Em Kettner

Born in: 1988
From: Philadelphia, United States of America
Lives and works: El Cerrito, United States of America
Represented by: François Ghebaly
Website: https://www.emkettner.com/

UN goals

Biography

Em Kettner uses the experience of her disabled body as a starting point for her work. She reflects on the dependency that can arise from these bodies, but far from a heavy discourse, the artist addresses the complex subject with humor, lightness and sensitivity. She magnifies the flaws and cracks. Strangeness becomes beautiful and poetic. She uses ceramics and embroidery as a vehicle for the message. The latter material is added as an element that allows her to reinforce her objects, something that repairs.

Ceramic art was reborn in the 1970s in the United States and became a new genre at the junction between feminism, minimalism and performance. Like her predecessors, such as Hannah Wilke, Em Kettner creates vulnerable and evocative work. She works for a more inclusive world that seeks to disrupt hegemonic notions of cultural identity.

Em Kettner also references the thousand-year-old history of disabilities and reparation. She looks to the origins of disabled people, such as Margaret Mead’s theory that a prehistoric healed femur could represent the beginning of society, a fossil showing us that humankind was emphatic and had this desire to care for others beyond simple survival instinct.