Vanessa Thill

Vanessa Thill is an artist based in New York. Her practice explores the ways that non-human systems animate our material and spiritual surroundings, implicating us all as perpetual collaborators with unknown forces. Her work highlights value-laden dynamics of contamination, shelter, and desire for transcendence. She makes sculptures by submerging paper in a bath of pigments, soaps, spices, and other found materials. After the pooled liquids evaporate and crystallize onto the paper, Thill applies a resin coat, creating a kind of earthly dermis. Thill makes her work within a mystical framework as a means of conceptualizing forms of divinity that are not grounded in domination.