Bio

Haydn Cooper is an multimedia artist from and currently living in Phoenix, Arizona. Graduate of Arizona State University with a BFA in Painting, 2020. Traditional image making is a staple of their work along with exploration of ceramic forms. Both source materials through a process of reclaiming previously used paint, wood or clay. Illustrative techniques, art history, and their motifs are important to the artist. Symbolic skulls nod to memento mori, the reminder of death within still life paintings. Birds, flora and fauna serve as visual motifs to represent the presence of life, combating the saturation of death. Their goal is to capture the cyclical nature of art and life itself through these means.

Artist Statement

I use the wheel to create utilitarian wares: bowls, cups, mugs and jugs. Coming from a background as a painter the functional nature of pottery drew me into the medium, it was a place between form and function that I wanted to be in. I have also ventured into handbuilt sculptures of mountain forms. Majority of my work has been cone 10 reduction, the subtleties of glazes at that temperature are mesmerizing. Creating surfaces that make pieces look as if they have always been around.

I am interested in exploring the realm in which pottery acts as an extension of the body; Physically with tactical forms but also as metaphor of the body. Ergonomics in pottery was introduced to me in a description of gender. Handles, feet, lips, angles, bellies of a pot could be read as masculine or feminine. How do our perceptions permeate into pottery, how can we alter it moving forward, and to whom is it necessary?

As a non-binary artist I want to make work that exists without gender or somewhere between the binary. I aim to obliterate these rigid binary expectations with my pottery. Through surface decoration and form I appropriate utilitarian forms to be a vessel for iconic imagery that is made by and for transgender individuals. Use illustrative glazing techniques that act like tattoos to reclaim the pot’s body. Such as classical memento mori motifs, referencing the fragility of life and how that is contextualized today for transgender people in today’s society.