“Looking at things that are supposed to behave a certain way and purposefully misunderstanding how they should be used is really important to me,” the artist says. In Typewriter Drawings, Clayton considers the role typewriters played in creating work opportunities for women by using a machine typically reserved for dictation and corporate correspondence for unexpectedly expressive ends. The resulting drawings (intricate depictions of decorative vases, carpets, gallery exhibitions, soup cans, and more) were created solely using the typewriter’s standard keys. In Darkhouse Lighthouse (2022), she and her frequent collaborator, Phillip Andrew Lewis, place a full-sized working lighthouse inside an abandoned Pittsburgh row house 383 miles away and 879 feet above the nearest ocean in anticipation of rising sea levels one day making the lighthouse functional. In other works, such as People in Order – Age (2006) and People in Order – Love (2006), the artist, working alongside James Price, performs impossible tasks and organizes arbitrary information, such as filming one person of every age from one to one hundred or arranging couples by the length of their relationships. In each work, the artist uses absurd yet poetic rules and tools to reflect on labor, aging, love, and community.

Building community around shared experience, Clayton founded An Artist Residency in Motherhood, a self-directed artist residency program with no application process that frames the daily activities of raising children as material for art making. Between 2012 and 2015, the artist participated in the residency herself, producing multiple bodies of work inspired by or created with her children. On Mother’s Day in 2016, the artist launched the program as an open residency, inviting other artist-parents to apply it to their own lives. “There were a lot of questions swirling around in my mind about childcare, finances, space, and time. These questions and concerns kind of became the frame for the work,” she says. In works Clayton completed during the residency, such as 63 Objects from My Son’s Mouth (2011-2012) and Dangerous Objects Made Safe (2013), she playfully explores the anxieties of parenthood, displaying items taken from her son’s mouth and household objects now encased in protective grey felt. Works like The Distance I Can Be From My Son – Park, and Women’s Intuition (hats) (2013) gives a concrete form to the feeling of maternal instinct, where Clayton recorded the distance her son could wander away before she felt the need to chase after him, or attempted to guess the names of anonymous figures in a photograph based solely on intuition. Through these works, and across her practice, the artist blurs the lines between the domestic and the public, inviting viewers into the intimate rhythms of everyday life and motherhood.