My materials are my work. I piece them together, following a set of intuitive rules that I continuously break. I instate systems that confuse them. I take them apart and put them back together again, pushing them to bend and change, become and re-become, as I present them with myriad possible lives. They develop resilience to my touch. They are structural, skeletal, and jury-rigged. They are precarious and worn. They know me and I know them.
I am particularly interested in our built environment and how it reflects and reinforces our social ones. As a queer person in America, I am further invested in untangling my own relationship to building culture, gender expectations, and unconscious bias. My investigation of these systems revolves around fostering intimacy with common building materials and redefining their functionality and purpose. The resulting objects exist in an undesignated space between familiarity and disorientation.
Emily Swanberg (she/they) is a queer visual artist based in St. Paul, MN who is influenced by the materials and processes inherent to building and architecture. Her work investigates the intimacy and materiality of building labor and the ways in which it links to larger social and natural systems.
Swanberg earned her MFA from University of Minnesota - Twin Cities and her BFA in Studio Art and BA in Psychology from Bethel University. Her work has been included in various exhibitions, including the 2018 Masters Show at Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design in Dundee, Scotland. She has also received various honors and awards, including the 2019 Outstanding Student Achievement in Contemporary Sculpture Honorable Mention Award from the International Sculpture Center. She currently works at the Minneapolis Institute of Art.