Supporting Ground

Supporting Ground is the inaugural exhibition at Harm’s Reach, featuring works by Natalie Gerber, April Matisz, Francesco Pedraglio, and Shelby Charlesworth.

Supporting Ground brings together a group of artists whose works, in different ways, engage notions of support. Shelby Charlseworth (BFA '17, Painting) uses medical and bodily support devices as references for ceramic structures that in turn support bronze-cast worms. Francesco Pedraglio produces drawings of picture frames that support imagined, non-existent works of art. Natalie Gerber (BFA '03, Fibre and MFA '25, Craft Media) examines the impact of memory, perception, and performativity on embodied female experience. While "support" may be a more indirect reading of her work, her delicate suspended forms can be understood as remnants or traces of the psychological and performative structures that sustain identity. Finally, April Matisz’s work on motherhood speaks directly to the complex, demanding, and often invisible forms of support embedded within caregiving.

It should also be noted that Supporting Ground refers not only to the various forms of support explored by the artists, but also to the ground that makes relationship and community possible. Care is the often-unseen foundation of our lives, creating the conditions for connection. This understanding of support is central to Harm’s Reach: not simply as a physical structure or aid, but as a relational practice that makes community possible.

Aron Hill (BFA '00, Interdiscipinary Studies) has created a space that is not only human in scale but also accessible to the surrounding community. Harm’s Reach aims to foster a particular intimacy, one that allows for a reciprocal relationship between the artworks, the space itself, and the people who gather within it.