Annakatrin Burnham’s Flowstate
At first glance, Annakatrin Burnham’s idiosyncratic sculptures are abstract and otherworldly — almost alien. Titling these quirky ceramics Trophies creates an immediate inroad for viewers to recognize their trophy-esque formal qualities: three-dimensional objects designed for display bearing a stable base adorned with a decorative stem or crowning object rising vertically from the base. But to what merit have such unique trophies been awarded?
Tidal Gallery (339 Second St.) in downtown Eureka opened the Trinidad-based artist’s solo exhibition Flowstate on Dec. 6, 2025, which will continue until Feb. 4. The driving force of Burnham’s show is the Trophies series with 15 ceramic pieces sculpted, fired and glazed using varying materials and techniques, including low, mid and high firing, magnesium carbonate crackle glaze, frost and black ice porcelain, and stoneware in soda. The sculptures are presented atop pedestals Burnham designed and fabricated herself. Additionally, the exhibition includes the aptly named “Chains”: a large-scale installation of white, mid-fire frost porcelain loops bound together, forming chains suspended from the gallery’s ceiling.
Though each ceramic piece in Trophies intimates the commemorative and design attributes of trophies, the artist designates value systems in her appraisals of what we might choose to celebrate that delineate from the competitive nature of trophies and awards. Here, Burnham’s trophies redeploy the modernist drive for innovation and victory through competition into curious sculptures that venerate everyday lived experiences, phenomena and even places that we may otherwise perhaps take for granted or consider to be signs of weakness antithetical to celebration. For example, “Mom Brain” is an ode to the artist’s experiences of caretaking and the fogginess of early motherhood, taking shape as a 14-by-6-by-6-inch ceramic sculpture crowned with a cloud sitting atop a spire emanating from a green U-shaped base. As a trophy, “Mom Brain” does not celebrate the phenomenon of feeling scatterbrained itself, but is instead merited by the artist as recognition of her own personal navigation of a physiological and emotional period that is expected of mothers through social reproduction as unpaid labor. And so, too, this trophy is offered to many other mothers, parents and caretakers. In a country without universal access to healthcare, reproductive rights, childcare, parental leave and many other social services that benefit parents of young children, a trophy feels like an unduly small commemorative gesture.
As a series, Trophies finds cause for celebrations not despite cultural values that favor modernist, capitalist innovation but in spite of these hierarchical rubrics that privilege certain types of traditionally masculine labor over other typically feminized forms of labor. Are Burnham’s Trophies warped and quirky — though equally beautiful and inviting — because we cannot otherwise imagine bestowing trophies for anything other than superiority? Are the abstract qualities of her sculptures mirrors that humorously poke at cultural norms and values to reflect systems of power that not only create competitive systems, but also reward dominance? Indeed, Burnham’s abstraction is an aesthetic choice that points toward our need to expand what success could look like.
The exhibition’s title Flowstate nods to artistic intuition in the creation stages, wherein a “flow state” is achieved once the artist loses herself in her process, time stretches and artistic output pours steadily through a stream of consciousness that eclipses self-awareness. Burnham’s foregrounding of the flow state also offers an entry point into longstanding debates in art criticism around determining objective versus subjective interpretation, and whether the developments of critical theory, contemporary art theory, art criticism and art history have produced canons and rubrics to objectively assess the cultural, artistic and conceptual value of artworks. The objective camp would turn to formal and sociocultural elements such as color theory, technique, art history and cultural histories that transcend personal and individualized interpretations. Meanwhile, the subjective camp would legitimize intuitive, emotional reactions to artworks, individual taste and personal lived experiences in deriving meaning. Many art historians and critics have noted masculinist undercurrents in objective frameworks that discount personal emotions and taste — which are coded as feminine — in the interpretation of art. Flowstate comfortably makes room for both camps through the artist’s use of abstraction, which serves as a cultural critique by subverting trophies, and in creating an exhibition that is exciting and aesthetically puzzling.
“The personal is political,” a famous feminist credo, is playfully embodied in Flowstate as Burnham sculpts her inner world and the shape of her brain fog into tangible moments of celebration. As she offers in her exhibition statement, “As these trophies come together, they shape a story and stand as dedications to the inglorious victories of daily life, the mundane, the tedious, and the darker moments that also define me.”
Alexander Rondeau (he/him) is a queer curator, writer, and artist from Ontario, Canada, and has been living in Humboldt County for the last three years. Like a Chappell Roan premonition, he will be moving to Saskatchewan in March for a curatorial appointment.
This article appears in ‘Bigger Than All of Us’, Tidal Gallery, and Ceramic sculpture.