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The Mississippi State University Department of Art Galleries is pleased to present Inside Job- work from Kristen Tordella-Williams in both Old Main Art Galleries from January 20 through February 19, 2026. 

Kristen Tordella-Williams is an interdisciplinary artist and arts educator based in the American South. She has exhibited nationally and internationally, including a recent two person exhibition at the Shiga Kogen Roman Museum in Yamanouchi, Japan. 

Inside Job is an exhibition of sculpture, artist books, and wall work created between 2023–26 using primarily hand papermaking and cast iron processes. Produced in both the United States and Japan, the works reflect contemporary post-industrial socio-political landscapes shaped by invisible and visible labor. The title refers simultaneously to the division of domestic labor, the insidiousness of internalized misogyny concealed by beauty and decorum, white-collar crime, and acts of economic, bodily, and historical theft. These works move between landscapes of the mind and the cosmos, and the forests, gardens, and streets of a small agricultural mountain town in Nagano, Japan, situating intimacy alongside empire.

Inside and outside, home and yard, domesticity and nature, operate as porous boundaries. Labor is rendered both present and obscured: read between the lines, embedded in materials, and folded into gestures of care. Doilies, leaves, and garden forms reference women’s work and the ways craft is undervalued within the home yet overvalued when reframed by the gallery. Hard iron leaves are fixed in space; paper forms remain fragile, brittle, and prone to collapse. Soft and hard materials, cotton, kozo, iron, stage assumptions of strength and weakness, tenderness and rigidity, beauty and threat.

Inside Job asks viewers to linger with nuance and fraught symbolism, to recognize beauty as a strategy, fragility as strength, and sweetness as a demand. It insists that what appears decorative is often structural, and that the most enduring violences are those that feel familiar, polite, and homegrown.

Kristen Tordella-Williams examines the impact of personal and communal labor on the landscapes of our bodies, communities and environments. Often using repetitive processes such as iron casting and hand papermaking, Tordella-Williams balances the strength and fragility inherent in the materials of cast iron and paper as well as their common histories in industrial and domestic spaces. Tordella-Williams memorializes the impact of our actions on our environments and collective culture by gathering and re-interpreting the remnants of labor, her own and that of others. When making multiples, Tordella-Williams uses the number forty to reference the forty-hour workweek unions fought militantly for in the past and now is mainly taken for granted. Her studio explorations result in site-responsive installations that invite viewers to reflect on their own experiences and the residue they leave behind through their art, refuse, or communal efforts.

Tordella-Williams holds a BFA in Sculpture from the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth and an MFA in Sculpture and Dimensional Studies from Alfred University. She is currently a Mid-South Sculpture Alliance board member and an Associate Professor of Sculpture at Auburn University in Alabama. Peek