Upon arriving in Alexis’ home/studio I was amazed by the wall with hundreds of her miniature ceramic creations, “I make them small because it’s what my hands like to make. I don’t think I'm strong enough to make big things on a wheel. I have always worked in miniature sculpture and photography. I make miniatures because they’re familiar and uncanny, theres a suspension of reality and playfulness, that lets me have dark conversations.” Her work is concerned with “the future past, its warning work, quiet, evacuated tombs and temples and dusty post human places, an archaeology of the anthropocene. It’s about mindfulness around the extinction moment we’re in and our impact as future ancestors.”

Oaxaca is an incredible sacred center of barro rojo (red mud) traditions and pre-colonial hand building and burnishing, the clay vernacular is so rich. In the states most clay is shipped, mined, or international. So it is an honor to dig and work with this clay. For me clay is digestion and compression, time and bodies. Clay is ancestors, minerals and decaying kin, its rocks and roots and bones and blood and leaves and seeds. Handling it, especially as an uninvited guest in this country, is a complex responsibility but also a space of connection and ancestral relation. I offer to the river some native seeds in gratitude when I dig a bag or two in Santa Catarina Minas.”

To find out more check out Alexis Rose / @greyandgray.