Red Lodge Clay Center – Short-Term Resident (ASPN) 2025
Salomé Aydlett is a sculptural ceramicist based in Missoula, MT, and a 2024/2025 Ceramics BFA candidate at the University of Montana. Originally from Winona, MN and a family of artists, Salomé grew up playing with clay. It is their first language and their child-like relationship to clay remains present in their work. Salomé’s work primarily centers on the human body and its physical connection to language–how language is formal (shape based and three-dimensional) and can be integrated and manifest in the physical composition of the body.
I am drawn to the anatomically incorrect. By ‘anatomically incorrect’ I mean distorted, deranged, haphazard, sideways, sometimes inside-out. Really, I mean that I’ve never viewed the body in a properly scientific way: the body isn’t layers of bone and tendon and muscle and skin, but rather a collision of words and grammars. The body is a three-dimensional language. This is the perspective I try to weave into my practice: sculpture as a way to explore how the human body relates to language and its expression.
My work stems from a place of disembodiment and derealization. It’s a continuous visual exploration of what it feels like to exist in spaces where the predominant modes of communication don’t match with my own internal dialogue. Understanding my struggle with language is just as important as creating a space for it to comfortably exist, and in my current body of work, abstracted sculptural representations of myself congregate and create an external reflection of my own internal space. These self-representations are an amalgamation of thoughts, feelings, worries, and events given a physical form without the need for verbal intervention. My work asks the viewer to question and confront their conceptions of what comfort and communication should look and feel like. What do our own internal languages look and sound like, and how do we make sure they’re welcoming for both ourselves and others?
For example, my own personal struggle with verbal language (speech, both its understanding and expression) is inherent in my work. Melting shapes and figures meld to create indistinct and deconstructed bodies that mimic the indistinction and confusion I often feel in the verbal world, and bright colours and thick dripping surfaces mirror the muddled way individual words sound to me. Offsetting the severity of these struggles, however, is my child-like approach to building and glazing: I believe that chaotic joy and play can always emerge from difficulty, and this is the mindset I bring to my interactions with clay and the world at large. In these ways, each piece is an ongoing sentence. A diary entry. A way to deeper examine the body/language relationship and push it towards a more intelligible and compassionate dimension.