Service - Jen Aitken and Mira Dayal

Service

Jen Aitken in conversation with Mira Dayal

Jen Aitken: Courtyard
January 9-20, 2026
Nine, 9 Monroe St, New York, NY 10002
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Monday, January 5, 18:48
Nine, 9 Monroe St, New York, NY 10002

JEN AITKEN WITH MIRA DAYAL

MIRA DAYAL: Oh wow, have you been firing and welding stuff in here?

JEN AITKEN: Yes! I fired the ceramics in Toronto and brought them with me, but the welding I did here in New York.

MD: That is amazing.
I’ll start with a process question about the armatures and the slabs. I imagine as you’re making these, there’s some amount of making an armature for the armature? Or how do you prop them up before you weld them?

JA: I just trial-and-error it. Weld something. Don’t like it, rip it off.

MD: Okay. So you clamp things together on the table and then weld them quickly in place and then take the clamp away?

JA: Yeah.

MD: So are you starting with the rods that go through the ceramic slabs and then working towards the feet?

JA: Yes. I start by making each ceramic component a kind of metal grip, or a vest. Something the rest of the armature can then be welded onto.

MD: So these skewers or ties that go into the holes happen first, and then you add from there.
JA: Yeah.

MD: That’s fun to think about, because visually the armatures look like stands that the ceramics are hung on. Like the stands or feet came first and then the slabs got attached onto them. But actually the metal structures are determined by the holes in the ceramics. I’m reverse-engineering them when I’m looking at them.

JA: I like that. Do you also always try to figure out exactly how something was made when you look at it?

M: Yeah, always, and it’s wild to realize some people aren't doing that. I’m doing it here with your work especially because the two materials are finished or made solid in different ways. The steel wouldn’t go into the kiln, it would probably melt, right?
JD: Yes I think clay fires at a way higher temperature than metal melts.
M: Your drawings—were they made in tandem with the sculptures as part of the process?

JA: I made them here at the same time, but they developed separately. And just by nature of being made in the same moment—the drawings and the sculptures have a parallel kind of mark making or energy, a sort of leaning into a form but not really ever quite being a form.

MD: It’s really fun to see the drawings layered on top of each other too, because it kind of builds up the forms. The repetition of marks with the layers creates more of a volume than if you were just looking at one drawing.
JA: Yeah, the layering is new. It feels more analogous to a sculpture.

MD: And there’s a sense of depth also—an almost photographic depth, you know? Where the “background” is in softer focus…
JA: Yeah, yeah.
MD: I want to talk more about line. I’m curious about the relationship between the steel rods and the ceramic components they’re inserted into, how that emerged. Were the rods anticipated by the holes in the ceramics? And in the drawings, there are a lot of straight lines too; how did those lines become a structuring element of the drawings?

JA: When I started these drawings I was using a more translucent paper, and my lines would bleed through two or three pages and make these little dots. And then I would start the next drawing on the already marked up page. And they looked kind of like Morse code things with lines and dots, and that started to become a language.
The sculptures just started as solid slabs—the holes came way later. After working with them for a while I felt the slab was too closed. And I wanted a way to make it receive another material. So the holes came in anticipation of the rods, yes. And then there was a nice relationship in the mark-making of the work, where the lines are positive marks and the holes are negative marks.

MD: Procedurally, I also wanted to ask about the relationship between the ceramic process and the steel process. You mentioned in your notes that you sent me that the splatters of glaze are in relation to the splatters of the welding heat marks.

JA: Yes—I’m just so wary of ceramic getting decorative or too painterly. As a sculptor, it’s important that everything is a procedure, not just an arbitrary add-on. It’s a natural thing to add glaze to ceramic—but it just looked so decorative every time I tried it before. And then the welding spatter that gets burned onto the surface of the ceramic slabs allowed me to sneak in some glaze spatters. It’s still decorative, but it’s sort of piggybacking on the very undecorative welding marks, so it feels less arbitrary.

MD: And it takes you back into a drawing language, it brings you back to mark-making. It produces this other kind of visual information, and almost makes it seem like the sculptures could be studies of your drawings, you know?
Let’s talk about the idea of the courtyard. I like the idea of a space within a space. We’re inside, in the gallery, but this is also like an outside that we are inside of. I wondered what else you were thinking about.

