BIOGRAPHY / Artist Statement
Photographed by Anne Burnam Shwartz https://www.anneburnhamschwartz.com
CV
Earth Ængel (they/them) creates from their own fluid experience, navigating a fantastical queer ecology through the dysphoria of hetero-centric late capitalism. Earth does not attempt to shame and scold these man-made values into submission but instead ingests them. They launder their consumption, laying by its deathbed—grieving, consoling the outcome—its funeral—and then resurrect it into the archive of predetermined aesthetics, bringing it into the queer afterlife. By examining the roots of aesthetics and material use in their empirical value, Earth Ængel uses heat-related practices to melt it all down.
Heat plays a pivotal role in Earth Ængel’s practice, acting as both a literal and symbolic force for transformation. Heat doesn’t just melt materials; it disintegrates rigid structures—whether societal expectations, cultural systems, or personal identity—and creates the possibility for new forms to emerge. Just as materials are softened, restructured, and remade, so too are the binaries of gender, identity, culture, and even economic or political systems reformed into something more fluid, open, and expansive. This process of melting and remaking allows for the regeneration of new possibilities for existence, where identities, systems, and ideas can be seen as dynamic, evolving, and resistant to fixed categories.
The totchkey, surface, or decorative elements, play an essential role in this vision. These often intricate embellishments go beyond ornamentation; they are markers of human complexity, resistance, and identity. The totchkey directly challenges the minimalist, modernist values often celebrated in contemporary design, which tend to erase or simplify identity and experience into a uniform, isolated form. Instead, Earth Ængel embraces decoration as a form of storytelling, a means of reclaiming space for the complexities and nuances of being. This decorative act speaks to a rejection of the exclusionary tendencies found in Modernism and Contemporary Art, and instead celebrates the fullness of human experience in a more Activated Art movement.
Earth Ængel is a recent MFA graduate of Goldsmiths University in London, having completed their undergraduate BFA at Parsons School of Design. They have received awards from The Arts Council of England, Cerf+, Goldsmiths University, and the NYC Parks Department to develop their work. Their pieces have been exhibited in New York, London, Mexico City, Chicago, and Cyprus. Earth Ængel lives and works in Brooklyn, NY, with their partner Rob Rose, where together they form the art duo Ængel-Rose.