A vessel that once held
now is learning to hold itself.

Primus (2024) is an exploration of dance, textiles, and clay’s movement possibilities and relationship to gravity.

It is named after American dancer, choreographer and anthropologist Pearl Primus. Just like Primus defied gravity with her five-foot-high jumps, these pieces are both falling and holding their stance. The clay opening, flapping, swaying, like the dancer’s clothes.

Among different sources of inspiration, Primus is known to have choreographed based on imagining the movement she observed in African sculpture. I move in the opposite direction — sculpting based on observed movement from Primus and other women dancers from the late XIX and XX centuries.

What’s inside becomes an integral, visible part of the whole.
We fall, we break.
We hold ourselves.
We stand up again.
Stronger. Wiser. Brighter.

Pearl Eileen Primus (November 29, 1919, Port of Spain, Trinidad—October 29, 1994, New Rochelle, NY, USA) was an American dancer, choreographer, anthropologist and teacher whose work drew inspiration from the African American experience and her research in Africa and the Caribbean.

Primus played an important role in the presentation of African dance to American audiences. Early in her career she saw the need to promote African dance as an art form worthy of study and performance.

Primus' work was a reaction to myths of savagery and the lack of knowledge about African people. It was an effort to guide the Western world to view African dance as an important and dignified statement about another way of life.