Cast forms echoing ritual points of spiritual or emotional exchange coupled with screen-printed ceramics provide rich material landscapes from which to recontextualize and exhibit an ethics of care. Each tile is screen-printed with stills from a self-surveillance video which show the artist, naked and squatting, as she performs for a john. The nexus of her work is not materiality itself but rather, the capacity for those materials to corroborate contradictory subjectivities and question the relational ecosystems involved in sustaining and maintaining bodies and minds. Diamond’s practice is ritually and theoretically rooted in methods of reproduction- re-generating and renegotiating the promise of transactional intimacy, care, and subaltern labor. In this way, her work is a meditation on literal and symbolic figurations of the body as a primordial workplace.

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Darya Diamond is a Mexican American artist based in London. She has an MFA from Goldsmiths University of London and she is currently a research fellow at the University of the Arts in Zurich and the School of Commons. She has exhibited at F Magazine, SB34 in Brussels, GAS Gallery in Los Angeles, Saatchi Gallery in London, and the Tree Art Museum in Beijing. Diamond is an object maker whose practice is systematically and symbolically rooted in methods of reproduction. Her work investigates the female body as a site for pleasure, power, and labor that has systematically upheld neoliberal capitalist structures.