CRANBROOK ACADEMY OF ART GRADUATE DREGREE EXHIBITION 2025  
GRADUATES \\ WORK \\ ABOUT \\
ALEYAH 
AUSTIN
DEPARTMENT
CERAMICS



 





 Familiar and unplaced, my work addresses ceramic as a material used in ritual, domestic spaces, and industrial spaces. In seeking the relationship between pleasure, leisure, and labor, I am entranced. As I alternate between hand-building techniques, digital fabrication, and image making, I embody and disassociate from the act of making. Solicitude and clarity are called into question.

I respond to the vessel and its associations with function, fluidity, sustenance, and the body. Memories and fantasies regarding my own body are physically deconstructed. Faded pastels attract and disgust, nostalgically and vulnerably. Swollen, blushing, stretched, and protruding. We are at the vanity, in the bathroom, or the toolshed, near the grotto. Often, I create “props” for performances to initiate devotion and transformation. Materials alongside ceramic, including plywood, grout, linen, horsehair, water, photographs and video, rouse my objects with their sensory implications. Boundaries between human, animal, mineral, and machine offer questions regarding animacy.

Performance residue becomes my iconography, obscured through material translation as a form of protection. I approach image making in search of the haptic. I explore methods of uniting the ceramic and photographic surface by way of laser engraving, cyanotype and gum printing. Both media connate the desire to archive memory, and together they are alchemy.
 



Compulsive Labor
2025 , Video still 
We Depend on Each Other
2024, Glazed ceramic, water, fountain pumps and tubing, 18" x 14" x 13” (individual fountain) 
Bathtub Venus
2025, Glazed ceramic, originally displayed inside a bathtub at Smith House, 21.5” x 15.5” x 8” 
Compulsive Labor
2025, Glazed ceramic, grout, plywood, house paint, 35” x 25” x 1.5”