On Being a Porous Boundary
On Being a Porous Boundary is copresented by Lewis & Clark College and A-B Projects at the Ronna and Eric Hoffman Gallery of Contemporary Art from November 19, 2024–February 25, 2025.
On Being a Porous Boundary features immersive paintings, bodily ceramic sculpture, and monumental paper sculpture by Catherine Fairbanks. This work is accompanied by intimate poetry by Catherine Barnett, which has been hand-drawn for the exhibition by Nuria Kiesebrink-Pareick.
We construct and reconstruct boundaries in order to protect ourselves, to relate to others, to move into and through the world, and for the world to move around and through us. We are, ourselves, volumes of porous boundaries.
Boundaries are necessary and real: strong and protective, hard-edged and cutting, blurry and binding; breachable, fallible; soft, malleable, and breathing; a conduit. To be a porous boundary means that we exist as all of these things, always individually, and often inextricably linked to each other. In her essay “Hydrofeminism: Or, On Becoming a Body of Water,” Astrida Neimanis posits that “As watery, we experience ourselves less as isolated entities, and more as oceanic eddies: I am a singular, dynamic whorl dissolving in a complex, fluid circulation.”
There is pleasure and joy in porosity, in connection; there can be deep discomfort when we lose sight of ourselves, of each other, or when there is a loss so great that grief obliterates (or, perhaps, vastly expands) our boundaries; and there is generative possibility in separation, in the common human experience of loneliness.
What does care look like in the context of this viscous porosity? How do we care for ourselves, for those in our immediate orbit, for strangers? How and when might we choose to hold strangers closely? What amount of fierceness or tenderness is necessary? What seeps through?
The exhibition further explores these questions by including a reading room with a selection of books and resources—curated by Lewis & Clark faculty and staff Daena Goldsmith, Alexis Rehrmann, Kabir Heimsath, Reiko Hillyer, Erica Jensen, and Mary Szybist—that relate to boundaries as seen through the lenses of narrative medicine, anthropology, history, art, and literature. The space is intended for classes and the public to gather, ponder, and converse.
About the Artists and Organizer
Catherine Fairbanks uses empathy as a foundational structure to bridge her dual practices as an artist and a nurse. In both roles, she is in dialogue with the early 20th century phenomenologist, Edith Stein, for whom empathy was the liberating recognition of infinite difference in the other. This is not empathy as feeling, this is empathy enacted socially as equality and liberation.Fairbanks received her MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute and has since attended national and international residencies including Salmon Creek Farm, Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, National Textile Institute in Iceland, and the Wool Factory in Barcelona. Additionally, she makes post-studio ceramic work with the international workers and end of life patients in the Medical ICU at UCLA, which she calls Glazing at the End of Life . Ground-shifting exhibitions of the past four years include the premier of Chimney Dances , a four-site collaborative work with Dylan Crossman (formerly of Merce Cunningham Dance Company) at the Franklin D. Murphy Sculpture Garden, UCLA, and Pieter Space, in February of 2020; a solo exhibition, Nurses Roses Midnight , at A-B Projects in Los Angeles, 2022; and a solo painting exhibition, Love Loves to Love Love, Nurse Loves the New Chemist at ACP in Los Angeles, Spring 2023. Her solo exhibition, Nurses Under Lakes , opened at M and B Gallery in Los Angeles in October 2024. Fairbanks has received critical acclaim in Artforum, der Freitag, Carla, SFMOMA Openspace, Thick Press , and Artillery .
Catherine Barnett is the author of four poetry collections, including Solutions for the Problem of Bodies in Space (2024 Graywolf); Human Hours (Believer Book Award, New York Times “Best Poetry of 2018” selection); The Game of Boxes (James Laughlin Award); and Into Perfect Spheres Such Holes Are Pierced (Beatrice Hawley Award). A Guggenheim and Civitella Ranieri fellow, she received a 2022 Arts and Letters Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and a Whiting Award, among other recognitions. Barnett’s work has been published in the New Yorker, The NY Review of Books, The Yale Review, The Nation, Harper’s, American Poetry Review, and elsewhere. She teaches in NYU’s MFA Program and works as an independent editor.
A-B Projects is a global hub for community, critical dialogue, and material experimentation that expand and redefine the ceramics field. A-B Projects curates an abundant lineup of unordinary exhibitions and offers the A-B Projects Ceramics Certificate (ABCC). Programming includes nonhierarchical State of Ceramics discussions that evaluate the trajectory of contemporary ceramics, as well as monthly artist-led Studio Sessions in which participants collectively research through making. A-B Projects is based in Portland, Oregon, and directed by Nicole Seisler.
About the Eric Hoffman Gallery of Contemporary Art at Lewis & Clark College
A gallery of contemporary art located on the grounds of Lewis & Clark College, the gallery’s exhibitions are mounted in 3,500 square feet of modern and highly flexible space, located across a beautiful plaza from Fields Center for the Visual Arts.
