Duma Mock is a sculptor based in Oakland.

I am creating props for an unwritten play. I am interested in creating objects that have an aura of narrative without collapsing into Story. I begin with a form that charms and/or repels me, then collapse my experience of that form into the object in its articulation. I array these objects into formal loops. I am drawn to the decorative, the gaudy, and the operatic; I love side chairs that were never intended to be used. I celebrate craft, queerness, and the pathetic. A technical mistake is always an opportunity for adornment; adornment is always an opportunity to be gay. Through sculpture, I seek to circumscribe fantasies that are both familiar and stubbornly liminal.

My recent body of work charts a masculinist iconography during a period when I have been wrestling with my non-binary identity. I began “Boxing Glove” in undergrad when I first came to see myself as queer and “Fool’s Flower” recently when I began taking HRT in alignment with my non-binary identity. I find much in male performance worthy of redemption, and yet there is so much more that I would seek to discard. In these icons, what I am attracted to is bound up with what I am repulsed by. In my articulation of these symbols, I am striving to extract what I love in them. I have been seeking out a soft pivot in service of a queer liberation, using these works to build a common vocabulary to point towards what that liberation might look like.