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Sophie Haulman is a Brooklyn-based ceramicist and sculptor from Wilmington, North Carolina. She received her BFA (2019) from Virginia Commonwealth University’s department of Sculpture + Extended Media. While maintaining her practice, she is also a ceramics teacher and works in ceramic production and fabrication. Her evolving work explores the sensuality of space, the body and the unknown through material-based experimentation, contemplation on process, investigation of tactile form, and a constant surrender to fate.
“every month grass came” is a contemplation on mortality and the temporary nature of all that we possess – our bodies, relationships, experiences, memories, desires. As beings of the natural world, we evolve, erode, disintegrate; how do we construct a coherent sense of identity from an existence that is ever-changing?
These ceramic works question and explore these themes of impermanence, loss, and the unknown through a material which has the capacity to long outlast our own bodies while bearing moments of our time within it. Its physical fragility but potential for permanence challenges the transitory nature of self. Sophie Haulman reflects on the idea of resiliency as crucial to surviving one’s evolution.
Haulman’s work is just as much about the labor and fate of process as it is about the result, considering “process” as both an action and a passage of time. Each piece was handbuilt with slow, methodical, repetitive movements encapsulated within the material body, resulting in forms that question themselves and occlude the transformations of their identities.
The title and show are dedicated to Steffan Elijah Haulman, the artist’s deceased brother. His photo, seen daily on the side of her refrigerator, is held up by four contemplative word magnets that have become a kind of mantra: every | month | grass | came.
