About me

The first time I took an art course at the University of Oklahoma, I felt an inexplicable connection, like the whole world suddenly made perfect sense. I'm Ki'Aunnau Chandler, a ceramic and sculpture artist. I am deeply fascinated with the ocean and, more specifically, octopi. This passion for sculpture and marine life has shaped my artistic journey. My work is the exploration and embracement of the beauty in ordinary things, creating a visual diary of emotions and life through another lens. My job is inspired by the wonders of nature and the mysteries of the human soul. Finding the beauty in darkness is what I strive to do in my work. Each mark, thread, and carved shape is a conversation through texture and bold colors, inviting viewers to connect with the piece using their own stories and interpretations. I hope to evoke a new appreciation for the beauty of our shared universe. My primary focus is ceramics. With clay, I aim to explore the fluidity and mystery of the ocean. I draw my inspiration from the intelligence and the intricate forms of the octopi and other sea forms, and the creatures that inhabit the ocean.

Art has always been something that I was interested in as a child. All of my hobbies had an art form to them. Growing up, when I felt like I couldn't buy the things that I wanted, I would just make them myself. Back then, I didn't know that art could be a career path that I could take. But in any art class or art-related activity, I always found myself enjoying life a little more. Oceanic animals and forms influence the majority of my work. I have a deep fascination with the ocean. The fact that we are barely able to explore the ocean completely and document what's been found has left me only more intrigued. There are so many things that are down there that we don't know of, and the fact that the ocean has just as much life activity as on land is amazing. Every creature has their unique ability to live in their environment. All of the ocean inhabitants work together to create their community. The fact that they can thrive without the influence of humans shows that we are not the makers or the ones in control. There is one creature in the ocean that I love the most: an octopus. Octopi are so incredibly smart, and I feel in a way that I can relate to them. Octopuses have eight arms and can do many things at once. And I feel that connects with the dialogue in my head. Being so occupied by the many things I have to do or think about at once makes me connect with an octopus, which can physically do everything at once. There are so many different kinds of octopi, and they all have their unique ability to do something that others cannot. They can come in various sizes. They have amazing adaptability and survival instincts.

My non-art world influences begin with God. I feel that God is the biggest and most intricate artist. Especially since I get a lot of my inspiration from nature, which is made with such precise detail by God. I would also say that Christianity directly impacts my art and ideas. With the art that I make, I try to communicate the delicacy of nature around us. To show that the things that we don't pay as much attention to have just as much life and beauty as the common things that we interact with daily. I like to draw attention to the minuscule things that the common person may not think about or care about. Subcultures that I reference are ocean-inspired aesthetics like marine biology or deep-sea mythology. I also enjoy combining surrealism and fantasy into my ocean-inspired work. Another subculture is ceramic arts in general. I mostly enjoy the sculptural part of ceramics.

Once I realized that art can be a career path, I had a large question for myself: what specific art medium am I good at? I knew that I enjoyed art growing up, but I didn't know which medium I was attracted to the most. I was surrounded by other artists who already knew what they enjoyed. This alone made me feel behind, but then I told myself that I just needed to try everything and figure out what it is that I like to do. When I came across sculpture I realized that I enjoyed it so much. However, there were aspects of sculpture that I dreaded. Working with machinery was not always my favorite, and metal or wood was something I wasn't particularly a fan of. Then I came across ceramics. I did not completely love it at first because of the texture of the clay and the skill required. However, I realized that I only didn't enjoy making functional pottery like cups, bowls, and plates. Once I started making more sculptural things, I fell in love with ceramics. I felt that I was able to combine aspects of sculpture that I did enjoy with ceramics, which were my two favorite mediums. For my work, I usually aim to make organic and fluid shapes and play a lot with texture. I enjoy having tactile textures, sometimes rough or sometimes smooth, depending on the form that I'm making. Since I try to mimic nature, smooth textures are rarely used in my work. I take pleasure in using bright colors or sometimes colors that closely mimic nature. I find joy in working on a medium to large scale because it changes how we interact with the object. Instead of viewers looking down and in on something, making it insignificant, being larger lets us admire the complexity and captivating aspects of an ordinary object that would normally be looked over. These choices help me mimic nature more accurately while also using colors and size to draw you in, even though sometimes they may not be as close to natural representation. I enjoy using textures to make viewers want to engage not just mentally, but physically with the object.

Currently, with my work, I am exploring how to combine my favorite aspects of other mediums into one. The goal I have for the evolution of my art is to push people to have this inter-dialogue of where they stand in the environment around them. And question whether their daily life aligns with their beliefs. As an artist, I feel that I have accomplished finding my place in the art world, which was at first extremely intimidating. I feel that I know where I stand. I also believe that I have grown to unapologetically be myself and what I want in my art, regardless of outside opinions, which I struggled with at first.As I look ahead in my practice, I feel a growing desire to continue deepening the connection between my eternal fascination with the ocean, more specifically the octopi, and the complexity of human emotion and experience. To me, the ocean has always represented something more than an aquatic environment. For me, it's a metaphor for the unknown the subconscious, and the other things that shape our inner and outer world. With their intelligence, adaptability, and strange features, octopuses have become symbolic figures in my work. They are mysterious and yet still grounded in reality, different yet relatable. In my work, they are perfect vessels for expressing resilience, transformation, and vulnerability, as well as the instinct to survive and grow despite the changing outside environment. I want my ceramic work to remain rooted in these aquatic inspirations, not for the aesthetic, but because it allows me to create a language for deeply exploring personal and collective questions. What does it mean to feel out of place or even camouflaged within our environment? Do we respond to overwhelming change? How can fluidity become a strength? These are some of the questions I continually return to as I conceptualize and build these forms and narratives through the clay. My work is a place where these types of questions can take shape and where the softness and fluidity of the form and the water meet the hard permanence of reality. Emotionally, I want my pieces to feel like encounters with these aquatic creatures that mirror our hopes, curiosities, and fears. The ocean is vast, unpredictable, and often unknowable, just like the landscapes of our internal being. By sculpting tentacles, coral forms, shells, and organic underwater textures, I can externalize these feelings of joy, wonder, and fear. I want my work to invite others into these emotional spaces, offering them a sense of connection not only with the natural world but with the emotional experiences that hide underneath the surface of everyday life.

As I work toward the future, I hope to keep refining my technique and ability to blend my technical skills with emotional expression. I want my ceramic sculptures to become both stories and artifacts. They should be fragments of the marine world that speak to the real human conditions that we experience. In doing so, I hope to contribute to conversations about environment, identity, and emotional survival in a world that is constantly shifting. I also want to continue to remain open to playfulness and surprise, letting the unpredictability of both clay and aquatic life remind me that not everything needs to be fully understood to be meaningful. My goal is to create work that feels alive. By continuing to explore this intersection of marine imagery and real-life questions and concerns, I hope to craft a body of work that resonates across boundaries, inviting people to look deeper into their own emotional waters while also considering their relationship to the world around them.