Art making gives me authority to reshape reality and build in its place a world that I have agency and control over. My work explores the interaction between form and minimal surfaces/colors that elicit specific emotional responses, in order to interrogate personal and societal standards of beauty and value as they relate to notions of equity, representation, and lasting impacts on mental health. I’ve always found comfort in abstraction. Through abstraction, my work explores issues of social justice, mental health, equity, and access. Clay as a material and abstraction as a visual vocabulary both afford the ability to reconstruct reality. To mold clay is to exert one’s own will onto the physical earth around them, and through glazing and firing make real and permanent the object of one’s imagination. Using non-representational lines and shapes to make meaning invites the possibility of a single stroke to invoke an infinite number of historical, contemporary, societal or personal narratives in service of building a complex tapestry of conceptual actualizations that continues to reveal themselves to the viewer and the maker overtime. Making meticulous forms reclaims the agency stripped by being marginalized in institutions that work to entrench the unrelenting societal doctrine that my existence is less valuable than that of my “majority” counterparts.

A sphere is perhaps the most important form in my work. I consider a sphere the basic building block for many of my other functional and sculptural forms. I activate different ways to distort spheres to create distinctively new shapes for cups, bottles, bowls, and even plates. A sphere is perfect, symmetrical across every axis, infinite, demanding, and complete. Perfect spheres are rigid and strict in their dimensions, yet soft and inviting in their appearance. Being influenced by spheres, the contours of my pots are round, continuous, and particular. Growing up, many aspects of my life felt uncertain, insecure, insubstantial, and readily subject to change. By utilizing meticulous, round forms, I attempt to exert control over a highly variable medium, forcing a sense of closure and completeness in my work that eases the tension of not having this control in other aspects of life. I also employ bright color lines in my work, which has a positive psychological effect by inspiring a sense of joy and fulfillment that relates to larger issues of empathy that I explore in my practice. In endeavoring to make conscious the act of being empathetic, I am contributing to an overdue societal resurgence of investment in mental health and stability.

Deshun Peoples’ work explores the interaction between form and minimal surfaces in order to interrogate personal and societal standards of beauty and value as they relate to notions of equity, representation, and lasting impacts on mental health. He is drawn to the order and logic of specific geometry because it inspires a feeling of security, and he uses various colors in his work to ponder the psychological effect that color has on us: either bright colors that elicit a feeling of joy and wonder, or pale/muted colors that elicit a feeling of calm, melancholy, or introspection.

In his most recent work, Peoples reflects on his experiences as a Black, Queer man from an impoverished, urban background, speculating on the socio-political dimensions to his recent work’s mission to ‘take up space’ as an act of resistance, abruption, and reclamation. Using sculptural ceramic table settings, Peoples endeavors to catalyze a conversation about the role of new ideas and representation in traditional rigid systems, as well as branch into different modes of making. These include various industrial ceramic production techniques, and digital fabrication methods to conceive of new ways to expand the breadth of his ceramic practice.

Peoples has shown his work in solo and group exhibitions including, “Jingdezhen Pottery” a solo exhibition at Bates College Olin Arts Center, and group exhibitions at Rhode Island School of Design’s Woods-Gerry and Gelman galleries, Worcester Center for Craft, and Saratoga Clay Arts Center. Deshun Peoples received his dual BA in Studio Art and Rhetorical Theory and Criticism from Bates College in 2017 and his MFA in Ceramics from RISD in 2021. His honors include a Phillips Fellowship for International Research from Bates College, Apprenticeship with artist Theaster Gates, and a Fulbright Student Research Grant to study Chinese porcelain production and traditional design techniques in Jingdezhen, China.