DeShun Peoples explores the interaction between form and minimal surfaces/colors that elicit specific emotional responses, in order to interrogate personal and societal standards of beauty and value as they relate to notions of equity, representation, and lasting impacts on mental health. Clay as a material and abstraction as a visual vocabulary both afford the ability to reconstruct reality. To mold clay is to exert one’s own will onto the physical earth around them, and through glazing and firing make real and permanent the object of one’s imagination. Using non-representational lines and shapes to make meaning invites the possibility of a single stroke to invoke an infinite number of historical, contemporary, societal or personal narratives. Making meticulous forms reclaims the agency stripped by being marginalized in institutions that work to entrench the unrelenting societal doctrine that my existence is less valuable than that of my “majority” counterparts.