Between Washing and Unwithering: Nicki Green

Nicki Green is a transdisciplinary artist working primarily in clay who is originally from Massachusetts, and now lives and works in California. Her work carves out spaces for LGBTQ+ people and reimagines a world that centers their life experiences. Informed by her Jewish faith, her work explores practices and mythologies steeped in an inclusivity that is often not seen in more traditional settings. For Green, clay is the perfect medium for its malleability and transmutational qualities - a metaphor for her life journey and a statement of her resiliency. This exhibition provides a survey of her major bodies of work - Morel Figures, Bricks and her latest series, Pillar of Earth.  

A reading of her art practice is put in context within the canon of art history by art historian, writer and University of California Santa Barbara Associate Professor, Jenni Sorkin. In her essay, created specially for the exhibition, she has laid out thoughtfully Green’s inspirations, experiences, ideas and theories as follows:

“Metamorphosis and Jewish identity are the primary drivers of Green’s content. Clay is key to rendering the body metaphorically, but also creates a morphology of form itself, that, is revising and re-shaping form. To this end, Green reworks ritual objects, inventing them anew, for an expanded, multigenerational, non-binary audience that might partake of them, or find meaning in the sanctity of inclusion itself. Not exclusive to Judaism, religious traditions worldwide enforce traditional male-female gender binaries, which become a barrier to non-binary participation, access, and belonging. Green’s significant and original work functions as a series of challenges to traditions and conventions in three simultaneous arenas: the social rigidity of gender presentation, Judaism, and functional ceramics. Transformation is the subtext of Green’s work, in particular, her use of form itself as a material means of enabling a poetic response to the transgendered body.”