Attempting the Impossible O’Steen enjoys exploring relationships in her work – between herself and the landscape; between time and measure; and how our experiences within those places warp and realign those relationships. With each exhibit, she indirectly asks the audience to “take on an active role,” internally moving among O’Steen’s understanding of a place, the research or history behind that places, and their understanding of it based on what they are overall experiencing in the exhibit.


COMING UP ROSES


Claudia O’Steen’s esteemed art career began in a garden.


O’Steen’s grandfather grew roses of all different colors in his garden in Florence, Alabama. Her grandmother would cut a single stem, put it in a bud vase and set it on the kitchen table, where O’Steen would sit and draw the roses on plain white paper with a no. 5 pencil.


But she never felt the confidence and comfort to call herself an artist until she became a student at Watkins College of Art.


“I have been making art for as long as I can remember,” said O’Steen, Winthrop’s newest Outstanding Junior Professor and one of Art- Connect’s most recent ‘Artists to Watch.’ “I was encouraged [at Watkins] to share my ideas and aesthetic interests with many of the teachers who helped expand my technical skill and develop my


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CLAUDIA for O’STEEN


artistic methodology. The first artwork that I con- sider to be the work that began my current trajec- tory was my undergraduate thesis installation.”


In addition to her B.F.A. in studio arts from Wat- kins, O’Steen also holds an M.F.A. in digital + me- dia from the Rhode Island School of Design and completed coursework in art history and design at the Cité Internationale Universitaire de Paris. She’s also been awarded residencies at Rural Projects, The Wassaic Project, Montalvo Arts Center, The Arctic Circle, The National Centre for Contemporary Art and more.


She has exhibited stateside—the Atlanta Con- temporary and INT’L Paperworks in North Dakota being some of the most recent—and internation- ally: the Bath Photography Festival in the United Kingdom; the Festival of Lights in Sweden; the Lacuna Festival in Spain; and the Salamanca Arts Centre in Australia, just to name a few.


“I develop tools to document my activities and my efforts at understanding the changing landscape, to isolate mistakes and record failures, and to reveal phenomena,” she said. “Seeing, counting, and measuring are ways of understanding. Creating tools to record and quantify these measurements allow me to understand them in relation to myself.”


For example, in one of her current collaborations, O’Steen studied the effects of climate change on Lake Superior and the Great Lakes System at the Keweenaw Observing Station. She and her collaborator, Aly Ogasian, created portable sculptures that also function as observational instruments, measuring wind, waves, visibility, water level and temperature.


“Growing up, I always wanted to be an artist or a paleontologist, which makes sense with my current art practice, because it involves a lot of fieldwork,” she continued. “Because my work is often site-specific, projects usually unfold in phases.”


Those phases: conducting research in her studio; visiting the site for in-depth fieldwork; returning to the studio to reflect on the relationship between the two; and experimenting with a variety of media and materials. The typical result? A unique integration of fieldwork, sculpture, digital media, drawing, video and performance, which O’Steen then takes back to the landscape – “a very cyclical process.”


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O’Steen does not fear failure in her artistic en- deavors and sometimes even embraces it, often attempting things she knows to be impossible. She considers each experience as a step along the journey, like when she created analogue instruments to record tidal changes in Russia, knowing the data would reflect human error.


Encouraging Experimentation O’Steen joined the Winthrop community in 2018 and has developed courses emphasizing both digital media and interdisciplinary studies; worked across departments on projects strengthening different artistic expressions; and created a new concentration in expanded media.


With her aforementioned interest in relationships, she has a new one to explore: the symbiotic one between practicing art and studying art.


“In my practice and in my teaching, I move back and forth from analogue to digital and back again, and I encourage students to look outside the field of art for inspiration in their work,” she said. “I also encourage a lot of experimentation. The goal with this is to get students to move fluidly between making and thinking, so that they begin to find analogy between their research and the things that they are making.”

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