Mai Ton
Senior Studio
No Sharp Corners
My work seeks to explore the infinity between comfort and intimacy. Within the world that our mind resides, we seek to make space into ours - our homes, our rooms, our dreams. Using various paint mediums and materials that lend themselves to be touched, often deemed for crafts, I hope to bring out senses of belonging and care within the space that my work occupies. By blurring the lines between the natural world, our private rooms, and our inner minds, the dimensions of living that we undergo begin to meld into one that allows our existences to feel safe and approachable. With our bodies, we build relationships to the physical and inform our understandings of the world.
I like to make art that makes me feel safe and at peace. Not necessarily that the object itself is an object of safety and peace, but rather, it is the process of using, touching, feeling the materials and applying them that spawns these feelings of comfort. It is a process that I want to be able to share with others - the feeling and touching and experiencing of art. In the time of the onset of the pandemic, I also began thinking about what my own relationship to art entails and I have settled that at its most simple, I want to make art that I find fun and lovely. The pandemic has pushed many of us to return to individual spaces of our past and remake our understanding of them. But such spaces do not have to feel so individual, as the experience of the pandemic was a global phenomenon. I aim to explore the idea of a room that we all can make, experience, transform, and find comfort in.
