About

Bio

Collyn Aubrey (b.1993) is an American artist raised in Colorado. Ahrens is currently based in Mendocino, CA. Ahrens holds an MFA from Parsons Fine Arts and a BFA from Sierra Nevada University, as well as completing a post-Baccalaureate in Ceramics from University of Colorado, Boulder.

Aubrey recently taught various ceramics courses for Mendocino College. Ahrens also taught ceramic sculpture for Studio Arts Boulder in CO and worked as a studio technician for Greenwich House Pottery in NYC. Ahrens was a resident artist at Mendocino Art Center and Cider Creek Collective in California. Ahrens has shown twice in the NCECA Annual Juried Student Exhibition and at CCACA, in Davis, California. Ahrens has shown their work throughout the United States, such as The Depot and The Holland Project in Reno, NV (2021), the Morean Center for Clay (2019), 25 East Gallery in New York City (2019), and in the virtual group show for The Olympia Project based in New York.

Statement

To lay the groundwork of my multidisciplinary practice, I focus on clay as a material that has memory of time and place. This allows me to revive the process of mourning as spirited and vital. Informed by an experience with grief, from witnessing the passing of a brother, I continue my role of the sister in my relationship with art. Through a playfulness with the lineage of sculpture and craft, I can digest the rhythm and labor of living with trauma.

 As the big sister to my work, I implement a sense of care balanced with agitation. In Groundwork (2020) cast porcelain is placed in an excavated patch of iron rich subsoil, questioning the aggregation of historic lineage. My work develops an embodied practice in which I am queering craft through slip-casting as a form of feminine reproduction. The series Mining the Viral (2020) investigates the slippage of digital memory through acts of squashing.

 My forms flux between figurative and quotidian object, to investigate animacy and the desire to see oneself in material. I make a reparative effort toward reshaping anthropocentrism, by dissolving the separations of human from non-human and by celebrating the vibrancy of matter.