Bianca MacPherson: Selected works, 2025-2026
Existing between worlds requires navigating the projections of others while simultaneously constructing one’s own reality. As a mixed-race Black woman, I inhabit that space, negotiating the tension between visibility and erasure, belonging and ambiguity. This experience has become both the foundation of my practice and the lens through which I understand the world.
I work through historical and personal photography, illustration, and archival research to extract and abstract forms, contexts, and hidden patterns from the American landscape. I am interested in the quiet traces that reveal themselves through history, the layered memories and subtle presences that remind us that racial multiplicity has always existed. Through archival materials and my own familial histories, I explore perception, inheritance, and the ways identity is shaped by what is remembered, overlooked, or claimed as our own.
Rather than recreating these images, I use abstraction to loosen the certainty of the archive. I pull apart fragments, mirror forms, and distort imagery to create new relationships between history, memory, and perception. Abstraction allows these sources to move beyond documentation and become something more fluid, where multiple meanings can exist at once.
Clay became the material that could hold these questions. Its ability to move between fluidity and permanence mirrors the tensions I explore throughout my work. Through a slow coiling process, I build each sculpture layer by layer. The repetition is meditative, allowing the forms to develop intuitively over time. Rather than resolving these ideas, clay allows me to sit with them, giving form to uncertainty and inviting multiple interpretations.
In recent work, I have begun Rorschaching my forms, reflecting a fractured double consciousness. By duplicating, mirroring, and distorting images from historical sources, I fracture their original contexts while creating subliminal connections that persist through symmetry. The resulting sculptures exist somewhere between recognition and abstraction, asking viewers to consider how much of what they see comes from the object itself and how much comes from their own experiences, assumptions, and histories.
I work primarily in black and white, often color matching the archive from which the source inspiration emerges. This reductive palette mirrors the ways we often attempt to categorize and simplify identity, while simultaneously revealing the complexity that exists within those boundaries. The variations within these binary tones create space for contradiction, ambiguity, and the layered experiences that exist beyond fixed definitions.
Through both making and teaching, I move beyond the object itself, creating opportunities for deeper inquiry and conversation between material, history, and community. My work does not seek to provide answers or create a singular understanding. Instead, it invites viewers to embrace uncertainty, question perception, and consider what becomes possible when we allow space for complexity.
Captions
- Crossed, 2026, Glazed Ceramic, 16” x 23” x 8”. Photo Courtesy of The Artist
- Sentinel Mother, 2026, Glazed Ceramic, 25” x 15” x 12”. Photo Courtesy of The Artist
- Learning From The Night Bird, 2026, Glazed Ceramic, 21” x 18.5” x 8.5”. Photo Courtesy of The Artist
- Tender in Tiers, 2026, Glazed Ceramic, White Gold Luster, 14” x 11” x 8”. Photo Courtesy of The Artist
- Tender in Tiers, 2026, Glazed Ceramic, White Gold Luster, 14” x 11” x 8”. Photo Courtesy of The Artist
- Touch Not The Cat, But a Glove, 2026, Glazed Ceramic, 20.5” x 16” x 11”. Photo Courtesy of The Artist
- Learning From The Night Bird, 2026, Glazed Ceramic, 21” x 18.5” x 8.5”. Photo Courtesy of The Artist
- The Standing One (Installation View), 2026, Glazed Ceramic, 16” x 15” x 11”. Photo credit: Andrew Castaneda Photography
- From Built To Breathing (Installation View), 2026, Glazed Ceramic, 23.5” x 13” x 10”. Photo credit: Andrew Castaneda Photography
- Sentinel Mother (Installation View), 2026, Glazed Ceramic, 25” x 15” x 12”. Photo credit: Andrew Castaneda Photography
- A Wish In The Grove, 2026, Glazed Ceramic, Black Sand, Metallic Pearls, 22” x 27.5” x 11.5”. Photo credit: Andrew Castaneda Photography
- From Built To Breathing, 2026, Glazed Ceramic, 23.5” x 13” x 10”. Photo Courtesy of The Artist
- The Standing One, 2026, Glazed Ceramic, 16” x 15” x 11”. Photo Courtesy of The Artist
- AIR 2026: COMPULSION at The American Museum of Ceramic Art, Pomona, California, 2026, Installation View, work by Bianca MacPherson. Photo Courtesy of The Artist
- Integration I, 2025, Glazed Ceramic, 14” x 11” x 12” (Multiple Views). Photo Courtesy of The Artist
- Pressure Points, 2025, Glazed Ceramic, White Gold Luster, 10” x 10.5” x 8”. Photo Courtesy of The Artist
- Braids Too Tight, 2025, Glazed Ceramic, 21” x 13” x 17”. Photo Courtesy of The Artist
- TenderHead (Solo Exhibition), 2025, Installation View. Photo credit: Alexis Oltmer
- Split Ends I, 2025, Glazed Ceramic, 30” x 17” x 16.5”. Photo credit: Alexis Oltmer
- Harmonic Divergence (Installation View), 2025, Ceramic Sculptures, Texture Glaze, Wood Hanging Sandbox, Black Sand, Auto-body Metallic Flakes, Black Chain, Soundbite on Plexiglass, (Left) 17” x 12.5” x 16.5”, (Right) 14” x 11.5” x 13”. Photo credit: Alexis Oltmer
