Libby Couch
Department of Art, College of Fine Arts (MFA)
Saucy Little Dish
My work investigates the ways we physically process emotion. I approach the body as an ever-shifting landscape that stores memory, absorbs impact, and reshapes itself in response to experience. In my practice, emotion registers materially. It accumulates, strains, presses, and alters form, leaving visible evidence of what has been endured.
I am drawn to the tension between vulnerability and agency. The body yields to pressure, yet it also resists. It is shaped by cultural expectation, gendered scrutiny, trauma, desire, and history while retaining the capacity to remain upright. I am attentive to how women's bodies are asked to contain, soften, perform, and persist, often at once.
Across my work, surfaces oscillate between seduction and rupture, lushness and aridity, containment and exposure. Forms swell, crack, harden, or recede, mirroring the ways emotion leaves residue. What appears stable often carries strain, and what seems fragile frequently endures. This practice considers how we carry our histories within us. It asks what it means to surrender to the forces that shape the body while maintaining the agency to stand altered, marked, and still present.
Artwork Description:
My work examines the ways we physically process emotion; how desire, shame, vitality, and depletion register on and within the body. This piece takes the form of a wall of plates, each functioning as a fragmentary meditation on womanhood and its expectations. Their exaggerated curves and lush compositions appear whimsical, even indulgent. From a distance, they seduce. Their forms offer a lush, hyper-aestheticized surface that signals familiarity, appetite, and excess. Yet this invitation collapses under sustained looking. The promise of wetness fractures against the material truth of arid, unglazed clay. To be moist is to be "well"; to be dry is to be read as failing or obsolete. By denying these forms the glossy wetness traditionally associated with ceramics, I disrupt the expectation of desirability. The glaze hesitates or recedes, prioritizing discomfort over allure.