L Autumn Gnadinger—
Untested Spiritual Gestures

Ceramics have long been the core of Louisville native L Autumn Gnadinger’s practice. Gnadinger recently completed a two-year Core Fellowship at North Carolina's prestigious Penland School of Craft where they also began making works on paper and using various fibers and other found materials. This exhibition introduces these new works, all of which are centered around an imagined character - a kind of proxy for the artist themself - suggested by a handcrafted white vestment. The vestment, which has been sized specifically to fit Gnadinger’s body, and other mysterious sculptural objects suggestive of horns, vessels, and devotionals, speak of otherness, of ceremonies and rituals both fictional and familiar and of an urgent exploration of a personal cosmology that revises the artist’s devout Roman Catholic upbringing while establishing the agency of a self-declared identity.

Both ceramics and fiber have connotations of the domestic, the utilitarian. Gnadinger describes themself as “drawn to an anti-modernist idea of making ceramics,” which could be characterized by an earnest commitment to functionality and usefulness, yet their work challenges, if not disregards, those notions. Gnadinger’s objects, seemingly possessed with their own self-determined history but lacking any traditional cultural baggage, exist in a plane separate from the mundanity of the every day. Contemplative, lyrical, elegant, even mournful, Gnadinger’s objects and artifacts, some of which reference quantum scale physics, represent a kind of emended mythology of the unknowable and also reflect the artist’s challenging experiences as a bisexual and gender nonconforming person living in a conservative environment. Devotionals in search of a creed, relics desirous of believers, these works neither promise healing, nor that such a thing is even possible, but they exist as instruments to nurture metaphorical experiences in an effort to find meaning and a sense of belonging.

—John Brooks

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