Opening: Amelia Lockwood: Rose Pit

Rose Pit is Los Angeles based artist Amelia Lockwood’s second solo exhibition with The Valley. In this body of work, Lockwood continues to develop a relationship with atmospheric firing methods, in which chemical reactions take place in the kiln that blush, char, and burn the surface of the clay. By allowing the color, texture, and surface quality of clay and glaze to be determined by the conditions present during the firing, the privileging of chance becomes a collaborative tool.

Suspended between the mortal and the mythical, the pastoral and the cosmic, inverted blossoms pose the unresolved question: where do they belong? Reaching skyward, seeking sustenance or guidance from above, they fuse the terrestrial with the extraterrestrial. Earth, water, fire, and air become their channels of transformation, conduits dissolving categorical hierarchies. Here, elemental orders collapse, axes skew, and orientation loosens grip. Rose Pit unsettles spatial logic, proposing a world where direction is not a fixed coordinate but an open negotiation.

Amelia Lockwood (b.1990, Stroudsburg, PA) is an artist who primarily works with ceramic to produce sculptures that reference sites of collective exchange: celestial, geological, psychic, and architectural. She received her BFA from Syracuse University (2012), completed post-bac studies at the University of Colorado, Boulder (2016), and received her MFA in Ceramics from The University of California, Los Angeles (2020).