Krista Dragomer

The bodies I make resist easy categories. They don’t sort neatly into human + environment, human + nonhuman, living + dying. In my work, these conditions blur and blend together, opening up new relations and possibilities at the taxonomical edge of the world, known or imagined.

These works combine paper pulp, pigments and clay in a wet and messy process that combines papermaking and pulp painting with casting, molding, and other sculptural processes. It is a process both additive and sedimentary: as I flesh out the forms, shapes emerge that feel both anatomical and geological.  These works are made with the materials of drawing—paper, graphite, charcoal, ink, wax—activating sculptural space while remaining in conversation with drawing as possibility, as a sketch for what could be if we followed our senses into new relations.

Her Ocean Floor began as I was staring out at a frozen Lake Erie from the meditation room at Hospice of the Western Reserve, in Cleveland Ohio. The vision of an unmoving lake called up a tension between stasis and change, between surface and what lives below. A few weeks after my father passed, I fell in love with a woman and my life changed. During this time, I was researching maps of underground waterways and reading about Marie Tharp, the geologist and oceanographer to first map the ocean floor, despite being barred from much of the science due to gender-based discrimination. And so I began to create work by making rubber molds from our bodies, hers and mine, and arranging them into topographies of unknown desires and emotions that have never known sunlight, arranged into shapes inspired by Tharp’s maps of the deepest places she could imagine.

topology :

1. topographic study of a particular place specifically : the history of a region as indicated by its topography

2. a branch of mathematics concerned with those properties of geometric configurations (such as point sets) which are unaltered by elastic deformations (such as a stretching or a twisting) that are homeomorphisms

pigmented cast cotton, flax and linen paper sculpture

inquiries: studio.kristadragomer@gmail.com