Artist Statement:Tyler Quintin
My work explores identity through ceramic objects, reflecting on heritage, queerness, and the digital spaces that shape community. As a gay Korean-American raised within an American cultural framework, I often occupy an in-between state, searching for belonging while acknowledging what feels fragmented or incomplete.
I approach this through two parallel series: Rendering and Idle Thoughts. In Rendering, I build vessels and figures from clay “wire-frame” scaffolds that recall digital modeling. My work references traditional Korean ceramics, mythological subjects, and online avatars, with each modeled form being partially unfinished. The fragmentation reflectsthe understanding supplemented through online communities rather than lived experience.
Idle Thoughts offers a counterpoint, guided by intuition. Here, swirling cloud motifs—riffing on Eastern designs and doubling as thought bubbles—evolve into figures and vessels as if glimpsed in the act of cloud-spotting. This series reflects my diasporic conflicts of heritage and culture, giving shape to discovery through making.
Recurring motifs such as wire-frames, clouds, and animal avatars, bridge the distance between heritage and queerness, the digital and the material. My sculptures are not fixed representations but sites of becoming—places where fragments converge, dissolve, and reform. By making these processes visible, I hope others see theincompleteness not as lack, but as potential.
