Crater Powers
they/he/it
Brooklyn, NY, USA
Carter “Crater” Powers is a Brooklyn-based interdisciplinary sculptor who earned their BFA with a minor in Visual and Material Studies at the School of Museum of Fine Arts. Utilizing a diverse range of technical skills— including ceramics, woodworking, metals, fibers, and digital fabrication— he creates speculative functional objects using experimental craft processes. His work resists legibility and categorization by amalgamating characteristics from various types of furniture to construct forms that feel simultaneously familiar and alien. Their work has been shown in galleries across the East Coast including Silvermine Art Gallery, Abigail Ogilvy Gallery, Boston Center for the Arts, and the Provincetown Art Association and Museum.
“My practice revolves around abstracting the human form as a way of processing my queer embodiment. I’m interested in creating objects that resist hegemonic modes of design that center cis-heteronormative identities and relationships. I explore how shared experiences of ostracization can act as a pathway to connection and can allow queer individuals to defy the suppression of their identities. An interdisciplinary approach to craft is central to my work as a way of resisting the gendered associations of craft and exploring political potential as a mode of queer world-building.”
How does your work relate to the theme connection?
“My work explores trans intimacies regarding both self-embodiment and interpersonal dynamics. As a trans person, my survival is reliant on the love and vulnerability I share with the queer people I have built community with. The exchange of personal narratives has empowered me to find belonging in spite of a political climate that has grown increasingly hostile towards transgender existence. Connection through platonic, romantic, and sexual intimacy has allowed me to cultivate a sense of comfort in the fact that I am not alone in these feelings of ostracization resulting from the choice to realize myself through medical transition and self-fashioning. Jewelry lends itself to this idea due to its visible placement on the body. Self-fashioning is incredibly powerful in this sense as queer subculture has a visual language that signals our embodiment to others, such as carabiniers or in a traditional sense, hanky codes.
The necklace is a reliquary to trans love, joy, and camaraderie. The ambiguous creature motif references the kinship I feel with animals due to their lack of gendered expectations. Furthemore, they are unable to be identified as a specific animal, relating to the ways I understand my own embodiment outside of binary terms. Yet, these two creatures are united through mutual love and acceptance, they share an understanding of one another through the ways in which they are othered. An earnest, unbridled love for one another’s weirdness and difference is what has made queer community feel like home to me.
The band aid earrings are a reflection on modes of care regarding my queerness. Specifically, it alludes to my commitment to cultivating myself by pursuing HRT. This choice is one of the ultimate forms of self care I perform for myself. Yet I consider other forms of body modification, such as piercings, to be gender affirming care as well which is why I chose the earring form. Similarly, piercings and injectable HRT are administered through a puncturing of the body with a metal needle, revealing the permeability of the body in order to alter its form."
"the best part of love is when you say you’ll be my friend", copper, brass, patina, 22.5" long, pendant 4" x 4" x .25", 2023What role does connection play in your creative process?
“Working as an interdisciplinary craftsperson, my work melds multiple mediums in order to build a relationship between disparate materials. In this sense, I view my process as an act of queer worldbuilding, learning to work across multiple disciplines and finding ways to bring them together into a cohesive whole. My multifaceted craft-based practice speaks to the way in which difference is something to be embraced, not feared, by merging mediums that require different levels of attention and care. This interdisciplinary quality mostly comes through in my work as a sculptural furniture fabricator and is less evident in my small metals work, but ultimately my desire to explore and understand the properties of various craft mediums has brought me to incorporating metals into my practice. In a conceptual sense, craft is the vessel through which I can express my nuanced and abstract understanding of gender, sexuality, and interpersonal bonds."
What connection(s) does your queerness make to the world around you?
“My queerness wholly shapes the way I move through and relate to my surroundings. I’m of the mind that most spaces and objects are not designed with queer people in mind. Largely, I think the built environment and mass-produced objects pander to a cis-hetoronormative ideal that has come to feel hostile to me. This discontent is what drives me to create objects that serve and reflect the lifestyle I have constructed for myself. Through making tangible objects, I am able to feel like me and my sensibilities have a place in this world. My target audience is other weird queer people that can see themselves in my work and feel as though it is possible for queer utopia to be constructed in the present rather than a distant future."
"Sticky", copper, silver, patina, .75" x .5" x .63" each, 2023
Anything else you would like to share about this work? This can be an important part of the process, sourcing materials, or research.
“These were the first pieces I created in the medium of small metals.
The band aid earrings were initially inspired by noticing a plethora of bandages stuck to sidewalks, oftentimes covering over cracks. I was touched by this as these discarded artifacts were symbolically bridging and healing these gaps and cracks. I’m fascinated by trash and found objects as I think it speaks to the ways in which queer life has historically been discarded and neglected on a systemic level. Finding purpose in detritus feels like a metaphor for queer survival and resilience. Furthermore, bandaids are a motif of my transness and medical transition. I always struggle to do my T-shot even though I yearn for the results of HRT, so I have gotten into the habit of purchasing fun looking bandaids in order to make the process more enjoyable, like when they would give you a sticker after a doctor's visit as a kid. Band Aids almost becomes an accessory itself in this sense. The band aid serves as a marker of medical transition. I always take notice of when my trans friends have a bandaid on their upper thigh or stomach as it is a visual indication of our decision to fully realize ourselves."