We humans are a part of one heaving organism, entangled and tumbling over one another. Magdolene uses sculpture, installation, and mark-making to visualize, actualize, and reconfigure connections between human and more-than-human bodies across space and time, disrupting the fantasy of an independent self.
Her work meditates on the power of the small when gathered into a collective, prioritizing accretive processes that depend on consistent effort over time. Magdolene works with clay accompanied by supporting materials to facilitate an exploration of broader notions of kinship that transgress suggested boundaries of us vs. them, self vs. other. Clay is a primordial material that bears the memory of the earliest artists, offering a connection to human and non-human bodies across time and space. Clay has been linked to our species since it emerged, sheltering, recording, and nourishing humans around the world.
Existing along a spectrum of becoming and undoing, Magdolene’s work reflects on the power and potential of impermanence. She embraces ephemerality and precarity for their poetic and anti-capitalist capacity. Each of her works is impermanent and embedded with the possibility of transformation, eagerly waiting to discover other systems of connectedness. In this way, each of Magdolene’s works exist as momentary configurations in a never-ending process of emergence and decay, a cycle of deconstruction and reformation.