July 1 – August 3rd, 2026
90 Maple St, Florence, MA 01062
About Accepting Identity
Sip413’s July gallery show, “Parts Work: Accepting Identity,” is a collection of photographs and ceramics exploring the sensations of joy, curiosity, exploration, and tension that come up while creating. This show is a celebration of Disability Pride Month, focusing on personal and shared experiences of finding identity and meaning through making art.
Artist Bio
Kristin Schiff (she/her) has been pursuing photography since 2018 and has been active in ceramics since 2023. She has a background in Psychology, focusing on Adoption Studies from her studies at University of Massachusetts: Amherst. For over a decade she worked as an Industrial Psychologist, before pursuing Art as a career in October 2025. Her photos have been featured in group expositions at galleries, restaurants, coworking spaces and community art centers—both juried and non-juried—in New England, Maryland, Seattle & New York.
Artist Statement
As a person living with several disabilities and a member of the LGBTQ+ community, finding ways to form positive experiences and connections with my body is central to my art. My identity and body is often politicized, and art offers me to opportunity to explore and process those feelings and experiences.
I make ceramics inspired by the feelings in my body when I enter the studio. Creating ceramics is the time I feel the most in-tune and happy in my body. All my work is inspired by the joy I feel in the physical action of creation. My photography is especially tied to my love of nature and history. I love travel to historical places, national and start parks, botanical gardens and wildlife refuges. Taking my camera pushes me physically to explore these places and also to slow down and appreciate all the details.
Ceramic Sculptures
"Generational Jackalopes #1" serves as a powerful metaphor for the intergenerational experience of medical trauma and healing. By rendering the mythical jackalope with a tender, raw vulnerability, the artist captures a painful yet beautiful moment of recognition.
When the young jackalope looks upon the parent, it witnesses a path it will never fully walk. In her own experience, the artist, Kristin Schiff, has seen her mother left untreated for an auto-immune disease for 33 years. They were both diagnosed in 2023 after the artist spent 7 years advocating in the medical system for that help. She chose a Jackalope as the symbol for auto-immune because they both experience this chronic condition in hidden or non-apparent ways that over time become visible. Choosing a mythical creature/cryptid is meant to connect hidden or non-apparent disability into something that can be seen, but is often treated as mythical by the medical community.
This pair of hand-sculpted ceramic book vases, called “Parts Work: Accepting Identity” acts as a literal and metaphorical vessel for human experience, exploring how psychological paradigms intersect with social identity and historical erasure.
In the smaller of the two volumes, the spine bears a subtle hint of the LGBTQ rainbow flag The physical scale of the piece is a deliberate nod to the burgeoning, newly emerging research surrounding LGBTQ social model approaches to identity and mental health. This smaller stature serves as a poignant monument to the massive amounts of institutional knowledge, history, and research lost during systemic attempts to erase LGBTQ identity, both historically in Nazi Germany and more recently during the Trump Administration. The reverse side features delicate, monochromatic floral impressions suggesting a quiet, resilient growth despite historical silencing.
In contrast the larger asserts its physical presence with the vibrant, distinct diagonal stripes of the Disability Pride flag glazed clearly across both sides. Its larger scale reflects the expansive, deeply entrenched history of medical and psychological research into disability and neurodiversity. This substantial volume represents the heavy, lasting impacts of the medical model of disability, a paradigm that has historically dominated clinical literature and institutional structures.
Viewed together the two vessels invites the viewer to question who holds the authority to document identity, whose history is preserved, and how the models we use to understand ourselves shape the space we are permitted to occupy. Functioning as actual vases, both pieces challenge us to consider what we choose to nurture and cultivate within the vessels of our communities, and how the social and medical models complement and interact with each other.
“Tortuga Dulce”, translated as "Sweet Turtle", takes its name from a lighthearted high school Spanish class nickname, but beneath the glossy, candy-coated surface lies a deeply personal exploration of trauma, protection, and somatic reclamation. For seven years, the artist lived encased in a rigid scoliosis brace. This sculpture serves as a physical manifestation of that lived experience. The turtle's heavy, protective shell reflects the literal and psychological shielding required to survive years of confinement that fostered body dysmorphia and forced a young mind to learn to live outside of the physical self.
The choice of glaze carries a deliberate tension. The pale blue shell and fleshy, mauve-pink limbs evoke a sickly sweetness reminiscent of artificial candy. This hyper-palatable exterior nods to the social performance of youth, the pressure to mask behind a pleasant, "sweet" demeanor, as a form of protection from bullying. This work is rooted in how the artist is learning to embrace all her parts through the principles of Internal Family Systems (IFS) and Parts Work. Tortuga Dulce represents an act of creative unlearning. It honors the protective "part" that built a hard shell to navigate trauma, while gently inviting the artist back into her own skin. By shaping the clay, the artist externalizes the armor she once wore, transforming a vessel of past confinement into a testament to healing, integration, and somatic homecoming.
In "Honeyed Apple," the classic symbol of health and restriction is fundamentally transformed. For generations, the adage “An apple a day keeps the doctor away" has been weaponized by diet culture, turning a simple fruit into a clinical mandate for perfection, restraint, and body policing. This sculpture radically rejects that rigid moral assignment.
