The first made entirely of animated quilts - is the first chapter in what will evolve into a lengthy visual novel that invites game players to choose-their-own-adventure similar to the 1980s children's game book series. The game and its installation at Locust Projects a designed to create a soothing sensory-inclusive environment with a hypnotic soundscape created by Elise Anderson and dialog made with mental health consultant Tayina Deravile. 

Influenced by the theoretical framework of Cosmic Pessimism, a pop culture philosophy of horror, Clay’s monsters are a hybrid of alien and natural forms whose pastel palette and cushioned fabric surfaces distract from an existence that is indifferent and even menacing to human exceptionalism.

Within a decision tree coding structure, the player’s avatars can choose from a list of prompts for each manipulative encounter with the trees, who communicate via text on the screen. The monsters’ choppy movements recall nineties video games and children’s shows. The game’s title refers to Juhani Pallsamaa’s book Eyes of the Skin: Architecture and the Senses, an architectural theory classic that advocates trusting one’s senses. This nearly therapeutic philosophy echoes the positive self-talk Clay adopted as a child who hallucinated monsters. Her work represents that experience and the work of managing it. Clay’s work also helps viewers who have not had this experience to empathize with this condition of near constant uncertainty. Of course, as more and more monsters prove themselves to be all too real, she lets us widen our acceptance, in her work’s soft cuddly embrace, of all that might be.

Eyes of the Skin is funded in part by a Knight New Work Grant awarded to the artist in 2022 by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation. The exhibition’s realization at Locust Projects is presented as part of Knight Digital Commissions.