2025:

Beyond what I know

WISH list:

- phenol peel

- cock block (sold out!)

- rug for bedroom, NOT IKEA. 

- more handkerchiefs, cotton, for sweat

- under-eye bags procedure 

- more plants for bedroom: ferns?

- own studio, own kiln

- books: David Nash, Chamberlain, Bove

- air purifier vs humidifier? 

- new shoes

- new swim gear

- someone to help with my dreads, AND not ruin them

- danish drivers license 

- visa; urgh

- PECS, ABS, Read: RIPPLING

- B I G G E R  H A N D S (@itzek), HOW? Manual labour?

- Yixing residency

- Sogetsu containers: moribana

- My hands and feet to not sweat, like, all, the, time

- selected for Loewe craft competition (WISHing!)

- beats headphones

- to be heard

- to be seen

- to be revered

- to not be pigeon-holed, again, by all my minority boxes

- to have a parents that will visit me 

- make bigger and bigger pots

- make teapots

- commes des garcons cologne

- a means to fund Seattle firing

- Funding for Eesti

- V&A fellowship.

- new friends, new FRIEND - not picky 

- pass PD3 

- all day honeymoon sex

- contentment

Amen

Keenan Vaughn Julies

København 19/12/2024

Artist Diatribe 2024

Working hard, pouring one’s soul and sweat into a work, completing it in jubilation and only to discover HUGE fucking cracks in the masterpiece. Sigh. Back to the beginning, reclaim the clay, do not collect 200. Chalk it up to not having learnt enough about physics in Art School. Attempt at stringing a sentence in English correctly when every day is a jumble of dansk datid eller førnutid. What do they teach us there anyway at these so called institutions of “higher” education?

Nothing of particular day-to-day value. No wonder artists can’t get a JAY OH BEE after graduating. B- in YOGA @FashionInstituteofTechnology

Yet I feel this year to be different and pivotal. It shall not be without it its hardships, it is known. The older I get the more I know about myself and the less I pretend to know about life and this universe. I know I am a Great Artist and I take solace in that, even if I may live for eternity unknown for my talents. I am great because I say so and don’t give up. An Art career is about stamina (and deep pockets.) 

What you are willing to sacrifice in order to see your visions materialise? No one gives us a roadmap of how to get to where we are supposed to go. All we get is judgment and criticism, unless recognition one day arrives and you are bestowed with everyones’ praise of always having believed in you. The voyage is perilous, society thinks we sit around and jerk off all day. Jerk off, yes, but unfortunately not all day. 37 and the prostata is just not quite the same.

Apply, apply, apply. Rejections like waves over you. It never seems to get easier, I continue like a gambler, stealing & lying in order to hedge bets because I have no other choice than to believe in miracles and divine grace. I pray. I work hard, and I believe in the the power of good work. Where is my audience? What is a day off? When can I get studio space? Someone, anyone, tell me what the heck I am supposed to do next. 

The lesson is to not be what I am not. I am a vessel maker. I am African and not Japanese. I shall walk through the back-doors which are open to me and continue with pride. I seek new virgin ground and scorch the fucking bridges behind me. I’m unfriendly, selfish and greedy. I yearn to feign being European and in defiance my curls zig-zag outwardly like an infectious disease. No amount of swimming will suck in my droopy under-eye bags. I want to make pots that defy sensibility and express skill and elegance.

I don’t make cups and I don’t make content either. 

I’m curious about building big shit, I want to present my portfolio to Chinese Art collectors in Chinese, I want six-pack abs and I want to be an alien Messiah. I want to walk into a room and make others shudder by my work ethic. I want assistants and a direct line to Bolia and Sothebys.

I want my list of wants to be more ridiculous every year I stick around this place. 

Thank you, Amen

Med Venlig Hilsen

Keenan Vaughn Julies - København 01/2024

Artist Statement 2023

København

“I hardly know thyself.”

Head shorn, under-eye bags baggier, gut & butt a tad squishier, greys aplenty and undecipherable noises roll over me as I step out the front door.

            Who the heck am I? Why do I strive to be an Artist day a f t e r day? Climbing an escalator going down. Hand luggage will not fit overhead. Diarrhea the day after Christmas. Stale rugbrød: frozen and defrosted. Another job quitted. Hygge-cide: HELP.

