Charles Snowden

Lives and works in Los Angeles, CA, USA

Artist statement

My work draws from ancient symbolism and apotropaic rituals, exploring the transformative qualities of animals, plants, and minerals. With familial roots spanning Mexico and Western Europe, I engage with the overlapping cultural, material, and spiritual meanings attributed to ceramic objects and materials. Anthropomorphism in my work engages with Donna Haraway’s concept of “significant otherness,” revealing and playing with the humanoid qualities of the natural world and inanimate objects. Through this lens, I approach ceramics as living forms that carry history, culture, memory, and spiritual significance that extend beyond their utility. I use the hand as a similar object that holds stories of labor, love, time, and the transmutation of non-living materials. Storytelling, slowness, tenderness, and care guide my practice as forms of resistance to increasingly alienating and linear ideas of progress. By examining our material relationship with clay, I reflect on our connections to the natural world and call into question what we consider “non-living.” I ask how we might develop new ways of relating, belonging, and imagining the other.

Artwork