Angela White

Her spartan and smooth porcelain forms chronicle life and interconnectivity using the ephemeral creations of local makers, hunters, and mothers -- reverentially captured spider webs.

 

I begin with a garden, planting tomatoes, raspberries, sunflowers, strawberries, scarlet runner beans and other Pacific Northwestern crops--creating an orb weaver habitat. Orb weavers like the shelter and protection of bamboo. So I make all of my trellises out of it. By late July, my garden is home to 20-to-24 orb weavers.

 

In August, I begin walking the garden in the early morning with a head lantern, learning where the orb Weaver's are living and what they are spinning.

 

Mid-August, I begin gathering their webs. So long as they are safe and well-fed, orb weavers stay in the same spot throughout the season, allowing me to grow familiar with them and their work.

 

I sculpt my days in dialogue with a distant species. I decenter the human, I question human exceptionalism, I work as a woman with a species I was told as a girl I ought to fear, a species pest-control agencies offer to exterminate for me, a species of kindred mothers, hunters and makers. In traditions of natural science illustration and feminist science studies, I document the ephemeral silk-works of orb weavers on the perennial material of clay.

 

Sometimes, I think the resulting objects are bound for a dystopian future of ecological collapse and global extinction. Amid the ruins, sacred shards remain.

 

Other times, I think I am from a utopian future. I came back in time to help make it come true. I am prefiguring it now by loving spiders.