Artist Resume
Taja Jinnah is an interdisciplinary artist from Nexwlélexwm/Bowen Island whose visual arts practice plays with functionality, familiarity and queerness through interactive sculpture and everyday ceramica. Their past work also includes social practice with experience in the Big Rock Candy Mountain Project and in their involvement with Fibreshed Field School. In these experiences and in outdoor installations they have explored interspecies art interactions and trained in sustainable methods of making.
The transformation of human/nonhuman bodies and communities is something Taja studies in their work through the use of clay, performance, and tactile engagement. Symbiosis has a different role within each piece. The making process involves traditional ceramic hand-building techniques and the use of found objects as tools.
The traditional functional-ware enhances community interaction and is immediately comfortable to the hand, whereas the interactive sculptures are non-intuitive and need to be investigated by the viewer. These projects modify sensorial experience and examine how objects affect our movements, or take on a life of their own. This exploration of functionality relates to living with a disability, and draws on the queer art of failure