Kayla Weinman - Artist 

Clowning has been around for thousands of years and can be traced back to around 2400 BC. However, the popularity of clowns rose to in western culture in the mid-1960s due to television shows like “Bozo the Clown”. The purpose of a clown was to simplify the complexity within humanity to make light of situations that may arise in everyday life. Clowns encourage the audience to laugh in the face of their adversity. Another important aspect to a clown’s work, like a magician, is to draw attention to one thing in order to distract the audience from the real world. The job of a clown is to be simple yet direct, while satirizing situations and issues.

            My current work is looking at the history of clowning and moving to understand why deflection and humor is so important. The purpose of this series is for a person to dress up in these bright colorful ceramic objects in order to draw an audience in and make the viewer feel comfortable with the person who is wearing said pieces. For me this aspect of performance art represents the burden of a socially anxious person.  Anxious individuals often fixate and may feel by “putting on a show” or appearing cheerful they make social groups feel comfortable. This act reemphasizes how the person wearing these objects are willing to make others comfortable at the expense of their own comfort, this feeling is something I have investigated with my work for many years now.

            The current work about clowning was designed off of a single piece of clown attire, then enhancing the size with a goal to fit the human body. Created with coils, slabs, hyper-smoothing, carving, and stitch-work.

My work has been based around creating representational objects that somehow have a twist: they are larger or smaller, bright, or have exaggerated features. In response to Roxanna Jackson and Marilyn Levine, I have chosen to photograph my work on a model. The juxtaposition of large, stiff, and visibly uncomfortable attire on the human body, purposely unfitting, intrigues me. Wearing bright, patch work clothing in addition to the objects, adds new questions and new lives to the objects.

The choice to work with ceramics, for me grows out of the ability of the material to mold and change its shape, conforming to the world around it as a way to stand out and pop with brilliance. For some people this would seem odd but the fragility and the flexibility allay all feelings of uneasiness and anxiety that come from social situations.