Addison Wolff

Addison Wolff explores self-identity, sexuality, and interior life through hand-built ceramic sculptures and layered paintings. His practice is grounded in transformation—both physical and emotional—drawing from the fluidity of personal experience. Through expressive, broken color, he references natural and urban environments, capturing fleeting moments in time and place. Queer aesthetics are central to his work: with bold hues, shimmering surfaces, and textures reminiscent of disco balls, Wolff applies synthetic polymer paint in thick, tactile layers. These shifting surfaces, reflecting the complexity of becoming and belonging.

In his ceramic work, Wolff uses slab-coil construction, allowing the clay—and the unpredictable forces of gravity—to guide the final form. The material’s innate behavior is embraced, resulting in sculptures that feel alive and responsive. Many of his forms include a large hollow tube, symbolizing a void or passageway—an architectural gesture toward movement, opening, or transformation. Positioned at the intersection of painting and sculpture, these bisque-fired works create a visual and conceptual tension between mass and space, stillness and movement, craft and fine art, light and shadow. Each object becomes a kind of personal archive—marking shifts in identity, presence, and time.

Wolff’s paintings extend these ideas into two dimensions, using the canvas as a site of layering, erasure, and excavation. His linear mark-making—built up through stacked lines and bands of color—reveals both the visible present and the history underneath. The interplay of past and present, surface and substrate, mirrors the evolving nature of selfhood. By layering and partially obscuring what came before, he evokes how personal identity is continually shaped by memory, revision, and reinvention.

Each painting is framed with raised textures made from synthetic polymer and sand, applied with spackle knives and custom stencils. These impasto borders add a sculptural dimension, further blurring the line between object and image. The resulting works push against traditional figure-ground relationships, creating a dynamic space where optical depth meets physical edge. Through the interplay of graphic foregrounds and linear backgrounds, Wolff creates visual environments that hold the same tension seen in his ceramics—between stasis and flux, clarity and ambiguity, past and present.