Chloe Dalton
Photo by Ivy Zip, 2023.
Chloe Dalton is a queer emerging artist with a focus on ceramic and mixed media sculpture based in Chicago. Through research and observational practices, Chloe experiments in representing the natural world through realistic and abstract sculpture. In their exploration of material and subject matter, they seek to translate the whimsy and spirit of the natural world.
Artist Statment
In my place of making, magic and fairies have always been real and I am privy to the conversation of the trees (they love the colors of the sky, the beauty of the wind, your face in the sunlight). I follow deer tracks as a permeable membrane, absorbing the sweet decay of the detritus and the rhythm of black veined butterflies; I am listening to the poetry of birdsong and whispering my secrets to twisting, curling limbs; I am collecting stones from ancient rivers and molding clay into rabbits.
My approach to creating and walking in the woods are the same: to become lost. I work with clay for its innate wild nature. I am drawn to the malleability, the permeability, the ubiquity of clay; its demand for attention and generous response to my call. My practice is in constant pursuit of listening; as I leave impressions in the clay, what does the clay impress upon me in return? Through a scientific and poetetic framework, I am creating a vocabulary for nature and my place amongst the wild things. I interpret scientific research into poetry then to sculpture. Developing a 3D form from text allows a comfortable degree of intuition to drive my making process and I take care to follow where the clay takes me. My work is often iterative, using the language of texture and surfacing to create a strange yet familar landscape.
We were standing on a bridge in the forest
Standing on a bridge
(ARTIFICE) trees stripped and bared, laid out beneath our feet
We were standing on a bridge watching the leaves dancing in the doorway between
Heaven and Earth
We were talking about magic
How the air was rich and HEAVY with it
how it tasted of metal and mold
A crisp rot and decay because it wasn’t summer anymore
The cicadas drone the leaves shuffle the trees groan
“I didn’t know the forest was this loud.”
“I wish I knew what they were saying.”
“The trees?”
“Yes, the trees.”
In that moment I began to
Listen
Listen
Listen.
The air cooled, and the breeze turned to gusts, and we both began to walk
(a little faster, a little faster),
a strident awareness of our place in the world: two sisters in a vast and startling forest, the comfort of solitude now wilderness biting at our ankles. Our arms were linked, our strides (yours slightly shorter than mine) keeping pace when we heard the sirens, the smack and scrape of the wind in the canopy above. Perhaps it was hubris to think the trees were warning us of danger; perhaps it was a confirmation that the eyes we felt pressing into our skin were indeed there.
Then the deathrattle of a giant silencing the birds, the grind of rusty scissors against silver thread, the scrape of metal on glass.
when a tree falls in the forest, but no one is around to hear it, does it make a