About the Projects

Aboubakar Fofana is a textile artist based between Paris and Bamako. His work utilizes traditional West African indigo dying techniques and is closely intertwined with spiritual practice. For Ground/work 2025, he has made two banangolos, “trees of life,” incorporating cotton and dye materials grown on his farm in Mali.

Yō Akiyama’s work explores the various properties assumed by clay after undergoing processes of intense heat and slow cooling. His Ground/work 2025 sculpture takes inspiration from the trees and earth of the Clark’s campus. Iron powder gives the work its rusty, yet lustrous finish.

Hugh Hayden is a sculptor from Dallas, based in New York City. His works often include complex spikes or branches extending from the base sculpture. Here he has created a ribcage of monumental proportions, a symbol of the fate we all share to merge ultimately with nature.

Javier Senosiain is an architect from Mexico City. Known for their organic approach, Senosiain’s buildings and sculptures assume the forms of living things. The serpent he has placed in Schow Pond alludes to the Aztec god Quetzalcoatl. Its glass mosaic skin reflects the colors of the surrounding landscape.

Laura Ellen Bacon is a maker of large-scale sculptures based in Derbyshire, in the United Kingdom. Her work at the Clark was made on site in willow, with each of its volumes representing one day of weaving. It gives the illusion of movement through space, interacting with the trees surrounding it.

Milena Naef is a Swiss sculptor born into a family of stone carvers. Her pieces are often made to fit precisely around her body, giving the illusion that she has been trapped inside the marble. Naef’s Ground/work 2025 sculpture binds together the artist’s body, two slabs of marble, and a fallen tree from the Clark’s campus.