Grace Sachi Troxell: this pot is made of earth and when it breaks, my father laughs

this pot is made of earth and when it breaks, my father laughs | press release | events | installation view

September 8 – October 12, 2024

Opening Reception: September 8, 7-9pm
Gallery Hours: Thurs + Fri: 4-6pm, Sat + Sun: 2-6pm
Dinner Party with Grace Sachi Troxell and Gabrielle Constantine: October 4, 6:30pm
Family Workshop with Grace Sachi Troxell and Students: October 5, 12-2pm

Open Source Gallery is pleased to present this pot is made of earth and when it breaks, my father laughs, an exhibition by Grace Sachi Troxell.

The title comes from a Pennsylvania Dutch flower pot made by Samuel Troxel in 1828 with the inscription: “this pot is made of earth, and when it breaks the potter laughs.” The object—and the story its text suggests—embodies the interactions at play in Grace Sachi Troxell’s exhibition at Open Source: between human and vegetable, vessel and rupture, family and stranger. (Troxell’s father is a ceramist; Samuel Troxel may be a distant relative.)

In this pot is made of earth and when it breaks, my father laughs, Troxell uses the language of clay to explore these relationships and how they are experienced in the body. Her sculptures combine ceramic casts of vegetables with familial parts: her mother’s breast and abdomen come together with the reproductive fruit of a vine; her partner’s metal-reinforced shoulder shares strength with the resilient outer skin of winter squash. The resulting entities are not merely influenced by family, food, and earth but entirely composed of them. 

These bodies are as much vegetable and soil as they are human, and are simultaneously immortalized and prematurely decomposed through their representation in clay. In preserving these imperfections, Troxell finds playful improvisation and creative survival within the processes of rot, growth, assimilation, grafting. The human body and the vegetable body grow together in this pot is made of earth and when it breaks, my father laughs, echoing the environmentally grounded amalgamations of Hélène Cixous, who writes: “I was even sure, sometimes, that the garden and I were made of the same substance, sand and compost rubbed my bones; moss, fern, violets and strelitzia were growing in my skin, stretching my limbs.” The resulting sculptures preserve an eternity of relationships within a single earthen moment.

Grace Sachi Troxell is a sculptor based in New York. She received a BS in Studio Art from Skidmore College, a Post-Graduate certificate in painting from the Glasgow School of Art, and an MFA from Cornell University. She has been artist in residence at Skowhegan, Sharpe – Walentas, MacDowell, Yaddo, Sculpture Space, the Studios at MASSMoCa, Woodstock Byrdcliffe, Willapa Bay AiR, The Pottery Workshop in Jingdezhen, China, Dumfries House, Scotland, and The International Textile Art Symposium, Daugavpils Rothko Center, Latvia. Troxell has had solo exhibitions at Wave Hill, NY, NY; Haw Contemporary, Kansas City, MO; Neighbors, Ithaca, NY; The Hartnett Gallery at The University of Rochester, and The Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Ithaca, NY. She is currently a Visiting Assistant Professor at Hamilton College.

For press inquiries, please contact us at contact@opensourcegallery.org

This program is supported, in part, by the New York State Council on the Arts, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, and the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, in partnership with the City Council.