SMFA BFA Capstone

Elliot Turner - My work explores the intersection of disability studies and social justice through the lens of family origin and remembrance. Working in hand-built ceramics and through glaze chemistry, I have created two fountains, one representing the future and ourselves and the other representing the destruction of one’s past. Across these sculptural pieces, I use the form and function of a fountain to question what protest can look like when traditional modes of resistance are inaccessible. Flowing water becomes both a metaphor for persistence and interruption mirroring the experience of navigating identity through the current climate in the United States. Influenced by Sick Woman Theory, I consider how people that cannot participate in conventional protest are often excluded from dominant able-bodied ideas of traditional protest. This work responds to Johanna Hedva’s question: How can you throw a brick through the window of a bank if you can’t get out of bed?. In response, I use remembrance as an act of defiance. I invite viewers to add to the piece by writing down a small detail of their family history and adding it to the piece, to pollute the fountain with remembering where we come from and to insist on carrying that history forward to resist erasure in a society that often devalues anything but sanitized American culture. The two pieces embody both the destruction and reconstruction of identity. Materials and textures suggesting erosion, and fragmentation, while color and form point toward regrowth and transformation. This tension reflects the ongoing process of identity- making shaped by both personal and collective histories. In this work, protest is quiet but insistent. It lives in the act of continuing and remembering. By putting these ideas within sculpture, I aim to create a space where vulnerability and resistance coexist where decay is not an end, but part of an ongoing cycle of regrowth. Photos by Chris Diani for Tufts University @chrisdiani