Em Kettner wants us to think differently about our bodies. Her playful small-scale sculptures and drawings insist that bodies are more fluid than we make them out to be. In her current exhibition—“Homebound” with François Ghebaly in New York—Kettner traces the historical roots of biases against people with disabilities, creating drawings that hover between fear and joy. After meeting over a shared interest in zines, I was eager to speak with her about her material predispositions and what she hopes viewers take away from her latest work.
Sarah Faux: When I first encountered your sculptures, I was surprised by how these tiny, wiggly, multi-limbed people had such an outsized presence. What draws you to a miniature scale?
Em Kettner: I love working tiny. Each wiggly form is like a word or a line drawing come to life. There's also this connection I'm trying to draw between what I'm making and votive offerings.
In some ancient traditions, when someone had an illness or a disability, they might bring a talisman that represented a part of their body to an altar and offer it as a prayer to heal. I have a physical disability. So I want to twist that association of disability with suffering and use a votive object to instead say, “Oh, this is actually a beautiful body. This is a valuable experience.”
Faux: Do you feel there's some sense of freedom in having your body function or appear as non-normative?
Kettner: Yeah, I do think that it affords you a peek behind the curtain of what else is possible in terms of what a body can do, not only on its own, but in collaboration with other bodies. There's this overbearing narrative many of us have grown up with that celebrates individuality, but the truth is that a lot of movement forward is achieved through networks of mutual support. And it's glorious to feel that your body doesn't end at its edges. You expand into the community that you create.
Faux: You've often called this phenomenon “interdependence,” which shows up in your work. I'm thinking about your sculptures depicting the feeling of being carried by piggyback, or the laughter of two people convalescing in a sickbed.
Kettner: Friends carry me around on piggyback when I can't navigate terrain, and it really feels like we become one many-limbed being. Like, “Wow, this is magical.”
I have sculptures where a couple heads are poking out from a bed, but their woven bedspread binds them into one body. And maybe the leg of the bed is an arm now. I think funny moments where the parts are jostled together are closer to the truth—we all rely on each other.
Faux: Your materials feel interdependent as well. You'll carve an indentation into a pedestal so that it droops underneath a tiny sculpture. How do you make material choices?
Kettner: There’s mutual support at the material level: clay gives shape to textiles, thread binds broken porcelain. I had this idea that I wanted sturdy surfaces to fold under the weight of these delicate sculptures. The porcelain figure doesn't look like it, but it’s really heavy, dense with emotional weight—the weight of someone who's been waiting so long to move out of the shadows, out of the peripheral. So it wears down the wood, kind of like how water drips onto rock; after millennia, it carves a way out.
Faux: Your current show at François Ghebaly sets small, loosely narrative drawings into intricately carved wooden frames. What kind of research went into this new body of work?
Kettner: In the show, we go on this fever dream journey through history, folklore, and myth, asking: where was the place for the disabled body?
The project started with this strange encounter I had with a doctor who told me not to have children, their reason being that it's possible I'd pass on my condition. That made me think, what if someone had said that to my parents or my parents' parents—because my father has the same thing—and what if they’d listened?
All of this casual violence, discouraging birth based on the assumption that disabled folks have a lower quality of life... I wanted to dissect that pathology, and I wanted to find the hidden and erased children.
Faux: Right, so your drawings trace that type of assumption from origins in Greek mythology into medieval Christianity into our medical system today, which is impacted by older narratives about which bodies are “worthy.” How does the stool sculpture, Exam Room Stool/ The Doctor is Out, 2024, fit into this broader picture?
Kettner: I like giving someone who visits my show an idea of who they might be in the story. I thought if I put a doctor’s stool in there and said, “The doctor is out,” you right away would have this question: Am I the doctor? Or, am I the patient? What role am I going to perform when I'm looking at these drawings?
The drawings are positioned so that if you're seated or in a wheelchair, they're at your eye height, but otherwise you have to stoop over and come down to them. There’s already empathy in that simple gesture. And in slower, more careful looking too.
Faux: Definitely, and there's a power dynamic in who is looking versus who is being looked at that expands beyond the hospital.
Kettner: Totally. There’s a way of looking that's… hungry. And then there's a way of looking that's like, I'm trying to meet you where you are, to see how you see. It's all about generating empathy and compassion.
Faux: A lot of your frames have little peepholes. When do you know what to reveal and what to hide?
Kettner: That's the question! The conceit of a lot of the objects is that the “full picture” includes the sensation that you're missing part of the picture. There’s a curtain or a wall in the way. That’s humbling, to see that you can’t see everything.
I like to think of the frames as different rooms in a dollhouse that someone's rearranging. How do I put this house back together? Who was here before me? And where’s the key?
Faux: So, as you go about putting your own house back together, are there other artists you want to live in the rooms with you?
Kettner: I’d love to shine more light on my dear friends, the incredible artists at NIAD Art Center in Richmond, California.
“Homebound” is on view through February 24, 2024 at François Ghebaly in New York.
