Art Basel’s 'Meet the artists' series presents contemporary creatives shaping today’s cultural landscape.

Woody De Othello transforms everyday objects into vessels of emotion and memory. Born in Miami to Haitian parents, the artist first turned to clay as an undergraduate. His anthropomorphic sculptures – telephones, mirrors, chairs, and other domestic forms in ceramic, bronze and wood – seem to breathe with human presence. By enlarging and distorting familiar items, he explores the psychology of space, and the energy objects hold.

In this episode of 'Meet the artists', we visit the Bay Area–based artist in his studio and go for a hike in the redwood forests in Northern California. There, he speaks about finding balance between the additive process of ceramics and the subtractive practice of carving wood – a duality that mirrors his own reflective nature. For Othello, making art is an act of receptivity as much as creation: ‘I don’t want to make something because someone expects it. I want to make something because I want to see what happens if it is made.

Woody De Othello is represented by Jessica Silverman (San Francisco) and Karma (Los Angeles, New York).

‘Woody De Othello: coming forth by day’ will open at Pérez Art Museum Miami on November 13. There, a new series of ceramic, wood, tile wall works, as well as a large-scale bronze, will be on display.

Meet the artists | Woody De Othello was produced in collaboration with Nowness.