Proof of Life
It's been my experience that in order to create art that delivers, I must give myself permission to be a conduit for my internal life. By "art that delivers", I mean art that takes something from the movement behind my skin and brings it into physical form. Thus delivering me from the intangible to the tangible, from vague to concrete, from fleeting to solid. When beginning this project, my intention was one of non-intention, simply put, I wanted to find the place inside of me where I could create purposefully but with no direct purpose. To stand in front of a chosen medium and allow it to deliver some part of me into the tactile world. In this way, I wanted the materials to be a vessel- as the boundaries imposed by the physical world would force certain rules of physics, gravity, color, and form into whatever I made- and to translate in one way or another the things I could never translate into words. So often we lose track of the nature behind creation– desire to express– and fall into cycles of expectation and self-consciousness. This project was a challenge to myself to resist those boundaries, hold aestheticism as an afterthought, and submit to intuition.
With clay, I built tall vessels and then squeezed, bent, cut, scraped, and twisted until I had created vaguely figurative forms that held tension and upward momentum. In the process of making them I entered a dialogue with the clay, an intimate space of pushing and pulling. Each of these pieces were created standing up, with abrupt movements and ritualistic care. I filled them with wax and lit them on fire because they needed to create their own source of light, rather than be lit by an external one. This series is titled The Body in Perpetuity. The three horizontal pieces of wood covered in wood stain, ink, oil pastel, and wax were created on the floor with painting, slow melting, and violent scraping. The process for these was hot, sharp, engaged my entire body, and brought me to a space of long gestural liberation. These pieces are not "things" but spaces, and thus felt naturally like spaces my sculptures could reside within. The series is titled Deep Space. Finally came my vertical wood drawings, which are the most 2d of the three series and were all done on the floor as well. For each one I knelt on the plank and brought my face down close to the surface of it, where I used ink and oil pastel to create gestural shapes and lines, alternating between quick scribbles and slow spreading of color. They became figurative, but remained abstract and complex. It took a lot of effort to find the space which brought me these works, but it was effortless once I was in it. I left them on raw wood with no finishing, to emphasize their existence as chunks of life rather than as precious items. These pieces are titled Gestures of Intimacy.
I hope that viewers of this body of work take from it what is necessary for them each individually - it's not for me to say what that should be. There are no guidelines for consuming this work, because there were no guidelines in my creating it. I only ask that you consider how you might find a space in your own life where constraint splits open and in its belly you find that the only important things are momentum, release, instinct.
Livia Karlstrom ‘25 (graduated in Dec. 2024)
Advisor: Daren Kendall
All images copyright © 2025 Livia Karlstrom. All rights reserved.
