history but extending outward into shared cultural codes, each object I create is a fragment of a larger emotional ecosystem—a hybridized companion, a haunted heirloom, or a misunderstood relic. These forms are often enlarged, broken, or softened into irony, revealing the frictions between comfort and harm, caregiving and control, private grief and public performance.

Clay is an intimate material that can be both vulnerable and permanent, with deep ties to the home. I recreate mundane household objects that have absorbed unspoken narratives of gender identity, maternal relationships, neurodivergence, and self-protection. By exaggerating their scale, bending their form, or coupling them with text and wordplay, I reframe these artifacts as unstable symbols. They become both literal and metaphorical vessels—of shame, humor, love, violence, and longing.

Influenced by the aesthetics of 90s childhood media, religious iconography, and the cartoonish clarity of comic books, my sculptural environments invite viewers to engage in active interpretation. The works don’t offer catharsis—they metabolize discomfort. I’m especially drawn to the tensions embedded in objects that are both precious and absurd, feminine and grotesque, inviting and defensive. These contradictions reflect my own lived experiences as someone shaped by the silent codes of girlhood, neurodivergent stereotypes, and the emotional choreography of generational caretaking.

By assembling these sculptures into intimate, semi-domestic installations—often on thrifted shelves, faux dining tables, or low-to-the-floor arrangements—I aim to destabilize the gallery’s neutrality and ask: What does it mean to find safety in the very objects or environments that once made us feel unseen? Can we reclaim, reimagine, or even laugh at the things that hurt us? This work is an ongoing act of translation—of memory into form, of silence into texture, of private feeling into public gesture.