JA: I was thinking about landscape architecture, and the table being a kind of terrain. Architecture that’s compressed and flattened. I was very into brutalism for a long time—the way one building flattens out into terrain and then becomes another building. The plaza is like the connective tissue of Brutalist architecture. And a courtyard feels like inside-out-ness to me. There’s something about this platform I built that feels exterior.

MD: Going back to your notes, I want to ask about the idea of the stage or the diorama, and the works being like figures on the stage. The recesses in this table you built at the center of the show make the table feel like this overall landscape—or an overall structure that complicates the relations between things.

JA: I see the table like a kind of stage, which I think comes from me leaning more into making figurative sculpture. These works are still very abstract, but they’re way more figurative than anything I’ve ever done, and the title of them being Dancers allows for that reading even more. It made sense to show them as a group, like they’re all in some kind of story together or a relationship or an event or some situation. And the scale of the whole installation is like an architectural model, which I’ve done before. The scale model implies a kind of planning—outlining and demarcating space—an organizational strategy—and at the same time, it creates a kind of theatrical arena. It’s both things.

MD: I think the idea of the set or the diorama is interesting, because of course a lot of your work is much larger scale than these pieces, or takes up an entire room. So in a way it feels like these could be studies for larger sculptures. But I also think the idea of the diorama or stage is different than just a scale model because it feels less about implied scale and more about imaginative space. There’s less specificity to the idea of this being a stage set where the relative scale isn’t really what’s important; it’s more about relationships among parts or allowing other things to happen.

JA: Yeah, nothing stays put in that way. I never want my work to have a single interpretation.

MD: How did you think about the actual relative placement of things and the relationship of the drawings to the sculptures within the stage?

JA: That was more straightforward. It just felt like making a gallery within a gallery. I was imagining your eye moving through the space the way your body would if the work was scaled to the whole room. It’s a pretty clean grid arrangement, and the column in the gallery is kind of shooting through it all.

MD: Yeah, that’s fun. It echoes what’s happening in the sculptures. It’s good to incorporate the column rather than ignore it.

JA: The table had to be quite low. I thought it’d be nice to have more variation, but the low ceilings in the space just didn’t really allow for that.

MD: And this feels more like hand-height—like it’s meant for manipulation or like you could pick up the drawings like scripts and read them, you know?

JA: Yeah, I was also thinking of the drawings as reflections or pools, like if the whole thing is a scale model of a sculpture garden, the drawings read like little water features.

MD: That’s nice, yeah. They also make me think of excavations. They’re like digging or scratching, or like piles of twigs.
There’s something much more raw and elemental about them. They’re like the basic components that make the sculptures. Like in the film you included at the entry to your show at the Power Plant, which introduced the visual vocabulary for the sculptures beyond. It’s like, “here’s the language and then here’s the sculptures.”

JA: Yeah, the drawings are like the form or the language in its pure abstract sense, which then takes on dimension and texture and weight in the sculptures, but stays in this suggestive space. And the sculptures are just one version of what that language could become in real space.

MD: They also made me think of Ursula Le Guin’s maps. She would draw maps before writing one of her stories. I was reading a book earlier today that included illustrations of all these maps that she drew, and different people reflecting on the use of maps in her writing. There’s something nice about that too, thinking of the installation as this kind of very abstracted map, and then the work like characters on the stage—there is something sci-fi about the sculptures too, you know? They even feel a little bit like creatures in a dystopia, or maybe they’re still incubating—things coming to life or structures to potentially inhabit.

JA: The combination of metal and ceramic maybe reads like an organic and technological hybrid.

MD: I was also looking at some of the other work that you were referencing in your notes—the Fontana ceramics with slashes through them, which have a kind of violence to them. Which is maybe not the intention here—there’s a visual softness in terms of the palette being light and reflective and airy overall—but there is something kind of gory with all these punctures and things impaling other things, or being put in a potential state of collapse and fragility.

JA: Mostly I feel a kind of vulnerability in them, and an intimacy between me and the form, and between the two elements in each piece. There’s this recurring pair in each work—the drawings are pairs and each sculpture has two ceramic components. It feels like there’s intimacy and vulnerability within each pair. But to read it as violent is—maybe revealing.

MD: You wrote to me about a sense of vulnerability in terms of choosing a different way of working—trying to not have as much of a framework ahead of time and being more guided by materials. Do you want to elaborate on that? What led you to that process, is that related to the kind of vulnerability that you’re talking about?

