SULO BEE, interdisciplinary metalsmith
After receiving gender affirming top surgery in June of 2022, my relationship to my body, studio practice, and environments have changed significantly. During my travels to arrive in California and spending time on the beaches of Mendocino County, I noticed the tender queer subtleties in the plant and animal life. Finding the beauty in the slow-moving water, rocky shorelines, and various terrains I traveled through, I realized that outside of the human construct binaries do not exist.
During my time at the Mendocino Art Center, I will continue researching queer ecology, the subtleties I noticed, and their connection to my identity while exploring my surroundings in search of the unique plant and animal life that live here. My practice will be dedicated to my advocacy for Trans, gender non-conforming bodies, and individuals that identify on the 2SLGBTQIA+ spectrum while developing a body of work that focuses on the use of adornment as an educational tool for queer liberation.
ABOUT SULO
SULO BEE (they/them) is a Trans Non-Binary interdisciplinary metalsmith and maker. They earned their BFA from Texas State University with a focus in Metals and Jewelry in 2018 and their MFA from SUNY New Paltz in 2022. They have exhibited their work internationally with Heidi Lowe Gallery, Ombre Gallery, GalerieMarzee, Australian Temp/Contemp Gallery, Athens Institute of Contemporary Art, Gallery 2052, Budapest Jewelry Week, New York City Jewelry Week, and Milan Jewelry Week. They were included in the One for the Future program with NYC Jewelry Week and completed a three-month residency at the Baltimore Jewelry Center in 2018. In 2020, they participated in an invitational residency, Pentaculum, at Arrowmont School of Arts and Craft.
SULO is featured in the Smithsonian Cooper Hewitt Learning Lab highlighting LGBTQIA+ artists, SNAG JaMS, Klimt 02, ARTISTAR Jewels, and Accessory Vanity Fair Magazine. SULO is a co-founder of the Queer Metalsmiths organization where they seek to advocate and uplift voices on the 2SLGBTQIA+ spectrum in the field of craft. They were recently named one of ten artists in the nation for the Emerging Artist Cohort with American Craft Council and awarded the Marzee Graduate Prize at the Marzee International Graduate Show in Nijmegen, Netherlands.
SULO’s work is a response to lived experiences and how they materialize as the fragmented narratives that define their Trans Non-Binary identity. Through iterative processes, automatic drawing, reactive construction, and colorful surface treatments, they balance opposing entities that address the gray area between self and contemporary society. They layer, respond, and transform elements through experimental techniques in metalworking and printmaking — resulting in clarity and a new visual language. The amassing of parts serves as an unorthodox mathematical equation: a queerness of the in-between, a state of equilibrium, a space for balance and belonging.