Intimate Monads:

SE Cooper Contemporary presents Intimate Monad, a solo exhibition of new work by Kimberly Gronquist, on view from April 25 through June 6, 2026. An opening reception with the artist will be held Saturday, April 25, 2026 from 1–4 PM.

A word like monad risks sounding grandiose until you stand in front of one of Gronquist’s sculptures and feel the term settle. Borrowed from Leibnizian symbolic logic, it names the smallest indivisible unit of being, a self-contained world. In this way Gronquist’s works conduct a small cosmos pressed into clay.  Each object existing solitary, self-possessed, while simultaneously conversing quietly across the gallery, forming a loose ecology of presences.

Originating in touch the clay bears evidence of fingers, gravity, pressure, and air forming a material history of the gestures that shaped it. These deliberate and discovered arrangements that seem grown rather than constructed. The process reveals almost like a form of thinking, or an embodied cognition in which ideas are not depicted but coaxed out of matter.

The shifting scale and intimacy of the sculptures keep them close to the body. Each one holds a small interior drama of time: a vessel formed slowly through attention, then fixed by fire. Psychologist Laura L. Carstensen’s notion of “time horizons”—the way human perception of time shapes our priorities, hovers in the background. These ceramics feel oddly liberated from time even as they record it.

Gronquist describes the work as an investigation into the porous boundary between inner consciousness and the world that forms it. The idea sounds philosophical, but the sculptures communicate it plainly. Their surfaces look weathered by encounter. They materially imply that identity like clay is made through the contact of touch, environment, attention, and relationships.

There is also a quiet defiance running through the exhibition. The work honors sovereign interiority over the social demand to appear legible or productive. They embrace beauty, excess, and vulnerability with a seriousness, Gronquist leans into those qualities despite the history of them being dismissed as indulgent. What could be read as softness becomes strength; what looks fragile reveals a stubborn independence to exist among the chaos.

One line lingers as a fitting epigraph for the show: “We are two abysses—a well staring up at the sky.” The phrase captures the mood of these objects. Each sculpture seems to look inward and outward at once, holding a private depth while opening toward something larger, formed, sustained, and continually remade through our encounters with the world and with one another.

***

Kimberly Gronquist is an American sculptor living and working in Portland Oregon.  Her work focuses on organic forms rendered in porcelain, and explore ideas of femininity, trauma, motherhood and mortality. Through rigorous practice and patience, Gronquist explores her preferred medium in an effort to expand her understanding of ceramics and the link between the natural and spirit worlds.