Uma Halsted is GlogauAIR resident
from October, 2022 to December, 2022
Uma Halsted’s work explores bodies of water and how their puddling and spreading properties connect the human experience with the earth through shared memories of the womb.
During her residency at GlogauAIR, she will conduct an artistic excavation in discard. In her art practice, the act of creating and maintaining a canvas, sculpture, or space also becomes an act of dirtying it through accumulation of paint and material. She will critically consider the role of the body and how themes of embodiment relate to discard and regeneration.
Meet the Artist
What is your name and where are you from?
Uma Halsted, America.
When/ how did your art practice begin … Do you think where you’re from has affected your work?
My work has definitely been affected being from California. but my art practice really started and took off at university, so I think my intellectual and artistic community there was a greater effect on my work (as well as what/who/was studying).
How has your practice changed over time?
It changes every day. I’m really impatient and restless as a person. So I try to keep it changing, But I think the primary way its changing is it’s been becoming increasingly conceptual in the last year.
Do you think your art has evolved being a different environment E.g. Do you think GlogauAIR / being in Berlin has influenced your work?
I think more than anything having the space of my studio here and the quiet of living on this street and having a garden outside has allowed me to breathe and evolve my art.
What are your next plans after your residency?
I will go back to California for the holidays, and then I will be applying to jobs in Berlin and New York and looking for studio space. I’m hoping to move back to Berlin in the new year, but I will ultimately keep myself open for opportunities wherever.
Statement
Imagine feeling. Floating in a body, concentrated with saltwater. Your internal water reaches out and your skin dissolves to greet this new home. You are here. Then you remember your eyes and their act of seeing the material that hangs before you.
Always returning to organic forms, my work explores bodies of water and how their puddling and spreading properties connect the human experience with the earth through shared memories of the womb. I make large-scale paintings that become sculptural forms in spatial installations. The process of creation is as important as my final paintings themselves, evoking performance-art through traces of my touch.
My paintings transcend the frame, molding themselves into organic, bulbous forms of unstretched canvas. They expose their own insides and become waste receptacles of discarded pigment, transmitting water like a membrane in osmosis. What I exhibit is the imprint of transmitted paint from one canvas to another, from one side to the other, and the trace of what has been painted in the past and grows into a form in the present. Like water, my works are unfixed and constantly morphing beyond formal interpretation.
GlogauAIR Project
During my residency at GlogauAIR, I will conduct an artistic excavation in discard. In my art practice, the act of creating and maintaining a canvas, sculpture, or space also becomes an act of dirtying it through accumulation of paint and material. My work’s emphasis on water and subliminal embodiment evokes Freud’s oceanic feeling, while its attention to discard – especially in the form of rags – recalls Walter Benjamin’s notion of the ragpicker as he articulates it in his Arcades Project (1927-1940). As I research and explore these two theoretical frameworks – primarily the latter – during my residency, I will critically consider the role of the body and how themes of embodiment relate to discard and regeneration. In the context of our ever growing digital world and subsequent dissociation and disembodiment of individuals today, I am invested in rekindling the body through my work and reconnecting a person to their sensorial, fleshy self. I will perform this reconnection through rituals of collecting what has been rejected and released and accumulates behind us. Prompted by Benjamin, I am interested in acts of relation and transference and in how gestures of rejecting/releasing and receiving/transferring can go hand-in-hand to create a symbiotic, bodily whole.
CV Summary
Education
- 2018-2022 Barnard College of Columbia University, B.A. in Art History (Concentration in Visual Arts) & English Literature
- 2022 International Center of Photography (ICP), Alternative Processing Photography Workshop
Exhibitions
- 2022 Barnard Undergraduate Senior Thesis Show, Curated by Piper Marshall, New York
- 2019 Painting Show, Group show at Postcrypt Art Gallery, New York
Awards and Grants
- 2022 W. Cabell Greet Prize, Barnard graduation award to a major for excellence in English
- 2021 Growing the Arts Grant, Awarded funding for work in the art
Gallery