JA: I think it’s related, yes. For a long time I was using this geometric vocabulary where everything conformed to 90 degrees and 45 degrees and these segments of circles. And I combined those elements into different compositions with different materials. Whether it was a solid cast volume or a two-dimensional plane or a line drawing in space—all those strategies conformed to this language. And that was generative for a long time, a way to make things belong to a cohesive world. It acted like a language so each piece and each body of work would accumulate a kind of sentence structure or syntax.
And then it culminated in that animation you mentioned at the Power Plant, literally called Lexicon! with an exclamation point, and the whole project just felt finished after that. I wanted to take all that geometric structure away and see what would happen if I started making something without any predetermined ideas or rules—what would come from nothing. Like, what are you doing if you don’t know what you’re doing? There was an honesty and a vulnerability and a fear to that question.

MD: Totally. Do you want to talk more about the sculptures that led to these works? You made a series with clay strips and metal strips —obviously there’s a direct material relationship; did they come before or after the Power Plant show?

JA: Actually well before. I made three in 2020, but I didn’t show them until 2023, after the Power Plant show. I called them Palaces, and they were made with strips of ceramic—one- to two-inch bands—either straight or curved. And I would arrange them in space with analogous bands of steel, welded together into architectural, playful, scale-model-ish but totally abstract constructions. I was moving away from geometry; I was thinking of the bands almost like painting brushstrokes. Those sculptures got to be more organic and expressive and romantic than anything I’d made in a long time. And from there I found a way out of the way I’d been working for so long.

MD: Like a bridge. The title of that show was Romantic Gestures?

JA: Yeah, that was at Trépanier Baer gallery in 2024.

MD: I thought that was interesting too, because it made sense with the tone of your work. There’s often a sense of fragility and also a textural relationship to bodies or skin in all of your work. But the Palaces feel more figurative, even though they’re not representational. They feel less purely abstract. So they’re kind of an interesting bridge to the Dancers.

JA: I was starting to make more of the Palaces when I came to this new idea. I was rolling out slabs to cut into strips and thinking, “oh, the slabs are something all on their own.”

MD: What do you think it was about the slab that you were drawn to?

JA: You said the word skin—it was something about that. The slabs feel like faces or masks. They’re so much about your hands and your body. They’re like the shape and size of a piece of dough. It might have been something about their relief kind of space. There’s only two inches of depth to each slab, so it’s like an image and a form at the same time.

MD: Yeah, and most of them have a fold at the edge that almost feels like it’s enclosing something, or it’s in the process of folding over so you can roll it out one more time. And in some of them there’s a middle section that feels like tectonic plates pushing together.

MD: I’m curious to hear more about your relationship to painting, because you’ve talked about these sculptures as being closer to painting, with painterly gestures.

JA: I remember when I was making cast concrete sculptures, I talked about each side of the concrete thing being like a monochrome. There was all this information in the gray, a subtle poetry of gray on gray on gray. And I’d have little bits of pink foam that would come out and mark the edges.
But with that work there was so much distance between the making-the-art part and the building-the-form part. I was building models, settling on a model, building a mold, casting the form. And I envied the kind of painter where making decisions and making the thing is the same activity. So I wanted to find a way to make sculptures in that way.
The Dancers feel like that to me now, where there’s no labor in them that isn’t a formal decision. Everything I’m doing becomes part of the work. There’s no extra parts.

MD: That’s interesting. I’m also not a painter, but I feel like with oil painting there is a sense of time and layers. The underpainting can be visible or buried. There can be a painting underneath a painting. It’s a condensed or more layered process that’s kind of smooshed together. In a casting process, the mold is not part of the final object. But the canvas holds all of the layers at once. And in these works, you have the slab and all the layers of work from rolling out the slab multiple times. And then on top of that you get the splatters from the welding, and the splatters of glaze. Everything is compacted in that way.

JA: Yes exactly. So it’s all additive, unlike mold-making.

MD: I’m curious about iteration. These feel like you made one sculpture and then made the next one in response and continued that way. Or there’s some amount of interchangeability—maybe the slab started with one armature and ended up being on another armature. It feels like there’s exchange among all the sculptures. And it feels like the drawings could easily be placed in relation to different sculptures.
I was looking at Anthony Caro’s tabletop sculptures, which you told me about a while ago, and thought, once you have that constraint of “tabletop sculpture,” there’s so much possible invention. And then they start going off the table and exceed that constraint. But once you arrive at the scale, it allows for all this iteration.