Often the weight is too much to bear. Is it freedom or is it entrapment this new chapter of my life, as I cling to the old me like a shed snakeskin. A useless wisp of smoke. This new Me slithers out unrecognizable – a complete stranger. I, the real Me, stands here looking at him and I don’t know what to think or feel.

Vessels are my salvation - the one fucking thing I am able to cling to like a (cultural) refugee being deported back to lands long since called home, places forcibly forgotten, never embraced there – not welcomed here and yet it’s hard to deny our origin. Our skin as irrefutable evidence. Pottery dots the landscapes and rooms of my past lives. As I mutate, do I schlep the things I own on my back. Don’t bother to save my phone number.

            Each piece left behind factual proof I was once there; evidence of my existence.

I flit about, I fear for my future yet I flirt with fire and flowers. My practice is less about routine and more about ritual. Spiritual versus sanitation. I obsess about details and totally forget the big picture. I live within the process, each movement a meditation radiating deep into the cosmos. My quest is to uncover a dialect that can aptly convey what it means for Me to wear a hairnet, and shine.

“I love thyself.” Keenan Vaughn Julies 2023

Artist Statement 2022

It has been said that my work feels African. At first I took slur at this, I was shocked and slightly offended. I may have even gasped. On second breath I realized this to be true and I now carry this banner proudly.

            Yes, my work is African. Even if I often feel I am not African enough by African standards. Africans created pottery, whether we all want to admit it or not and I am here to stake claim for what rightfully belongs to us of the Brown skin-tones.

Step aside, I am here.

Look at what I make. Tell me my point of view is not valid.

This is what contemporary African ceramics and glass looks like. We too have taste, sense of design, proportion and elegance. My work stems from an intuitive centre. I embrace that I am a self-taught Artist. I feel the clay –  not think the clay. I slap it, I beat it into submission like my slave forebearers were beaten into submission. I even burn the shit out of it. I bury my sins in the bowels of fire.

Yet, here I stand. Each work is a testament to our innate resilience to go on.

I cannot think with shoes on, I do not comb my hair. I create my most powerful pieces when I am topless or in the nude. I work on the floor – I need to be close to my work. Intimate and in unison, this is a capoeira between earth and animal. Battle disguised by dance. I do not move the piece, I move around it. It is the centre. I don’t know how to verbalize why I make my work, or why I pick a particular form but I do know what my work is about. Each piece is my testament to surviving the day before, expressing human emotion through the consolidation of sculpture. I want my work in your home, where it can haunt and delight you every (f.u.c.k.i.n.g.) day.

When I look at my vessels or arrangements what I train my eye to sculpt is not the volume and mass but the profile. I am seduced by its silhouette, how it touches and talks to the surface which it sits upon. I envision wind swirling around it. My hands are waves crashing against a craggy cliff. The two are in constant dialogue with each other. They cannot exist without the other.

For me, I work with vessels as I see it as a dimensional language that allows me to distill unanswerable questions into digestible chunks. Really, a bowl or vase is not one shape but two spaces. It consists of the outside and the inside with the rim as the portal between two vastly different worlds. Rims are everything to me. My process from start to finish is physical yet nuanced. I add and then I subtract. The process is the work. Each vase imbued with my sweat and impregnated by my tears.

If you made it this far in reading, I must have done something right.

Artist Statement 2021

In my practice I do not work with clay, I commune with mud and sacrifice to fire.

I am a sculptress who stands, squats and kneels before her offerings. Often I just gaze at them. It is a bodily, shamanistic experience.

            Before I commence, I research like a devotee. I speak in tongues as I envision the shape and form. Each nuance is a pilgrimage in colour or a desire to capture an ingrained primitive attitude. But, whilst I create I don’t analyze much − I love, I worry, I feel desperate, I feel sensual, I obsess about the shape of my toes, whichever idiosyncrasy I am enslaved to in the moment. Each vessel is my meagre attempt to hold on. Each step is to walk on the precipice between primal and design, flirting between communistic control and nipples-out abandon.

            The provocativeness of touch forms my springboard. Things start one way and then I get lost, I drown. Then I salvage through my own language.

            Before my pieces, as Grand Jurors, do I stand.

Keenan V Julies