Compression

While participating in a residency at the McColl Center in Charlotte, NC, Eng began learning a bit about the history of brick making in the southeast U.S.A. She connected with the archives at Davidson College, where she learned that many of the buildings on their campus were constructed with bricks made from enslaved people. Impressions of enslaved people’s hands can be found on buildings on plantations across the South, a reminder of our shared history and the injustices of slavery. Connecting to her interest in the history of materials, labor, and where they come from, in September 2021, she began working with clay from a nearby farm in Cumberland County, PA. Her interest in building a form at NARS that is recognizable of our human constructed environment relates to being in the city and questions she has regarding commercial mining, the disproportionate impacts on communities nearby these sites, and the types of developments being built in her community. The video projection was taken on the construction site to connect the materials to their histories and the land it came from.

In a world where objects can travel so freely while it is difficult for people to do so, Eng is thinking about how far materials travel and their carbon footprint. Increasingly, she is sourcing the clay she works with locally in an effort to make her practice more sustainable. The lifespan of many of her previous projects are also ephemeral, connecting to the life cycles of all living things, and at the close of an exhibition, the clay will be broken down and returned to the site where it came from. These ideas of interconnectedness and regeneration are not new, indigenous peoples have and continue to teach of the importance of reciprocity. The writings of Robin Wall Kimmerer (Potawatomi), Max Liboiron (Metis), Lucy Lippard, and Lauret Savoy have impacted her thinking. Our landscape has been shaped for billions of years, but in the short time that humans have inhabited this planet, we have left many scars. How can humans learn to have more reciprocal relationships with our planet and each other versus ones of just extraction?

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About the artist:

Rachel Eng (she/her) earned her MFA from the University of Colorado Boulder and her BFA from Pennsylvania State University. Eng has shown her work in solo exhibitions at Atlanta Contemporary (Atlanta, GA: 2023), The Springfield Museum of Art (Springfield, OH; 2023), Jane Hartsook Gallery (NYC, NY: 2022), and Flecker Gallery (Long Island, NY; 2020).  Recent group exhibitions include: AIM Biennial (Miami, FL & Online; 2023), Susquehanna Art Museum (Harrisburg, PA; 2023) Maguire Art Museum (Merion Station, PA; 2023), Rowan University (Glassboro, NJ; 2022), and The Clay Studio (Philadelphia, PA; 2020),  She has held residencies at McColl Center (Charlotte, NC), Studio Kura (Fukuoka, Japan), and Watershed Center for the Ceramic Arts (Newcastle, ME), among others. In 2021 she was awarded a Windgate Fellowship through the Center for Emerging Visual Arts in Philadelphia and a Puffin Foundation Grant.  Her work is in various private and public collections including the Gyeonggi Museum of Contemporary Ceramic Art (Republic of Korea) and Peninsula College Ceramics Collection (Port Angeles, WA).  She currently lives in Carlisle, PA with her family, where she is an Associate Professor of Art at Dickinson College.

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