Christine Gaffney is an interdisciplinary sculptor based in Dayton, Ohio. She holds an MFA from the California Institute of the Arts, where she studied Art and Technology and Integrated Media. She has also studied at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn and the Columbus College of Art and Design. She additionally holds a master’s degree in Library and Information Science from the University of Pittsburgh. Her practice explores body image, body politics, feminism, and disability justice. Gaffney works from her home studio as well as Rosewood Arts Center in Kettering, Ohio, and Queen City Clay in Cincinnati. Her work has been exhibited widely throughout Ohio and across the United States.


Statement

My practice centers on large-scale ceramic figures that depict bodies often excluded from idealization—fat bodies, aging bodies, bodies that resist polish, optimization, and legibility. These works function less as portraits than as anti-portraits: figures shaped through exaggeration, compression, and imbalance, where the body becomes a site for emotional and physical weight rather than realism.

Although my graduate school work was conceptually informed by artificial intelligence, I’ve moved away from AI in favor of slow, physical processes that keep the body—both mine and the figure’s—at the center of the work. Hand-building in clay allows gravity, pressure, surface, and time to actively shape form. Sagging, stacking, bulging, and settling are not corrected but emphasized. Distortion emerges through repeated touch and accumulation, making the sculpture an index of labor, hesitation, and care.

The figures I make are intentionally moody and grounded. Through scale, stillness, and density, they hold tension between vulnerability and quiet authority. Some forms feel compressed or contained; others appear to spill outward or rest heavily within themselves. I’m drawn to moments where the body feels deeply human yet slightly strange—familiar in its fleshiness and weight, but carrying something psychological or mythic, as if charged from within.

Across ceramics, painting, printmaking, performance, and sculpture I continue to investigate the body as a site of agency, intimacy, and lived experience. The body is sometimes fully depicted and sometimes fragmented or implied, with nudity operating as a shifting condition rather than a declaration. These fluctuations in visibility allow me to explore exposure, withholding, and the politics of being seen.

By centering bodies that are often marginalized or rendered invisible, my work creates space for complexity, tenderness, and reverence. In a culture saturated with polished images and resolved forms, I’m interested in what it means to let the body remain unresolved—to allow weight, excess, stillness, and time to assert their own authority. The studio becomes a place where the body is not corrected or clarified, but held—strange, imperfect, and quietly luminous.