V Walton and the Geology of Being at Hannah Traore Gallery

Installation view 2025, V Walton, Hannah Traore Gallery, New York, NY
 

By PATRICK RYAN BELL October 17, 2025

V Walton, an interdisciplinary artist based in Baltimore, MD, is one of the latest Baltimore-based artists putting the city on the map. Centered in ideas of embodiment and ecology, the work they’ve been producing lately has pushed the field of ceramics into examining its roots both literally and figuratively. Actual root structures—sometimes found, sometimes sculpted—exist in Walton’s work in tandem with the soil from which they were displaced. Working primarily in sculpture and installation, Walton uses materials from the earth to create scenes of nature and the body that exist outside of their original contexts. Much of the artist’s work is created with clay and ceramics, but Walton doesn’t just use these to make their art. They interrogate material relationships in a way that mirrors societal and interpersonal ties, drawing attention to the interdependencies that shape our sense of self.

Installation view 2025, V Walton, Hannah Traore Gallery, New York, NY

It is these literal and fabricated elements that create the environment for the geological processes that produce clay itself. Walton’s practice expands ceramics beyond vessel-making or formalist concerns, situating it as a relational practice between body, earth, and history.

I Find Rest is Walton’s first solo show in NYC and consists of a number of installations that set a stage for their video I Make My Way / Enter Into Another World (2025). Framing themselves within a lineage of artists like Ana Mendieta and Belinda Blignaut, Walton doesn’t just use themselves as a sculpting tool for soil and clay—they become the canvas. The installation See What I Become (2025) includes a kneeling figure without arms, replacing head, shoulders, and neck with roots that grow to a point just above where a head might be expected. The figure kneels in the center of a rectangular slab of earth, layered with iron-rich clay, dark brown soil, and patches of grass. Like the ceramic figure, tree branches rise from the soil, creating a sense that the viewer has been transported to a more natural and intimate setting than a gallery in NYC’s Lower East Side.

The rest of the gallery feels like a balance between an image stilled from Walton’s video work and distinct sculptural elements that, while discrete, remain in conversation with the artist’s body and “The Body” as an idea. I Feel God When My Hands Are in the Soil and the eponymous I Find Rest are the most individual works in the gallery. The former is divided horizontally, with the top formed of natural plant roots and the bottom a sculpted hand with root-like extensions, all covered in the ochre soil that pervades the show. This work recalls a soil line in its division between plant above and soil below, but with an inversion: instead of suggesting that humanity comes from the earth, the piece shows humanity acting as a root structure from which the natural world can grow and thrive. Walton would likely see this interconnectedness as a fluid oscillation between caretaker and cared-for, and the compositional choices lend themselves to reflection on one’s responsibility to the world. I Find Rest depicts a somber face with eyes shut, roots growing from the head and neck, extending outward. This piece evokes the image of a reclining Buddha, a figure at peace.

Installation view 2025, V Walton, Hannah Traore Gallery, New York, NY

Like Mendieta’s Ocean Bird (Washup) from 1974, where her body is present, or in her Siluheta series where the body is implied, Walton uses themselves as a central point of connection between body and earth. While Mendieta often created scenes that speak to a disconnect between past and present—particularly her absence from Cuba—Walton’s work feels more about connection. Kinship, stewardship, and “situating the human body as part of a greater, mysterious whole” are consistent themes in their practice, contrasting Mendieta’s more somber reflections.

In I Make My Way / Enter Into Another World (2025), slip, a liquid form of clay, and soil are coated onto the artist’s body. Walton lays on Black stewarded land in Owings, MD, at once creating a place to rest while shapeshifting into part of the environment. While much of their work centers on the interconnectedness of humanity and nature, this video manifests those ideas most literally. It opens with three glass vessels of iron-rich slip foregrounding a scene of Walton digging. At first the scene recalls grave digging, but it soon becomes clear Walton is creating something between a womb and a nest. It is a resting place, but not a final one. After a few minutes, Walton sits in the earth and pours slip across their body. The thin skin of material encases them completely, blurring the boundary between body and ecosystem. Once covered, they pull soil over their body. At this point in the video there is little difference between how Walton uses material on their body and how they use it on fired ceramic sculpture like I Feel God When My Hands Are in the Soil. One thing that stays true in Walton’s work is that layers remain central—whether geological strata, soil horizons, liquid clay or their own skin coated in earth.

Installation view 2025, V Walton, Hannah Traore Gallery, New York, NY

The metaphors of clay and body may feel familiar—ceramicists refer to “clay bodies,” potters to parts of vessels as lips, necks, shoulders—but Walton’s embodied relationship to the material is unique. Their work manifests an interconnectedness reminiscent of Heidegger’s idea of “Being-in-the-world.” Heidegger argues that Being-in is not an optional property of existence, but its essential state: one cannot separate person from environment. Walton voices a similar criticism of separateness, merging literal earthen material with their body and creating bodily sculptures with roots and branches extending outward. Through these approaches, Walton tackles Being-in-the-world from multiple angles.

Most recently, on September 21, Walton redesigned the Community Gallery in the Baltimore Museum of Art, reimagining the space in a way akin to their show at Hannah Traore Gallery. The BMA is currently centering works related to the environment with their initiative Turn Again to the Earth, which “encourages conversation and action around climate change and the role of the museum.” Walton’s work here consists of one installation and one single-channel video. The installation To Be of the Earth tears into the museum’s walls, exposing hidden strata and blending them with soil, dirt, and faux plants, echoing See What I Become. The soil and plant matter are situated opposite to a large, projected video, giving the viewer a sense that the environment created within the screen extends beyond into their own physical space. The video One Body continues Walton’s theme of intimate engagement with the earth, though more impersonal than I Make My Way / Enter Into Another World. It shows a hand digging and probing the ground, sometimes with sticks. Here, too, Walton plays with layers: in the overlay of multiple videos, and in the oscillation between climate crisis gravity and the childlike wonder of playing in the earth. The installation transforms the gallery from sterile cube into an active landscape, ecologically and spiritually rich. If I Make My Way / Enter Into Another World focused on the individual body at rest, One Body feels more related to collective experience and focused on human and nonhuman bodies entanglement within larger networks.

The BMA installation demonstrates Walton’s ability to adapt their practice to different scales and audiences. While the Hannah Traore show unfolded in the intimacy of a Lower East Side gallery, the BMA project situates their work within the broader discourse of contemporary institutions, bringing local concerns into conversation with global ones. Across both contexts, Walton insists that clay is not only a material but a living relation—a reminder that human presence is inseparable from the earth’s processes.

I Find Rest is currently on view at Hannah Traore Gallery through October 17th and Walton’s installation and video are on view at The Baltimore Museum of Art through March 6th.