I’m happy you found the place.
GREETINGS,
My name is Dakota Dowding, and this is my artist website. I have to include some formal things like an artist statement and biography so that I pass this course; however, what I want is for you and me to be ourselves here. I’m not going to convince you of my work’s worth or that my reason for making is significant. I’m a serious person and artist, but not in the way that the following text would make you believe. I’m intense and passionate about one thing: having fun. It’s my mission: to have as much fun with the limited time that I’ve been gifted on this planet. So here’s my attempt at generating fun through a digitized and competitive space. I hope you enjoy it, but if you don’t, I hope you find something that makes you happy real soon.
BIOGRAPHY
Dakota Dowding is a mixed media artist from Dresden, Ohio, also known as Wakatomika: A Shawnee village that was destroyed by deliberate fire in 1774. Growing up, the engulfing landscapes of this area spellbound Dowding; the rolling hills, high grasses, dense forests, sharp rocks, rushing streams, and clicking critters were a consistent source of solace for him. He’d take himself to his neighborhood’s highest point, barefoot and on all fours, acting as a foraging animal: sniffing the soil, snacking on dewy grass, and trying to decipher the calls of crows. He still feels at home in this trance despite knowing he didn’t belong where he was. Dowding only started making work in 2022 and struggles to describe himself as an “artist.” Though he has generated works in ceramics, painting, drawing, sculpture, video, sound, and written word, he does not consider the results to be art objects; rather, he deems them as embodied, sensorial archives of his intense encounters, fragmented memories, current cognition, and transforming physicality. This process serves as an intuitive practice of self-reflection, meditation, and emotional processing. Dowding currently resides in Columbus, Ohio, and has exhibited these archives in Hopkins Hall Gallery, Hopkins Hall Project Space, and the Madison Journal of Literary Criticism. His current preoccupations are abstract drawing, lyric writing, poetry, apparel design, digital design, and music production.
ARTIST STATEMENT
I am unconcerned with artistic medium, concept, and reception. I make work like a grizzly gnaws his leg from a bear trap’s teeth. Like a child screams herself awake from a revisiting nightmare. Like a white tail crumbles after an arrow to the heart. I tear, punch, burn, spit, slash, strike, adhere, and destroy materials. An abstracted conglomerate of layers remains. A splintering wood frame bound by shreds of old t-shirts and blankets; raw, stringy canvas that’s soaked from spewed cherry spit; paper that’s enveloped by charcoal, paint, and wax, then crumbled and burned; a cumbersome snake of trash bound ceramic test tiles. They all reside in the dark. Art creation is my salvation; it takes the puke of my past without resentment and promises catharsis and consolation. It offers me the gift of navigation: to ebb into/out of remembrance and presence. It encourages me to indulge in my animality and to embrace the spawning of my messes. I refuse to tidy, tailor, frame, or explain the result of these processes, for they are honest archives of my exploration of self; they serve as pictures of the ceremonious permissions that art allows me. To be loud, to be scared, to be grieving, and to be guided.