Candice Lin

born 1979, Concord, Massachusetts; lives in Los Angeles, California

Candice Lin traces legacies of colonialism and diaspora through the history of physical materials, often making associative links across time, place, and subject. Swamp Fat is an installation of ceramic frogs, snakes, and lizards that contain solid perfume made from animal lard infused with the smell of rotting vermin. This work emerged from Lin’s investigations into cultural perceptions around contamination in relation to the construction of race and citizenship within the bayous of Louisiana in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Lin’s ceramic vessels are made of clay collected from near St. Malo, Louisiana, thought to be the site of the first Asian American settlement in the United States, and which was previously inhabited by escaped slaves and Indigenous peoples. Established by escaped Filipino indentured laborers in the mid-eighteenth century, St. Malo existed in the swamp, protected from the reach of government officials. Set atop ornate pedestals made from scagliola, a faux marble decoration popular in seventeenth-century Italian architecture, Lin’s creaturely vessels honor the swamp and the community who made a life there beyond the restrictions of white society.

Inside the ceramic vessels, Lin’s wearable perfume emits an odor of rot, interrogating social fears of pestilence and impurity that have historically been associated with racialized bodies. The animal fat used to make the perfume conjures additional associations, including the Slaughterhouse Cases brought before the U.S. Supreme Court in 1873. Precipitated by the issue of animal waste polluting the Mississippi River, alongside questions of labor and property rights, the case ultimately resulted in a decision that severely restricted the Fourteenth Amendment, disempowering newly free Black Americans whom the amendment was originally intended to protect.

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Christine Howard Sandoval

born 1975, Anaheim, California; lives in Vancouver, British Columbia

Christine Howard Sandoval investigates colonial histories of inhabitation and displacement through the lens of her own relationship to land, language, cultural memory, and architecture. Her recent body of work explores the historical uses of adobe, a desert building material made from clay, sand, and soil with close connections to her familial lineage. In the eighteenth century, Howard Sandoval’s paternal Chalon ancestors were forced from their homelands and confined to the Mission Soledad during Spanish attempts to Christianize and acculturate the Indigenous inhabitants of California. Subjugated Indigenous people built and maintained the mission using adobe, a technology introduced to the region by missionaries after their experiences with Native peoples of the Southwest. Howard Sandoval’s own use of adobe is a way to process the painful past of her paternal heritage, while also reconnecting to a material with deep ties to her maternal Hispanic ancestors from the Southwest.

In her drawings, Howard Sandoval renders the mission architecture in a simplified typology. This approach is a way to contend with the ubiquity of this architecture as uncontested symbols of California history. Using souvenir models of the missions to create her drawings, Sandoval recalls the requisite assignment of building a mission model that she and her fellow classmates completed as a part of California’s educational requirements. This educational assignment came with a total lack of tending to the colonial histories of the missions, effectively erasing Indigenous peoples from California state history. Through the embodied process of mixing and working with adobe, Howard Sandoval gives agency back to the Indigenous body, asserting a Native presence into California’s shared histories.

The companion video, Niniwas- to belong here, layers found texts and imagery with body camera footage of Howard Sandoval’s movement through Mission Soledad, creating a form of embodied drawing through the landscape. Granted access to protected areas of the site, Howard Sandoval walks the mission grounds while tenderly touching the walls of the crumbling architecture and the artifacts of former inhabitants that she encounters there. One of these objects, a large cracked metate or stone tool used for processing grain and seed, inspired Howard Sandoval’s sculpture titled Split Metate, between two worlds, which pays homage to the memory of touch, labor, and life held in the original tool.

Christine Howard Sandoval, Niniwas- to belong here [still], 2022. Single-channel video (color, sound). Installation view of Thick as Mud, 2023.

Rose B. Simpson

Rose B. Simpson’s work in clay draws from her Tewa ancestry as Santa Clara Pueblo and a deep matrilineal heritage of ceramic artistry. She adapts a millennia-old tradition of working with clay by inventing new techniques to make forms that respond to contemporary life and express her hopes for the world.

Simpson’s figures are powerful agents of Indigenous survival in the wake of colonial violence against Native communities and the environment. Two of these figures, River Girl 1 and River Girl A, are immortal warriors that stand ready to accompany and protect each other through battle. Adorned with metal feathers that run down their backs like spikes, prayer beads for arms, and marked with a “+”—a recurring motif for the cardinal directions and journey of life in Simpson’s work—these figures don spiritual and physical armor for moving through an inhospitable world. Simpson made these embodiments of female presence and power in direct response to the epidemic of

Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls that is taking place in the United States and Canada.1

Simpson’s figures are vessel forms built from layers of heavily worked clay. They exude a sense of strength through vulnerability, embodied in the properties of clay itself. Simpson approaches clay with almost spiritual intentions, saying, “The water in the clay is listening to my internal molecular water, so it’s going to respond and break [if I’m in an agitated state]… Whatever your intentions are, it listens and responds.”2 Understanding clay this way, Simpson treats her material as a living entity that requires humility, evoking a worldview of mutual relationship between the resources of the Earth and its human inhabitants.

12021 A + E: Clay, Place, and Cultural Survival with Rose B. Simpson,” Nevada Museum of Art, January 19, 2022, https://www.youtube. com/watch?v=4i-C7J_1N0c&t=2377s.

2Peter Relic, “Rose B. Simpson’s deFINE ‘Countdown,” SCADworks, February 26, 2021, https://www.scad.edu/blog/ rose-b-simpsons-define-countdown.

Installation views of Thick as Mud, 2023. Previous page and foreground: Rose B. Simpson; Background: Diedrick Brackens.