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NORMAN, Oklahoma — Raven Halfmoon’s (Caddo Nation) stoneware sculptures embrace the monumental. The artist, whose first main solo exhibition, Raven Halfmoon: Flags of Our Moms, opened on June 25 at The Aldrich Up to date in Connecticut, situates her work throughout the canon of Caddo tradition and manufacturing, whereas coming into right into a dialogue with each intimate and broad themes.
Halfmoon grew up in Norman, Oklahoma, the place she at the moment lives and works. “I all the time was a painter and I beloved to attract in my youth once I was in highschool,” she instructed me in dialog at her studio. It was throughout her adolescence that she encountered clay as a medium. “My first contact of clay was with a Caddo elder named Jeri Redcorn,” she mentioned. “This was my first time truly dealing with clay and making conventional pots and studying the fabric.” As soon as Halfmoon enrolled as an undergraduate on the College of Arkansas, she started to take lessons and totally immerse herself within the medium to construct a robust technical basis: “It was then that I discovered what clay can do.” In tandem together with her research and artwork apply on the college, she started to deal with her personal historical past, heritage, and id as a Caddo individual, aspiring not solely to know that historical past, however to precise it by way of artwork, in the end incomes a BA in cultural anthropology alongside her nice arts diploma.
Halfmoon’s work, the methods during which she permits portray and ceramics to intersect and work together with each other turns into obvious. The artist treats the stoneware kind nearly like a canvas, splashing and drenching it with glaze that oozes down the perimeters, typically with textual content included; phrases stretch and drip throughout the dimpled clay facades. Her identify is scrawled throughout a number of works in vivid purple, black, or white. By writing her identify and phrases similar to “you don’t look Native” or “do you converse Indian,” she is just not merely tagging the work however transmitting a message of presence to the viewer — that of her ancestors, her group, and herself.
Additionally current within the work is the artist’s hand: her fingers make seen impressions within the clay. Sculpting voluptuous figures with richly dynamic surfaces creates a shared humanity between the paintings, the artist, and the viewer. “Clay generally is so manipulative and there’s such a physicality to it,” she shared. “I construct issues up and I add clay and smash it and swipe my fingers throughout after which I’m taking clay again out. I’m including and subtracting; it’s simply such a particular materials to me.” Although Halfmoon explores different mediums, together with a current curiosity in bronze and a return to portray, clay will all the time be on the core of her apply. “I’ll all the time work in clay,” she expressed. “My ancestors and my tribe have had such an intimate relationship with clay, and clay is tied to the land, and that’s so vital the place we come from and that [connection] to land and what meaning.”
For her Connecticut present, co-organized between The Aldrich and the Bemis Middle for Up to date Arts in Omaha, Halfmoon shows preexisting items alongside bold new works that stretch the bounds of clay. The present encompasses themes of energy and Indigenous id and perspective, and makes house for the tales of Indigenous girls. The title, Flags of Our Moms, has a specific resonance with the artist, one which she hopes is mirrored to the viewer. “I think about them [my works] as flags due to their dimension,” she famous. “But additionally, I learn Flags of Our Fathers in highschool and it’s about this combat for our nation … however Flags of Our Moms, for me, is [a reference to] my very own expertise and what my mom has taught me, our combat for our girls, our story, my story, my tribe’s story, and so I really feel the items are paving away for this new nation of those monumental girls who demand to be heard.”
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