Max Silver (they | them)

I am a multidisciplinary artist, trained in acting, music, dance, devised theater, and several visual art mediums.

Theater + Performance

I prefer to zoom into tiny intimate moments rather than tell elaborate stories. In my theater and performance work this has manifested as an effort to slow down real time and bring awareness to the subtlest movements we make unconsciously. I'm drawn to what we say without speaking and intense--and perhaps radical levels of--nostalgia. 

Music

I trained in classical piano as a kid and later in guitar. I abandoned music for over a decade and began guitar lessons again as an adult in 2019. I did choir in middle school but gave up on singing after I didn’t get accepted into the Madrigals. I overcame my fear of singing after that in 2021 by teaching myself to sing to Taylor Swift in the car.

My guitar teacher and I both have backgrounds in devised theater and we’ve applied those principles to music making. I pull from source material (most recently, a series of letters I wrote to myself at 16 beginning in 2017 and continuing to today), music I listen to, and my own writing to create new music.

Ceramics

Hold Water Ceramics is my return to ceramics after closing Paperclip Pottery, my ceramics business. My intention with HWC is to make work that I like, that allows me to slow down and revel in the process, shirk the Capitalist production mindset that promotes scarcity and quantity and tends to estrange the maker from their work. I strive to push the limits of what is considered functional and prioritize shape and form over utilitarianism.

Book me as an Intimacy Coordinator.

Read about my consent school, Consent Wizardry.