As an autistic, trans, chronically ill artist, educator, and healer, Scout Ober (they/them) carries a lineage of mad wisdom. Their transdisciplinary practice is rooted in disability justice and queer worldbuilding, and they approach the process of making as a hybridized self-care routine and mystic ritual. Producing work according to the cadence of their nervous system and building relationships with land-based, cosmic, and elemental collaborators; kiln fire, corrosive etching salts, printing presses, and organic materials conspire to shape outcomes in unexpected and unpredictable ways. The work invites both maker and viewer into a mutual surrender steeped in a dichotomy of energetic abundance and material (dys)functionality.

Their art practice embodies a sacred grotesque of domestic abundance and queer relational interdependence. By researching the intersections of chronic illness and entities from higher realms (and the more-than-human world), they question the function and purpose of materials typically related to wellness, consciousness, and survival. Suboxone wrappers pressed into paper transcend identification as debris, becoming a meditative mandala. Pain management becomes a metaphysical offering, extending beyond the concrete temporal reality of prescribed doses.

Clay occupies a threshold between becoming and destruction. Making reliquaries for sensory remembrance, offerings to kiln gods leave auric shadows within the viscera of each vessel. Stoneware bodies crack and gape around the memory of incinerated offerings, while crusted gelatinous medication (a permanent interim solution) weeps from each wound.

Conductive copper plates absorb ongoing energy and intention, and organic substrates carry these spiritual impressions beyond and across multiple manifestations. Intaglio plates etched in the image of a fractured consciousness, monotype images open portals to inner dimensions, and fragmented zines embrace the simultaneous beauty of misregistration and recontextualization.