Bread Virgins

Kate Clark

Regardless of our stations, we all participate in certain life rhythms. We mark these moments by developing and reperforming signifying customs, narratives, and objects. Whether they are funeral wakes, historic re-enactments, or wedding celebrations, I explore and deconstruct the roots of these acts and how they evolve and reiterate themselves, equally individual and collective, macabre and lighthearted, fleeting and permanent, mythical and quotidian, local and global. Like the folk story of the blind men attempting to describe an elephant by feeling its contours from many angles, I explore these themes through working with many processes, people, and materials.

These figures were created through a series of castings:

1. A mold was taken from a plastic religious figurine found at a thrift store.
2. Bread dough was pressed into this mold, removed, hand shaped, and baked.
3. Dough figurines were cast a final time into solid aluminum.

Kate Clark is an interdisciplinary artist and community organizer. She has worked as a visiting artist in museums, public schools, galleries, and community centers nationally and internationally. She is a recipient of the Smithsonian’s Hirshhorn Museum fellowship in museum studies, and is a research fellow at Provisions Library for Arts and Social Change. Clark has done residencies at Elsewhere Living Museum in Greensboro, North Carolina, Gallery See Beyond in Tokyo, Japan, and Honfleur Gallery in Washington DC. She received her Bachelor of Arts from the Evergreen State College with a focus in interdisciplinary studio art, art history, and philosophy, and has also studied at the Pont Aven School of Contemporary Art in (Pont Aven, France), The International School (Istanbul, Turkey), Luzanky Skola (Brno, Czech republic) and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago’s Ox-Bow School of Art. She is currently pursuing her Master of Fine Arts Degree at UC San Diego. Kate Clark is native to the San Juan Islands of Washington State.