Sydney received her MFA in sculpture from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and received a Bachelor of Arts degree in Studio Art and Literature from Beloit College in Beloit, Wisconsin. She grew up in Austin, Texas and now lives and works in Chicago, Illinois, where she teaches art history and studio art.
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I take my cues from moments that have undeniably pleasurable aspects and also cause intellectual or emotional distress. These feelings can seem inaccessible in combination regardless of how strongly they show up. They stay unspeakable, unknowable, and it can be tempting to let them cancel each other into nothingness. I am looking to understand my own affectual responses in these instants of clarity or confusion (or both), and investigate how fleeting pangs in everyday moments can illuminate truths about the world and my own responses to it.
I imagine physical gaps between feelings and ideas that exist simultaneously but seem utterly incompatible at their core – the gaps hold the answers to how these things are able to live in the same world and in the same moment in time. I am attempting to fill the shapes of those gaps to the point where they can stand on their own. In outlined and potentially more vulnerable positions, I hope that these shapes can reveal ways to better understand contradictory realities.