to take part in taking apart, 2022, screenprinted artist book

Steph Kudisch makes ritual ceramic objects, artist books, and sound sculptures, using mutated intertidal aesthetics to dwell in in-betweens. In their practice they echo the sea’s refusal to be stagnant and delineated, touching on queer crip collectivism and overlapping ecotones. 

Kudisch was born with unilateral microtia and aural atresia, and is profoundly Deaf in their undeveloped left ear. Bodily autonomy is at the center of their work: in terms of their experiences as a child who could not consent to a series of cosmetic surgeries meant to normalize their “deformity”, and in terms of their experiences as an adult whose life has been made possible by their agency and access to gender affirming surgeries and hormone replacement therapy. 

Kudisch’s sound sculptures are composed with ceramic, sound, and fabric printmaking processes; they pair glazed ceramic with unfired clay: mud transformed in time & silica fire held by malleable solidified dust with the endless potential to un-form, re-form, and un-form anew. They make field recordings, modulate their voice, layer and stretch it to reveal the contours of their changing vocal chords as they experience hormone replacement therapy; the sounds resonate and change shape as they emerge from clay bodies in symbiotic metamorphosis.