ABIGALE BRADING

My ceramic sculptures challenge beliefs that restrict social progress and personal growth. Each convey free thinking and bring awareness to gender, religious, and inherited inequalities within social structures. I create narrative scenes to provide insight into struggles seen through a humanist lens, and I tap into the notion of empathy that is understood at its peak when shown and experienced through the modeling of behaviors and detailed visual components. Through the malleable nature of clay, I link symbolic architectural structures and anthropomorphic figures together to portray a sense of burden and weight that is tied to individual experiences with indoctrinated principles. I create a visual discord of opposing surface treatments and forms to accentuate a lack of harmony between structures and figures. They serve to document and expose the inner anguish that manifests when one tries to move beyond cultural encoding. They also celebrate and uplift the transformation that happens when balance and an elevated state of existence is achieved. My work invites the viewer to look for the human connections behind each cause and its effect.

 

The focus of each theme revolves around a non-typical female form. Her albino doe-like features are an allegory veiled in philosophies of transcendence, wholeness, and compassion. Her development alludes to a boundless being who has achieved a higher state of existence that is raw and unapologetic. The nature of the architectural elements speaks about control, confinement, personal burdens, systems of power, and dogma. At the backbone of my artistic practice is the desire to remind that we should strive to live in a pluralistic society; where people are free to hold various beliefs but are tolerant of other's philosophies, even when they are diametrically different than our own.