Genevra Daley

Lives and works in Davis, CA, USA

Artist statement

My work revolves around my tacit understanding of material and the tactile memories that daily interactions with fabric and clay evoke. I have punched, squeezed, torn, and coaxed materials again and again until my body understood them, until patterns emerged that meant something, until the work mirrored my relationship to my body and eventually engulfed my frame. A single work exhibited and experienced physically has become impossible with the rise of COVID-19. I have developed my new work to address our current conditions of the mediated exhibition and experience of artwork. Stand of Four are one evolutionary cycle of sculpture that no longer exist as you see them in these photos. In the last few months I started creating modular sculptural elements that can be formed and reformed to create new sculptures. As I documented each new assemblage I began to think of the pieces as exhibiting the same transformational qualities of a body. The sculpture, like a body, exists as it does in any one moment only because of the constant renewing of its constituent parts. From the sloughing walls of reproductive organs, to the growing limb of a baby in the womb, our bodies renew and create from the biological blueprints of our DNA. My developing visual vocabulary acts as my sculpture's DNA. Each new sculpture evolves in form while carrying with it the homologous traits of previous pieces. With the idea of the Argonaut in mind, the ship that reached its destination with its name being...

Artwork