In Conversation with Randi Renate

Randi Renate. Photo by Carolina Menendez. Courtesy the artist and The Java Project, Brooklyn

Randi Renate (b. en caul 1991, San Antonio, TX) is an MFA graduate of the Sculpture Department at the Yale School of Art, and the recipient of numerous fellowships including Socrates Sculpture Park NY, Lighthouse Works, NY, Bemis Center for Contemporary Art, NE, Fountainhead, FL, Santa Fe Art Institute, NM, and Sculpture Space, NY. Her permanent public sculpture blue is the atmospheric refraction I see you through (2021) is installed at the Adirondack History Museum. Featured in Sculpture Magazine, her public sculpture in NYC for the 2022 Socrates Annual exhibition Sink or Swim Climate Futures has also garnered critical attention. Renate is the host of the podcast CORALESCENCE, which highlights the connection between art and science, exploring topics such as coral restoration, global climate change, and ecology through studio visits with scientists and researchers.

SANDRO: Your work in Between Great Currents draws inspiration from marine biology and the morphology of coral species like orbicella faveolata. How do you translate scientific knowledge into formal sculptural language, and what is your process for selecting which organisms to focus on?

RANDI: I have long shared a deep connection to our oceans, and to the creatures with whom we share a significant portion of our DNA. Much of my sculptural language is derived from natural forms and scientific observations, particularly within the oceanic realm. For over half my life, I’ve  been a diver (both scuba and freediving), and my focus is the diverse, fragile ecosystems of coral reefs. Corals are the architects of the ocean—complex, symbiotic organisms that build habitats for countless species. In translating scientific knowledge into sculptural form, I study coral morphology through underwater photography, field sketches, and conversations with marine biologists. For example, Orbicella faveolata, commonly known as the mountainous star coral, is an endangered key reef-building species in the Caribbean. The coral has a distinct structure and growth pattern that I interpret through texture, repetition, and scale in my studio. I often zoom in on microscopic features—polyps, ridges, the aggregation of form to show their symbiotic relationships. This translation involves abstraction: transforming data and form into material expression through carefully carving ceramics. Magnifying their rhizomatic polyp structure  shows the complexities of these colonial animals, and invokes that delicate, webbed interconnection of being. We can learn so much from corals as a testament to the power of collective action.

S: The ceramic wall pieces in this exhibition evoke both bodily forms and living marine systems. How do you see the body—human or non-human—functioning in your practice as a site of ecological convergence?

R: Many of the works in the Between Great Currents involves a bleeding of the human into oceanic life, especially in the works like the sea becomes her, where a female hand emerges from a shell, or the withering of venus, in which the female form is reclining and curled into the scallop, head on her arm lying over crying into the sea. In the wall piece on tides, moons, and psychic corals, coral polyp forms encircle a full lunar cycle—at its center is a diagram of a human neural diagram by Spanish neuroscientist Santiago Ramón y Cajal (1852–1934). Gravitational lunar pulls are critical to not only tides but also our own human bodily rhythms, and coral spawning, which occur annually during a full moon. These “bodies” of the exhibition, the coral polyps, human forms, comb-jellies, moons with closed eyes emerging from nautilus, are all containers of consciousness.  Resurfacing for me is Karen Barad’s brittlestar—a creature whose “very being is a visualizing apparatus,” as she writes in her Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglements of Matter and Meaning. The brittlestar, despite lacking what we would conventionally call eyes or a brain, can still sense and respond to its environment, seeking camouflage among coral when predators approach. Are these beings so different? In this ceramic series, the usual human-centered ontological hierarchy—placing humans above the non-human—is dissolved through their merging.

Randi Renate on tides, moons, and psychic corals .002L, 2024 glazed stoneware  22 inch diameter

S: Your recent works highlight the deep interconnection between human and marine life. How do you express this relationship through your ceramic sculpture and what makes clay a particularly powerful medium for exploring the overlap between biological and environmental systems.

R: There’s an immediate, indexical connection between my thought process and my physical body when working into ceramic slabs. The clay becomes a direct extension of processed data, feelings, and intuitions, through touch. Being of the earth, clay holds a material resonance that aligns with the narratives I am crafting and imprinting of our natural world—narratives that seek to enrich our understanding of ecological systems. The glazes I formulate carry layers of magic, alchemy and indeterminacy—the transformative processes of firing offer a symbolic lens for our current nebulous times. Clay forms from fine rock particles carried by water that settle in riverbeds and ocean floors over time. Rather than using synthetic materials, the technology of clay invokes a deeper, ancient dialog around ecology and the biological systems that I am studying.

Randi Renate the withering of venus .002 , 2025 glazed stoneware  7.5 inch diameter

U: With your podcast CORALESCENCE and your studio practice both rooted in science and ecology, how do you see these roles—as artist, researcher, and communicator—intersecting? How does one inform or expand the other?

R: I use art as a humanistic inquiry, so in my practice, the role of artist and researcher are actually overlapping. This allows me to then bring to life otherwise static facts of science to a broader audience. As an artist, I synthesize—gather data, stories, and research, then extrude knowledge into form and feeling. Art is a vital part of climate solutions; the strategies of research and artistic process are deeply intertwined. To truly deepen public understanding, we must go beyond data—we need emotion and story to make people feel, and ultimately, to care. Illuminating our present science can change our sea of possible futures.

For more information about Randi’s artwork, please follow her on Instagram here. For information about Kathy Sirico and their two-person show currently on view at The Java Project, please visit here.