The Body, The Object, The Other

Second Clay Biennial
curated by Holly Jerger and Andres Payan Estrada
January 25, 2020–January 10, 2021
Craft Contemporary Museum
Los Angeles, CA

Curator Holly Jerger on Linn’s work in the exhibition:

STONE is the first piece in a new series of work that she has created to examine ideas of strength and vulnerability within human bodies. Inspired by the round stone ruins of ritual gathering sites, Linn chose the museum courtyard to locate her work. The Craft Contemporary courtyard is rife with its own architectural relics—a circular window that was once a ticket booth, steel posts that once supported a rotating gate—things that have lost purpose over time. According to the artist, “STONE, its shape suggestive of the human body, lives in this place of confluence. Made from stoneware, the clay is fired to 2262 Fahrenheit. Multiple layers of glazes applied to the black mountain clay fashioning a sense of a uniform with the ‘belt’ and the red stripe across ‘the chest.’ The heavy layer of clear crackle glaze evokes a feeling of emerging from a primordial goo, perhaps suggesting a recent birth…STONE serves as a guardian. Like a gargoyle, a Lamassu, a Hamsa or a Mezuzah, it is a sentry both welcoming and guarding the museum and its visitors; its presence reminding us that strength and vulnerability come hand in hand and that we carry both inside.” (Quote is Linn, in email to Jerger, December 4, 2019.)