The bodies Nalani Stolz crafts bulge, grow and break down. Their holes and orifices slowly release and leak. Their taut skin stretches and pulls; leaving soft lines across their surfaces. Through her work, she grapples with how it feels to inhabit our bodies as ever-shifting forms. Exploring the ways they hold together all the mushy, heavy, fragile pieces.

By utilizing materials gleaned from the domestic skills of her mother, the labor and tenderness of these daily tasks are passed from her mother’s body to Stolz’s own. Through creating sculptural forms, Stolz reclaims these materials and processes. Observing rising dough to explore expansion and constriction, allowing cloth sculptures to leak and ooze, filling fermented membranes and porous clay bodies with vinegar that seeps out, growing warts and bumps across their surfaces.

The bodily processes in the work draw on the often-gendered experiences of weeping, menstruation, miscarriage, abortion, and pregnancy. Each work continually shifting throughout the exhibition to convey slow processes of change or disintegration. Through material surrogates each work gives form to the ways our body takes in and expels matter; the feelings of expansion and fullness and those of emptying out, of breaking down. The way these moments shift our seemingly solid edges and reveal our porous boundaries; reminding us that we are dying, changing, decaying vessels, loosely contained by skin, muscle, and bone.

About Nalani Stolz

Nalani Stolz is a sculptor and installation artist based in the Midwest. Through materials that shift and change over time, Nalani explores how it feels to inhabit the body. From 2014-2018, she founded and directed The Birdsell Project, an arts organization and residency program that focuses on bringing artists into spaces to create site-responsive installations. Nalani has created her own site-specific installations through Brickscape Residency, The Birdsell Project, The Ohio State University and The Columbus Printed Arts Center. Along with her installations, Nalani has shown her sculptural work at Woman Made Gallery, The South Bend Museum of Art, What Gallery, and Urban Arts Space. Nalani received her BA in Sculpture at Whitman College and her MFA in Sculpture from The Ohio State University and has recently completed residencies at Bemis Center for the Contemporary Arts and Township10.

Learn more about Nalani Stolz here.

Nalani Stolz is a recipient of The Sculpture Center’s Revealed Emerging Artist Series.