JA: It was challenging to work with that kind of iteration in this show. With the Palaces, the components were more versatile—they would combine in all kinds of configurations. With the Dancers, the slab is such a particular given form. It’s this flat sheet, and doesn’t combine in that many ways. I figured out I liked the relationship between a pair of them, and then that structure felt fairly fixed. So the iteration became less about composition, and more about the subtle variations of a repeated form. How the slabs are leaning against each other. These two have feet, these others have stick legs. Those are facing the same direction. These are leaning toward each other, and this one’s lifted off the ground.
They feel frozen mid-movement, but you’re not sure what the movement is necessarily. Maybe that’s similar to what you were saying about not being sure if they’re falling apart or coming into being.

MD: Maybe you could talk more about the idea of dance specifically. I know you’ve talked about a desire to move more toward the figurative. But “Dancers” is a specific term that has a lot of associations, in and beyond art history. I think I understand where that came from in terms of the forms, but I’m curious what you were thinking about.

JA: I think of a dancer as a sculptural body. Dance is like making form with your body. I was also thinking about how it’s easier to get into an instinctive way of being when you’re dancing than when you’re looking at art. But that’s what I want from art. When art really moves me, it’s like my mind is lagging behind my being somehow. It hits me and then my brain catches up to tell me why it’s hitting me. The first pull is not actually a cerebral one. It’s emotional or physical. Even watching dance can hit you in that same way. There’s an empathic response to watching someone else dance and feeling it in your own body.
I also find form in dance really interesting from a sculptural perspective. I was reading Suzanne K. Langer a while back, and she talks about how a dancer keeps moving and yet somehow the movement adds up to a sense of a total form. If you take any one frozen moment of a dance, it’s not the whole thing. You need the totality of the dance to arrive at the form, you can’t describe it in a single image.

MD: That reminds me of the title of your installation from a few years ago, The Forest for the Trees—trying to see both the instant and the overall movement, the small thing and the larger whole at the same time. The water droplet and the waterfall.
Maybe that conveys your interest in physicality or materiality, but also your focus on overall form and the flow that it creates. The static, heavy thing that is material, and also the fluid thing that is movement.

JA: I think that’s why I’m interested in sculpture, especially. All objects are objects, and yet a sculpture somehow has this extra-ness. It’s more than the sum of its parts, if it’s a good one. It transcends its objectness.

Jen Aitken is based in Toronto, Canada. She makes sculptures that combine perceptual ambiguity with structural clarity. She uses common industrial materials to create unidentifiable forms about intimacy, syntax, and bodily space. Aitken presented her first institutional solo show at The Power Plant, Toronto in 2023, titled The Same Thing Looks Different, which was accompanied by an exhibition catalogue. Her first large-scale public sculpture was installed at the new headquarters of the National Bank of Canada, Montreal, in 2023. She was commissioned by the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, DC, to create a site-specific installation for its 2020 Women to Watch exhibition. Aitken is represented by Trépanier Baer gallery in Calgary, Alberta, and her work is in public collections across Canada, including Toronto’s Art Gallery of Ontario and the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal.

Mira Dayal is an artist, writer, and editor based in New York. She produces sculptures, drawings, installations, books, and interdisciplinary works that create and iterate larger systems of meaning. Dayal has recently presented solo exhibitions at Princeton University, NJ; Spencer Brownstone Gallery, New York; and Fuller Rosen Gallery, Philadelphia. Recent group exhibition venues include Van Abbehuis, Eindhoven, Netherlands; the Hessel Museum of Art, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY; Feral File; Barnard College, New York; Miriam, Brooklyn; and lower_cavity, Holyoke, MA. Dayal has been supported by residencies at Fountainhead, Miami; the Steel Yard, Providence, RI; Ox-Bow, Saugatuck, MI; Art in General, New York; and A.I.R. Gallery at Governor's Island, NY. Dayal is also senior editor at Triple Canopy, co-editor of Track changes: a handbook for art criticism (Paper Monument, 2023), and co-publisher of the collaborative artist book series prompt:. She teaches at Barnard College and the School of Visual Arts.

Photos courtesy of Site Service
Photographed by Chris Hernandez

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