Studio Visit: MK Guth

Art and creation are inextricably linked. Creativity involves making something, revealing unseen potential, and enabling new experiences of the world. But art is also about omission, removal, and, sometimes, destruction. Without a critical faculty making value distinctions—keep this, exclude that—art wouldn’t exist. This editing process applies both to individual works and to an artist’s career more broadly. For this reason, I recently visited MK Guth’s studio in Portland, Oregon, not to look at new work but to watch her destroy one of her early sculptures.