Featured in When the World is Beautifully Strange
Niki Ford (b. 1974)
Child on High, 2025
Stoneware, mason stain, underglaze, glaze,
tung oil, epoxy, spar varnish, rebar and concrete base
47 in. x 16 in. x 16 in.
Courtesy of the artist
Photo by Ernest Gibson
About
Niki Ford, a Los Angeles-based artist, befriends the otherworldly through their richly pigmented and hyper-tactile stoneware sculptures. During the building process, Ford works intuitively, as if receiving a kind of download – watching the form emerge and unfold, rather than consciously constructing it. This quiet exchange between artist and object gives rise to the final form, allowing motifs, textures, colors, and patterns to surface.
Formerly a cook, chef, and 2012 Culinary Fellow at Montalvo, Ford draws inspiration from the vibrant but transient world of the physical senses. Clay, mason stain, glaze, concrete, and epoxy culminate in a whimsical, yet deeply considered, construction that both explores the physical world of ceramic and reveres the abstracted world of imagination.
A hymn to the queer divine, Child on High invokes the archetypal boy-child not as an echo of the past, but as a representation of inner boyhood – wild, intuitive, and unruled. This sculpture can be seen as a dialogue between the transcendental and the transformative, where gender is not a terminus but a dreamscape. Through Ford’s work, we realize it is the child-like, playful, and imaginative parts of ourselves that contain the deepest wisdom.
Location
Child on High is displayed next to the Oval Garden, behind the Villa.
