Sasinun Kladpetch moved to the United States in 2013 to attend graduate school at the San Francisco Art Institute after completed her baccalaureate degree from Silpakorn University in Thailand.

In Material Matters, her inaugural solo exhibition, at Themes+Projects, Kladpetch explores the materiality of her practice and its roots in her homeland. 

For the series Mud Balls, for example, the artist returned to Thailand to gather soil from her father’s orchard in which she used to play as a child. Shaped by hand, the mud balls are a direct transformation of material into form. Fine grains of screened earth, compressed in-between the artist's hands, form a sphere. (Earth by gravity, here the artist's hands) The mud balls are materialized objects of memory and reflection, they are also an artist's manifest to keep the process of creation close to the human hands and its elementary script (bringing material into shape) to bring material into shape.

In Dirt Box 1 & 2, Kladpetch returns to the United States to mix earth from the Oakland Hills, Noe Valley, and the Marin Headlands. In contrast with Mud Balls, which are compressed by hand into spheres, the soil here spreads over the planar surfaces of free-standing boxes. 

The rough and cracked surface and cracks reveals the complex composition of organic and inorganic elements. The objects expand into the space, de-contextualizing the soil under our feet. The earth material feels closer to the human eye, akin to looking through a magnifying glass. 

A different approach can be seen in the group of artworks titled Spin and Totems. In this series, the artist connects what she used to separate in her art practice as a ceramicist and a sculpture using concrete. Both materials, ceramics and concrete, come together through points of contact. In Spin concrete blocks illusionary out of balance rotate on top of round ceramic cones whose deformed bodies seem to react to the weight of the concrete sitting on top. In Totems ceramic elements in various shapes and characters stack up, rising vertically in a balancing act along gravity. 

Material Matters visualizes Sasinun Kladpetch’s cultural influences, especially her crafts and skill-focused education in Thailand, and the earthbound conceptual approach in the United States. As a successful emerging artist, she takes a step forward by looking back, always staying close to her origins.