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, proportionally deranged, haphazard, sideways, sometimes inside-out. Really, I mean that I’ve never viewed the body in a properly scientific way: rather, the body is a three-dimensional language. This is the perspective I try to weave into my practice: figurative sculpture as a way to explore how the human body relates to language and its expression/inexpression.
My own personal struggle with ‘two-dimensional’ verbalized language (both its understanding and expression) is inherent in my work. Melting, humanish figures combine with organic shapes to create indistinct and confused bodies that mimic the indistinction and confusion I often feel in the verbal world. Bright colours and dripping surfaces mirror the ways individual words sound to me. In a way, 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/unintelligible dimension.” -Aydlett