Erik T. Clayton

A child of the Southland, Erik T. Clayton's vision is intrinsically informed by his upbringing at the back door of the world's culture factory. Steeped in iconography, his work walks a tightrope of irony and sincerity, reminding us - often through bitter wit - that behind every joke lies truth, and the jester is the only one who can speak it to the king. A designer and craftsman, he straddles the attitudes of technologist and Luddite to create novel works in which neither form nor function is sacrificed for the other, but wherein the two are intrinsically intertwined. Erik has had a lifelong fascination with the underlying working of things, and graduated The Ohio State University with a major in engineering physics. He combines this with an artistic temperament given by his father and countless childhood hours spent in galleries & museums to create objects and concepts in a wide variety of media, with focus in neon, steel, and mechanism.