Pollock Gallery

Grace Sachi Troxell

The Body Outside The Body
September 11 - December 6, 2026

Visiting Artist Lecture and Opening Reception
Friday, September 11 from 5 - 7 p.m.
Pollock Gallery, Expressway Tower

Grace Sachi Troxell comes from a lineage of Japanese and Pennsylvania Dutch ceramicists. She uses clay, steel, and found objects to explore entanglements between organic and inorganic materials, form and deformity, ritual and grief. By combining hand building and casts of her family and vegetables, she is constructing a speculative archaeology. She is assistant professor of Ceramics at Georgia State University.

Troxell received a B.S. in Studio Art from Skidmore College, a post-graduate certificate in painting from the Glasgow School of Art and an M.F.A. from Cornell University. She has been an artist-in-residence at Skowhegan; Sharpe-Walentas; MacDowell; Yaddo; The Houston Center for Contemporary Craft; Sculpture Space; the Studios at MASS MoCa; Woodstock Byrdcliffe; Willapa Bay AiR; The Pottery Workshop in Jingdezhen, China; Dumfries House, Scotland; and Daugavpils Rothko Center, Latvia. Troxell’s work has been included in exhibitions in New York City at Swivel Gallery, Hesse Flatow, Wave Hill, Bridget Donahue, Jack Hanley, Open Source, 125 Maiden Lane and Alison Bradley Projects. She has also been included in exhibitions at The Johnson Museum of Art, Neighbors, String Gallery, Cohen Gallery, Blunk Space, Haw Contemporary, shedshows, and the Hartnett Gallery, among others.

Artist Statement

I think about vegetables a lot. I love them, I worship them, I want them to heal me, I want them to heal others, I worry they’ve lost their taste, their individuality, what makes them special, they are conforming, we are making them conform. In The Gleaners and I, Agnes Varda sorts through a pile of cast away potatoes, she zooms in on a potato that looks like a heart. She gets me.

In Yuriko Saito’s book Aesthetics of the Familiar: Everyday Life and World-Making, Saito proposes embracing more misshapen or ugly vegetables, approximately 1/3 of vegetables are discarded before they arrive at supermarkets for aesthetic rather than nutritional reasons.

By casting my family and vegetables, I am making a speculative archaeology trying to discover and reimagine the future. I find myself drawn to Paul Thek’s Technological Reliquaries, Tetsumi Kudo’s Cages, Adrían Villar Rojas’ Today We Reboot the Planet, and Alina Szapocznikow’s bodily amalgamations, especially Belly-Cushions.

Big Belly Deli, Tentacular Tummy is named after a gas station that acts as a marker on a trip I often make to my parent’s house and Donna Haraway’s ideas of Tentacular Thinking. The tentacles in this case act as a skeleton, a support and a display. This piece calls upon family members and vegetables to create new forms of knowledge. A long-lost auntie’s face is the only fully recognizable figure but is swept into the cacophony where the line between turnip and breast is blurred.

In Pile, Heartache, and this pot is made of earth and when it breaks, my father laughs vessels made of pit fired casts of family members, a long-lost aunt, my mother, my father, myself, vegetables from my garden, intermingle and are contained in a steel armature. This steel becomes at once a fruit basket, cage, line drawing, and a porous sac within a larger intestinal system. In Viscous Porosity in Material Feminisms Nancy Tuana questions, “the boundaries between our flesh and the flesh of the world.” In my work, glaze and stains are both painterly and toxic. They oscillate between bodily organs, toxic chemicals and charring via pit firing to collapse the internal and external.

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