Today we’d like to introduce you to Claudia O’Steen.
Hi Claudia, can you start by introducing yourself? We’d love to learn more about how you got to where you are today.
I have been making art for as long as I can remember. My grandfather grew roses; I remember drawing them after my grandmother cut them. As a Watkins College of Art student, I found the confidence and voice to call myself an artist. I was encouraged to share my ideas and aesthetic interests with many teachers who helped expand my technical skills and develop my artistic methodology. The first artwork I consider to be the work that began my current trajectory was my undergraduate thesis installation. I attended grad school at Rhode Island School of Design, where I further developed my research and studio practice. Continually participating in professional development opportunities and surrounding myself with people doing the same is crucial to maintaining a relevant practice. I participate in at least one artist residency a year, where I can connect with other artists and have the space and time to question what and why I am interested in making the things I make. I am also part of the artist collective Tiger Strikes Asteroid (Greenville), which is full of such diverse and exciting artists, and it has been fascinating to connect with fellow artists in this region.
Can you talk to us about the challenges and lessons you’ve learned? Looking back, would you say it’s been easy or smooth in retrospect?
Money and funding are always a concern. I feel fortunate to be doing the two things I love (making artwork and teaching), but getting to this point was a long process. I still don’t have all the time I’d like to make work. There aren’t enough resources for artists in this country, especially in the south.
Thanks – so, what else should our readers know about your work and what you’re currently focused on?
I have both a collaborative and an independent practice. Both sides of my practice are research and fieldwork-based. I am interested in landscapes and my relationship to them. I am also interested in the relationships between time and measure and how our experiences within a place warp and realign these relationships. I develop tools to document my activities and efforts at understanding the changing landscape, isolate mistakes, record failures, and reveal phenomena. Seeing, counting, and measuring are ways of understanding; creating tools to record and quantify these measurements allows me to understand them in relation to myself. Because my work is often site-specific, projects usually unfold in phases. I conduct research in my studio, visit a site to conduct in-depth fieldwork, and then return to the studio to reflect on the relationship between the two. This is where I began experimenting with various media and materials. During this production phase, I often create sculptures that are then taken back into the landscape. The process is very cyclical. A lot of my work is about the idea of failure, and I often attempt things that I know are impossible. I develop systems, processes, and tools to understand something and repeat that process repeatedly. I then examine the failures, abnormalities, or anomalies in that process. All of my work is research-based, very interdisciplinary, and frequently collaborative. The themes change depending on the location or idea I am researching, but the work always integrates fieldwork, sculpture, digital media, drawing, video, and performance.
What are your plans for the future?
I have a solo show with my collaborator (Aly Ogasian) in Calumet, Michigan, this summer, and I am also working on a new sculpture and body of research for a TSA show that will take place later this year. I am exploring ghost forests and coastline changes in South Carolina and am very excited to see how this research develops.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://claudiaosteen.com
- Instagram: @claudiaeosteen
Image Credits
Photo of me in my studio is courtesy of Meshaal Malik
