Fire Coversall Fire Coveralls

2023

zip hazmat suit, image transfers, urban fire zone

Fire Coveralls is a hazmat suit covered in flames, wearable, by me, by many. I use this wearable fire suit as a garment that I can climb into, as a way to try to enter, to attempt to more fully engage in a conversation I am unable to understand. Temperatures rise and extended fire seasons intensify. I made Fire Coveralls as fire seems to cover all, and I don’t know what to do about it. This work gives me the opportunity to grapple with how to exist in our climate crisis and live in our house on fire.

Biography

Dawn Stetzel is a visual artist from the United States living on the Long Beach Peninsula on the southern coast of Washington. Her body-activated sculptures become ambitious attempts at reimagining a sustainable existence. The heart of her deep emotional distress lays within the climate crisis and its impact on disparity and spatial and environmental justice. Using a tinge of the ridiculous, these works suggest struggles seeking opportunistic-existence within dysfunction.

She has a Master of Fine Arts from the College of Visual and Performing Arts at The University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth. She has exhibited widely through multiple solo exhibitions, public art commissions and group exhibitions across the United States including Grounds for Sculpture, Disjecta and the Portland Biennial. Her work is included in permanent public collections at The City of Seattle Office of Arts & Culture and the Shiwan Ceramic Museum in the Guangdong Province of China. Her work is printed in multiple publications, she has shown internationally and has lectured in the United States, China and Brazil. Innovative in her field and in recognition of the quality of her work and dedication to her art over a period of many years, she was recently awarded a 2024 Individual Support Grant from the Gottlieb Foundation in New York.

web:    dawnstetzel.com

Artist Statement

I make sculptural objects, contraptions that interact with a specific environment. These environments are usually in the margins of places, feeling somehow desolate, vast, or lonely due to forms of neglect or absence. These are places I find oddly fascinating, sometimes disgusting and pull at visceral threads in my being. Often these landscapes exhibit hints of resourcefulness and potential paths to new ways of living in a place, thus they feel somewhat like home to me.

Within this environment I use my sculpture as a tool, or mode of locomotion in which to navigate the landscape. Manually operated, these pieces require me to physically propel, push, pull, row or ski and push the limits of my physical strength, safety and comfort levels. This process places my work between sculpture and performance.

My sculptures embrace the aesthetics of resourcefulness, repairing, adaptability and invention. I prefer a low-tech approach and glean materials from my surroundings. I select all materials for their inherent story of place relevant to the concepts within each sculpture. This process of collecting materials puts me in the edges of places, a process I need to connect me to my emotions, the specifics of place and a non-threatening bridge of connection to other people through their discards.

I am currently making work that struggles with seeking moments of survival within a dysfunctional system, on the move, searching opportunistic existence. I use a tinge of the ridiculous and make pieces that function but just barely. I am exploring spatial and environmental justice, systematic disparity, and the climate crisis. The heart of my deep emotional distress lays within our overlapping crises as the climate crisis connects us all and at the same time amplifies our disparity gap.

Implementing a mechanism of survival is not a safe feeling; it is one of risk, uncertainty and maybe just barely making it. The solo nature of this work and many of my pieces reflect my extreme independence as a trauma response. It contains a longing for trust in the universe, in humanity and political systems to equitably help and protect when needed