Hannah Traore Gallery is pleased to present I Find Rest, the first New York City solo exhibition by Maryland-based interdisciplinary artist V Walton, featuring large-scale organic sculpture, an immersive installation, and a video work. Working across mediums, Walton’s practice is a deeply personal exploration of Black identity, ecological stewardship, and healing through ancestral and material pathways—while restoring connections between the Afro-diaspora and the land.
Through figurative and organic forms, I Find Rest focuses on the relationship between the human body and the natural world. Trained as a figurative ceramicist, Walton utilizes soil, clay, and mud not only as artistic mediums but as pathways for deconstructing social connotations that associate these materials with uncleanliness and poverty. In utilizing organic and decomposable materials, Walton’s sculptures and bodily forms illustrate the societal and interpersonal dynamics that both build us up and break us down: some works are made to endure, while others are meant to break down and return to the earth, reflecting the duality of permanence and impermanence.
The show centers two major works: I Make My Way / Enter Into Another World (2025), a new video piece filmed on Black stewarded land in Owings, MD, which follows the artist as they dig a crater into the earth and then slowly coat themselves in sienna, umber, and ochre-colored liquid clay. In this work, Walton’s body disappears into the earth as the organic materials shift and dry, marking a meditative ritual that becomes an invitation to rest.
On the right side of the gallery, See What I Become (2025) mirrors I Make My Way / Enter Into Another World. The installation propels a oneness with nature, pulling the viewer into a forest-like environment with trees, soil, plants, and sculptural figures. At its center, a headless figure sits in an “earth womb,” its torso fused within the root of a tree. Mixed media sculptures protrude from the wall, interweaving the body with the natural world.
With I Find Rest, Walton invites visitors to reimagine their relationship with nature—not as something we control or consume, but as a space of kinship and comfort. In situating the human body as part of a greater, mysterious whole, Walton encourages us to reimagine and renegotiate our understanding of self.
Hannah Traore Gallery is pleased to present I Find Rest, the first New York City solo exhibition by Maryland-based interdisciplinary artist V Walton, featuring large-scale organic sculpture, an immersive installation, and a video work. Working across mediums, Walton’s practice is a deeply personal exploration of Black identity, ecological stewardship, and healing through ancestral and material pathways—while restoring connections between the Afro-diaspora and the land.
Through figurative and organic forms, I Find Rest focuses on the relationship between the human body and the natural world. Trained as a figurative ceramicist, Walton utilizes soil, clay, and mud not only as artistic mediums but as pathways for deconstructing social connotations that associate these materials with uncleanliness and poverty. In utilizing organic and decomposable materials, Walton’s sculptures and bodily forms illustrate the societal and interpersonal dynamics that both build us up and break us down: some works are made to endure, while others are meant to break down and return to the earth, reflecting the duality of permanence and impermanence.
The show centers two major works: I Make My Way / Enter Into Another World (2025), a new video piece filmed on Black stewarded land in Owings, MD, which follows the artist as they dig a crater into the earth and then slowly coat themselves in sienna, umber, and ochre-colored liquid clay. In this work, Walton’s body disappears into the earth as the organic materials shift and dry, marking a meditative ritual that becomes an invitation to rest.
On the right side of the gallery, See What I Become (2025) mirrors I Make My Way / Enter Into Another World. The installation propels a oneness with nature, pulling the viewer into a forest-like environment with trees, soil, plants, and sculptural figures. At its center, a headless figure sits in an “earth womb,” its torso fused within the root of a tree. Mixed media sculptures protrude from the wall, interweaving the body with the natural world.
With I Find Rest, Walton invites visitors to reimagine their relationship with nature—not as something we control or consume, but as a space of kinship and comfort. In situating the human body as part of a greater, mysterious whole, Walton encourages us to reimagine and renegotiate our understanding of self.
