Artist Statement: Internal Gestures
Chase M. Munsey, B.F.A. 2025

Being is the product of external manipulations and sensations, because we are not floating brains that transcend the experience of the physical, we are subject to forces that are out of our control, forces of and on to the body. My intentions for this project are to create sculptures and images that document the action of being in the physical world, experiencing in motion. What does it mean to experience life? It is interesting to think about the idea that we only experience our world through physical matter, things around us, tangible artifacts. I want to demonstrate this phenomenology in a visual form, a multi-dimensional artifact, as a documentation of a ‘happening’.

Using photography and clay, I will perform the act of constructing a sculpture while documenting the form’s development and symptoms of manipulation by me, through the use of my body, directly relating the physical tangibility of experience, from one form to another. The images created will prove as documentation, existing too in the tangible world, as a record of an exchange; an art-artifact, and as a physical document.

Introduction: It has been important to me to notice the tangibility of living, the actual physical experience. We think and act through our bodies constantly, perpetually engaging with forces of matter that shape our reason. The body itself keeps record of the physical experience, marks, tears and symbols, representing themselves as events in a personal, and close history. The body experiences each choice made too, acting on both the positive and negative. The body sees the results of abuse, and torment too, malfunctions, and sicknesses. It is the physical body that our big brains are attached to that experience the world, we can only reflect then on that record of feelings, of experiences.

My body has a memory of my history too, it is a living document to my past and my being. Working with the body I want to consider the fragments left in the marks, to investigate what traces of the physical experience can be seen in the material. The clay records time passed as it is handled and persuaded. The affectable material captures the events that demonstrate the relationship between myself and my body. Capturing the act of experience through photography allows for distance and alternative perspectives. Will the clay serve as an extension of the body, recording the physical relationship between the material and myself through the marks made, or simply a metaphor for experience? Can the clay serve as a document when it becomes static? Frozen in a state of performance. Do the photographic and ceramic documents protect the experience or simply demonstrate it?

What if revisiting the document with a new device could transcend the physicality into a more embodied experience, closer to the emotional response to materiality. By pushing the representation further from our normal interaction to the physical world, the document becomes elastic, and bending toward the spiritual connection of materiality. If the document is never still, and subject to abstraction and interpretation of devices and viewership, then what is the most tangible part of existence?

Background: Where is the line between photography and performance? What is the difference between a self portrait and a document? I often wonder what this physical experience could look like if captured as a moment in time, in a photograph or physical form. I have felt both distant and truly confronted with my personal physical experiences. To understand experience more clearly I want to capture the action of myself recording experience in the clay through the photograph, to document the physical involvement of a relationship to material.

In 2022 I made a series of eight ceramic sculptures after surgery and treatment for the collapsing and permanent paralysis of my esophagus, a very rare condition that left me very thin and very confused about the idea of experience. The sculptures were products of my disorientation, they were fixed in a perpetual performance by the clay, documenting the moment the material hardened. I left the marks of my confusion and anxieties along within the material, and the porcelain that dried offered documentation, a form from my personal history. But I didn't see my experience in the hardened shapes, only the consequence of it. By capturing myself and my body in this way I hope to understand the experience better as a moment, not fixed time, and no longer see the material or object as static but fluid and operatic.

( Crit 2 )Internal Gestures Nov 14, 24

Process 1

1st round of studies

Process Video No. 2

Second round of studies.

Crit 2, Nov 18

Third Round Process Film :

Third Round Projection Stills :