This Studio Session invites participants to become travelers in time, to repeatedly reframe our perspectives so that we experience clay and the process of working/embodying the material anew. We will assume alter identities and future personas, we will consider nonlinear formulations of deep time, we will commingle past/present/future distinctions, we will exist as an ancient rock bed, we will enact geologic forces, we will slow our breathing.

Kelley O’Leary (she/they) is an interdisciplinary artist based in the Bay Area. She received a MFA in Art Studio from University of California, Davis and a BA in Art with a minor in Anthropology from University of California, Santa Cruz. As one of the last generations to have pre-Internet memories, she longs to document and articulate the massive shift into life in the digital age. O’Leary’s research-based practice takes on multiple human and non-human perspectives and temporalities, spanning media from sculpture and installation to video, drawing and writing. Her recent work explores the physicality of the internet through the perspective of an archeologist of the future, offering speculative artifacts and documentation to reveal hidden geographies embedded within cyberspace and pointing towards the immensity of Earth’s extraction across a geological timescale. Kelley is a member of Imaginaries of the Future Collective, a self-organizing nomadic collective of artists and thinkers.

This Studio Session took place in September 2023.