I am one of five children born to my parents in less than twenty-five months. Growing up, my siblings and I were treated as a collective​​​​​ before we were treated as individuals - the twins most of all. Living alongside someone who shares your physical characteristics, though few others, teaches you early that sameness and difference are never the entire story. My work examines what it means to be categorized before you are known.

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The materials I work with are chosen for their histories - of life, labor, and care. These are everyday objects, familiar and functional, that have been dismissed as unworthy of serious attention. My work lives in the gap between what something is, what it’s expected to be, and what it might yet become.

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Text runs through all of it - words and slogans drawn from a lifetime of witnessing; language that has been shouted, whispered, and swallowed. I treat language as structure; a material as essential as the objects themselves.

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Taken together, the pieces move between the intimate and the collective, the childhood we are handed and the language and stories we select for ourselves.

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-Kim Radatz