Adah Bennion

Born and raised in the rural desert valleys of central Utah, interdisciplinary artist Adah Lee Bennion engages tactile and durational processes of traditional craft and fiber to form intimate and explorative relationships with unorthodox, everyday materials (trash) as a means to explore interweaving threads of materiality, embodied memory, desire, and permanence within our contemporary context. Working with a media fluidity, her work blurs the lines between craft and contemporary sculpture, subtly seeking to corrupt the loadbearing columns upholding our inherited hierarchies of value while dismantling notions of “women’s work”.

Bennion received her BFA in Sculpture Intermedia from the University of Utah and she is currently an Arts Lab Research Fellow and MFA candidate at the Lamar Dodd School of Art at the University of Georgia. Her work has been exhibited nationally, including at the Utah Museum of Contemporary Art in Salt Lake City, The San Luis Obispo Museum of Art in California, and The Works in Atlanta, Georgia. In 2023, Bennion received an Honorable Mention from The International Sculpture Center in their annual Outstanding Student Awards, for which she was mentioned in Sculpture Magazine, and in 2024 she was awarded the Diane Komminsk Scholarship by the Mid-South Sculpture Alliance (MSA), which allowed her the opportunity to exhibit and present on her work at the annual MSA conference in Birmingham, Alabama.

Research Detail

My artistic practice engages in the slow, tactile processes of traditional craft and fiber to form intimate and explorative relationships with materials over protracted lengths of dedicated time and intention, through which I explore interweaving threads of time, materiality, memory and value in our contemporary context. My work leans into blurring the lines between craft and contemporary art and seeks to corrupt the loadbearing columns that uphold our inherited hierarchy of value, while unpacking and deconstructing notions of “women’s work”.

I am interested in the ways in which made materials and technologies are reshaping our relationships to memory and my work probes at the meaning and role of tradition and ritual in the TikTok era. Similarly fascinated by the prospective evolutional arcs of made materials in geologic time, my practice often imagines the spawn of adaptive material relationships and the chimeric ecologies of a post-anthropocentric world, which manifest as bizarre, yet appealing, juxtapositions of material and form, suggestive of a strange naturally occurring convergence of traditional craft processes and synthetic materials over time.

Examining our relationship with objects as embodied vessels for meaning, connection, and identity as we come to terms with and cope with our knowledge of death, I explore the materiality of inheritance, heritage, and lineage in my creative research: All that we pass on, all that is left behind, and all that remains. Grappling with this in my work, I confront my multigenerational impulse to preserve and save—to hoard, and slowly come to terms with being the end of my family line.