Cameron Patricia Downey

Lives and works in Minneapolis, MN

Artist statement

I am an antidisciplinary artist born and raised in Minneapolis, Mni Sóta Makoce who has spent my life indebted to objects that have lived past lives. I’m the artist that I am today only because I’ve been loved on, cleaned and sat quiet in the presence of storied-women in storied-places. Their living rooms, boiler rooms, hand-built churches and funeral parlours color my affinity to form. I’ve long found myself listening to, empathizing with the incidental things, spaces called intimate; tables, corners, chairs and dusts. The kind of sensuality writers like Morrison and Lorde name power. I work with Black material culture, carrying a commitment to extending and exploring the lives of this matter, in new space with new functions. Across sculpture, memory, monument, and body, I see instruction in the discarded. Through crafting, gathering and recrafting, I strive to unfurl, make-altar-of and lend fantasy to the Blues of Black life and relation. For form is not just a record keeper, but a philosophy of feeling. A way forward. In this practice of mine, it’s paramount that materials speak to and for themselves. Through making I honor the desires of the mundane things that animate our lives and living as much as we do theirs’. My studio bears my religious gathering of the used and misremembered: Walls, quilts and prosthetics. Sometimes a seat begs a folding and a split– new joints, careful and adorned like beaded braids– in new places; a limousine might want for a booming head...

Artwork