BIO:
Sidney Whipps is a ceramic artist based in Cincinnati, Ohio. She is currently a senior Fine Arts student at the University of Cincinnati’s DAAP Program. Sidney’s artist practice encompasses humanities' relationship with technology and how it has affected our communication with one another. Sidney has been in a couple of group exhibitions at the Tabula Rasa Gallery. Sidney has also been a lab technician for over a year at the DAAP Ceramics Lab and spent a semester as a studio intern at Queen City Clay.
ARTIST STATEMENT:
My work explores the complex relationship we have with our phones, devices that connect us in the world, but also create distance between us. We use our phones today as a tool to operate in our daily lives, which has made us heavily reliant on them. The evolution of these devices that allow us to communicate with one another has created this narrative of how prolongedness and immediacy have played a role during that time. In the beginning, devices were used primarily to listen and communicate to each other which involved taking minutes to hours to get ahold of someone and now you can send a text in seconds to reach someone through the press of a button.
I mainly work with clay, a medium that has infinite outcomes but also has an unforgiving nature. Clay has qualities of permanence that mimic the way technology has become indefinite to us in its presence. By using clay, I create figurative sculptures that encapsulate a period in time where communication once was only through the voice, and how lives were uncentered around devices to now where it has become a part of our identity. My practice also heavily revolves around using mold making as a tool to discuss mass production of readymades like landlines and Nokia’s. I’m encapsulating an object of communication that was mass-produced into a commodity for humanity, and to now where it has commodified us.
Today, we are over-consumed by the media through scrolling through our devices and from that, we are connected through the use of imagery and video. We can remember an image we saw on Instagram during the day, but we take in so much content that it all gets forgotten the next day. What has changed through these ever-advancing devices? What would life be like without Google or any device of information that we all go to for answers to operate? How have these devices shaped us as individuals, our sense of self, our relationships, and our way of communicating?
