Jae Ford

Lives and works in Falls Village, CT

Artist statement

My work explores the relationship between bodies, materials, and meaning as they unfold through space. Working across painting, drawing, and sculpture, I investigate the expressive potential of line and color to articulate the embodied, psychological, and emotional dimensions of experience. Using steel, resin, and paint, I create forms that function as gestures: three-dimensional drawings that bend, twist, and extend in response to the viewer’s presence. Through intuitive play and sustained physical labor, I explore how attention, desire, and emotion can be experienced through form, and how movement and perception continually shape one another. I understand orientation as both a physical and existential act: a process of positioning oneself in relation to others, to history, and to the surrounding world. My sculptures stage these moments of encounter, where the viewer’s body and the work share a field of awareness. In bending and contouring metal, I explore the boundaries of what is structurally and metaphorically unyielding, situating transformation as a site of productive tension. By reapproaching the visual language of minimalism, I aim to introduce sensitivity and vulnerability into a tradition once defined by restraint and control. Formally, my practice engages the legacies of minimalism, reinterpreting its rigor through the sensuous and relational dynamics of embodied experience. Through color and surface, I construct relationships of absorption and reflection that...

Artwork