At the opening party for Io Palmer’s show Meander, visitors walked back and forth along a wide passageway, holding their phones aloft.
Some nearly collided while taking videos. Others snuck across a boundary line taped on the floor. All were attempting to capture the 35-foot-long, 14-foot-tall span of Palmer’s ceramic wall installation, but the wild bursts and winding curls refused to be contained.
Palmer compares these unruly clay bundles to hedgerows and thickets. Despite the explosion of stems, circles and hues, she doesn’t consider them flowers. “I’m too abstract for that,” she explains with a laugh. Instead she intends these tangled assemblages of glazed clay, wire and plexiglass to inspire a feeling of chaotic embrace. They radiate constant movement, something alive and wriggling free.
“These pieces are meant to be about energy,” Palmer says. “They’re about possibilities. They’re about expansion, and they’re very much about the unfixed nature of our times.”
Meander (at the Whatcom Museum’s Lightcatcher Building in Bellingham through Jan. 25, 2026) is her largest work to date in this ceramic series.
A professor in the art department at Washington State University in Pullman, Palmer’s previous body of work includes large-scale, ceiling-suspended installations crafted from painted and cut paper, wood and fabric. She considered these huge hung pieces to be “interruptions,” exclamation points in inescapably bold colors that questioned societal boundaries and sanctioned spaces.
Her shift to working in clay was inspired by a 2019 Fulbright scholarship to Kerala, India, where she experienced a metaphysical encounter with a spirit — a “being” that awakened in her a sense of connection and abundance.
“I realized that I made a lot of work in relation to white America, like, in opposition,” she recalls. “But this [clay] work is about a celebration of who we are, as Black people, as brown people, trans or gay people. These pieces celebrate folks who have been othered.”
As a Black woman, Palmer has personally experienced the invisibility and oppression that comes with not feeling welcome in certain places. She grew up on an island in Greece, moved with her family to small-town western Pennsylvania and now lives in Pullman.
She says her work reflects “the emotional landscape of having lived in predominantly white spaces for most of my life.” In creating abstract hedgerows, Palmer is in a sense tearing down fences and in their place erecting spaces that feel inclusive and ever-changing.
“For me, abstraction is a way to work through complexity,” she says. “Abstraction allows me to invite viewers into a space that’s open-ended, layered and emotionally charged.”
After earning a BFA in painting from the Tyler School of Art at Temple University in Philadelphia, Palmer completed an MFA in 3D art at the University of Arizona in Tucson. “I’m not a good painter,” she confesses. But she brings a deep understanding of painting, movement and color theory to her clay forays into “unruly foliage.”
“They’re clay, but for me they’re about drawing,” Palmer explains. “Drawing and painting.” She calls the individual ceramic pieces “marks” — squiggly lines, limpet shapes, petals and rings that she hand-forms, glazes and composes into a kind of 3-D graffiti.
When a work is in progress, her WSU studio looks something like a bakery: stacked metal racks hold trays full of freshly formed doughy shapes awaiting their turn in the kiln. She makes these in batches, rolling them out like Play-Doh worms and pinched dumplings. The components — some of which come to her in the space between sleep and waking — are similar but loosely so. “Not labored,” she explains. More jazz riffs than practiced scales.
“I feel like jazz has really informed me as a person,” Palmer says. Growing up on the Greek island of Hydra, she was surrounded by art, she says, “whether through my dad’s sculptures or my mom’s prints or paintings.” And wafting through the Aegean air: “Always, always, always jazz music on the record player.”
She channels a similar energy for her own artmaking. Palmer picks her glazes intuitively and in the moment, and paints them on the dried clay without worrying too much about how they’ll come out of the kiln. “I want it to be free and expressive and dynamic,” she says. “I don’t want to fuss about it.”
Palmer also takes inspiration from pop culture — specifically, a bent toward glam — evident in the glazes she chooses, slick and bright. “I love the gaudy, the shiny,” she says. “The high gloss of a ceramic glaze echoes the gloss coat of a manicure.”
Though she rarely gets her own nails done, Palmer is inspired by elaborate nail art, hair salons, drag shows and other defiant subcultures with exuberant expression. “I borrow from these segments of society,” she says, “with a boldness that’s celebratory, excessive in the best way.”
It’s not just about the colors, of course. Underlying these extravagant gestures is, as Palmer puts it, “the stubborn beauty of lives lived with resilience.” That stubbornness is clear in another of her hedgerows currently on view at the Bainbridge Island Museum of Art in the exhibit Many Hats, One Spirit (through Sept. 17).
The group show is a retrospective of work by Seattle artist James W. Washington Jr. (1908 - 2000). A Black stone carver, printmaker, painter and poet, Washington was also a civil rights activist, who with his wife turned their Central District home into the Dr. James and Janie Washington Cultural Center. The BIMA show also includes work by 25 former artists in residence.
Palmer was an artist-in-residence there in 2009 (as was her partner, artist Squeak Meisel). Her contribution to the new exhibit is much smaller than her Lightcatcher installation, but no less alive and kicking.
Stretching from shin-level to overhead, the piece (“Hedgerow Series orange/blue”) rises in three segments, up and to the right. The middle section is thicker than the top and bottom, creating an abstract shape the human brain can’t help but translate into a torso between a head and feet. Stare a bit longer and you might start to see two lungs, with implied expansion and contraction.
The colors in the work are predominantly deep navy and orange, which suggest both sturdiness and uplift. There’s a heaviness in this piece, but it’s being transcended right before our eyes.
“The installations are about honoring unseen paths, tangled growth,” Palmer says. “They trace the winding, wild and often uncomfortable journeys of people of color and offer a space that honors the arrival, the joy and the recognition.”
Made amid the undulating green hills of the Palouse, these spiky bursts of color and musicality stand out like a cowlick that refuses to be combed down. Palmer’s work is a glossy gesture of resistance and rebellion, something untamed and ongoing. As she noted at the opening of her Bellingham show, “It’s my quiet way of speaking truth to power.”
Brangien Davis
Catch up with the artists featured in the first season of Art by Northwest, and watch for new Season 2 episodes as they roll out in August, September and October, 2025.
