There’s something oddly beautiful about the work of Kansas based artist Jamie Bates Slone. Her vibrant sculptures are teaming with diseased growths and discolorations, and the effect is simultaneously fascinating and horrifying. Slone can relate to the physical and emotional impact that disease brings. “Through conjured memory, I revisit my family’s history with illness and premature death. These memories are flooded with emotion and anxiety that I use as the base of my sculptural work,” she says. Each figure that she creates is life-size, typically made of stoneware clay, onto which she adds strange swellings and festering sores. She also features her sculptures in video installations, where psychedelic projections engulf and overwhelm them in a reenactment of her anxieties about illness. Slone sees the skin’s surface as a reflection of what’s going on underneath. “These surface choices are derived from high-color contrast scanning electron micrograph images of cancer cells and their inherently grotesque and psychedelic appearance,” she explains. “Everything is exaggerated. Life. Cancer. Growth. It’s all a repeating and continuous cycle of being wary of the future and empathetic of the past.”
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