Setha Low, a Los Angeles native transplanted to the East End, spent the earlier part of her life doing research in Central America, Western Europe, Africa, and Japan as well as teaching anthropology, environmental psychology, and urban design at the University of Pennsylvania and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. She is the author of many books including the Anthropology of Space and Place, On the Plaza: The Politics of Public Space and Culture and Behind the Gates: Life, Security and the Pursuit of Happiness in Fortress America.

She began sculpting in 2002 when she took a ceramics class at the Clay Potato in Bridgehampton. At the urging to two artist friends at the Art Barge in Napeague, she soon joined the Crazy Monkey Gallery in Amagansett and began showing her sculpture.  Ms. Low still works at the Art Barge and in Clay Guild raku workshops, but makes most of her body sculpture in the growing workspace at her home in the Northwest Woods of East Hampton.  She experiments with smoke-firing using sawdust, seaweed and wood chips and additives such as steel wool and copper wire, as well as raku and traditional stoneware glazing, to achieve her luminous surface results. Ms. Low considers the artistic process to be a co-creation between the medium and the imagination, with form evolving organically.

There is a resonance between her art and theoretical writings.  Both examine people’s relationships to the natural and built environment through an examination of the embodied spaces we live in.  The suggestive forms she creates express the emotions of everyday life, but remain grounded in materiality of the body. She views her wall pieces as landscapes of the inner self, while her free standing sculptures evoke the emotional and physical traumas of women in all cultures, times, classes, and places.  These “body topographies” and “topographies of the body” create places of contact and engagement between the artist and her viewer through both deep seated emotions and liberating politics.