Rather than presenting an ideal representation of a ceramic apple, the piece is covered in a heavy, visceral, and unapologetically indulgent gold and blue glaze. A thick, viscous "honey" glaze cascades down the form, breaking into unpredictable golds and deep, bruised blues before pooling above a white glaze base. The glossy, dripping glaze celebrates the messiness of true nourishment and pleasure over the sterile promises of wellness trends.
Selected Photography from Fluid Identity
A dramatic diagonal split creates a visual metaphor for the different spaces navigated by the LGBTQ+ & Disability community. The smooth expanse is melting ice, those that have let go and accepted that they contain many aspects of their identity. The side still frozen from an ice storm symbolizes the turbulent, but ultimately necessary exploration of the different parts of identity, that there is freedom, joy, beauty and vulnerability of living with true visibility. The frozen chaos would not be as stunning without the contrast of the smooth and flowing water. The line is not a barrier, but a site of acceptance and courage, where the choice to embrace the different identities and live in the parts of yourself that conflict is true freedom of expression.
Medium: Photography, 2021
Limited Edition Print: 1,000 Only
Dimensions: 12×18 Print matted to 16×20
Exhibited at Lotvin Family Gallery, Hopkinton MA, March - April 2026 for Depth of Field Juried Photography Exhibition
Exhibited at WaterFire Arts Center, Providence RI, July - August 2026 for the America, Unfinished?! Exhibition
Exhibited at Parts Work: Accepting Identity- a solo exhibition on Disability & LGBTQ Identity hosted by Sip413 Gallery & Cafe, July 2026
Exhibited at Heart in Hand Tattoo Pop-up, starting September 2026
A dynamic close-up of a rain-drenched pond surface, featuring a perfect, expanding concentric ripple pattern left by a fallen droplet. The texture is complex, composed of a submerged bed of fine pebbles and scattered pine needles visible through the clear water, punctuated by two dark, weathered stones. This piece captures the fleeting moment of impact and the subsequent geometry of motion, like how a single act or moment can cause the realization of a new queer identity.
1,000 Limited Edition Prints, 11×14, 2026
Exhibited at Parts Work: Accepting Identity - a solo exhibition on Disability & LGBTQ Identity hosted by Sip413 Gallery & Cafe, July 2026
Exhibited at Heart in Hand Tattoo Pop-up, starting September 2026
This evocative composition showcases the intersection of the seasons as vibrant brown oak leaves rest on a sheet of blue-tinted ice. A small opening in the ice reveals the dark, rippling water beneath, framed by the sharp, jagged edges of the leaves. I view this piece as a chaotic and unsupported moment of the transition of identity. The flowing water below is right there to sweep the leaves away as soon as the support around it melts.
Medium: Photography, 2026
Limited Edition Print: 1,000 Only
Dimensions: 11×17 Print matted to 16×20
Bridgeport Art Trail hosted by City Lights Gallery, Bridgeport CT, June - July 2026 for OutWork 2026
Exhibited at Parts Work: Accepting Identity- a solo exhibition on Disability & LGBTQ Identity hosted by Sip413 Gallery & Cafe, July 2026
Exhibited at Heart in Hand Tattoo Pop-up, starting September 2026
A vibrant celebration of diversity and visibility, this image captures the spirit of the 2021 Dyke March. Framed by the elegant classical columns and intricately patterned dome of the Boston Common's Parkman Bandstand, iconic Pride flags flutter against a clear blue sky.
The scene features the standard Rainbow Flag, the Transgender Pride Flag, and the Pansexual Pride Flag, highlighting the intersectional and inclusive nature of the event. Beyond the bandstand, the city skyline provides a stark yet beautiful contrast, showcasing the community's presence and impact on the urban landscape.
This photograph serves as a powerful testament to the ongoing fight for LGBTQ+ rights and the enduring strength of the community.
Medium: Photography, 2021
Limited Edition Print: 1,000 Only
Dimensions: 12×16 Print matted to 16×20
Exhibited at Parts Work: Accepting Identity- a solo exhibition on Disability & LGBTQ Identity hosted by Sip413 Gallery & Cafe, July 2026
Exhibited at Heart in Hand Tattoo Pop-up, starting September 2026
A skeletal structure stands resilient in an open field, framed by dense woodland under a dramatic sky. For the artist living with chronic illness, it is the ever-present blueprint of a life that was, or a future longed for, constantly being built and rebuilt. It represents the fluctuating nature of health, where the foundations of comfort and normalcy can feel both solid and ethereal. The open spaces highlight the unseen battles, the invisible symptoms, and the deep yearning for a 'home' within one's own body that feels stable and complete. The landscape also signifies hope and the continuous construction of identity and resilience, even when the full structure remains a daily endeavor.
Medium: Photography, 2023
Limited Edition Print: 1,000 Only
Dimensions: 8×12 Print matted to 11×14
Exhibited at WaterFire Arts Center, Providence RI, July - August 2026 for the America, Unfinished?! Exhibition
Exhibited at Parts Work: Accepting Identity- a solo exhibition on Disability & LGBTQ Identity hosted by Sip413 Gallery & Cafe, July 2026
Exhibited at Heart in Hand Tattoo Pop-up, starting September 2026
