A Kin to Clay
Tinworks, Bozeman
22 June – 19 October 2025

Gabriel Chaile’s work is grounded in ancestry, architecture, and ritual. At Tinworks, he reconstructs Ella vendrá a pagarle todo (She will come to pay him for everything), an adobe sculpture first presented at BAMPFA in the exhibition MATRIX 283. Towering and symbolic, the vessel draws from familial memory and Indigenous ceramic traditions, transforming earth into a sacred form—part monument, part offering.

Alongside this sculptural work, Chaile will create a new communal adobe oven that invites the public to gather, bake, and share. Activated monthly throughout the exhibition season, the oven bridges individual memory and collective ritual, linking Chaile’s practice with environmental legacies, including Agnes Denes’s Wheatfield, from which the flour for baking is sourced. Together, these works explore the poetic and political potential of shared nourishment, ancestral knowledge, and clay as a living medium.

For its 2025 exhibition season, Tinworks Art presents A Kin to Clay, an exhibition that honors the rich legacy of ceramics in Montana while tracing its connections to broader histories and cultural lineages. Through the work of artists who engage clay and earthen materials as vessels of memory, resistance, and community, the exhibition explores how a shared relationship to the earth can shape meaning across generations and geographies.