Ian Manseau

Ian Manseau is a sculptor and MFA candidate at Texas A&M University - Corpus Christi. He is working toward his Master of Fine Arts in Studio Art with an expected graduation date of May of 2026. In his current body of work, he is examining the unseen and deferred human and environmental costs of military service. Manseau mines his own experience of toxic exposure from military burn pits to bring awareness to what he calls the invisible wound of service and to bear witness to its lasting impact on communities. He combines raku-fired ceramics, digital modeling, screen printing, and 3D fabrication techniques to work across scales and material archives, distilling complex information into systems of meaning, memory, and fracture.

Manseau is a medically retired U.S. Air Force Technical Sergeant with almost 14 years of service in a number of capacities as a network analyst and senior technical manager. He was deployed once in support of Operation Enduring Freedom in Bagram Air Base, Afghanistan. His current body of work, Residue, is a large-scale ceramic installation that memorializes veterans' service as much as it is a visualization of exposure through transformation and erasure. Manseau is collecting uniforms worn by veterans during deployment for a ceremonial burning in a raku kiln. The flame will consume the garments completely, imprinting the carbon residue of the fabric directly onto the surface of the ceramic vessel. The resulting forms carry a symbolic impression of each veteran's service and become a record of personal sacrifice and collective loss.

Ian's ongoing Altered Reality photographic series is a meditation on the viewer's implicit trust in the veracity of the photographic image. He begins each work with a documentary photograph of an actual industrial site or fully developed landscape. Man-made objects in these places, the buildings, towers, and infrastructure that support modern life, are erased and replaced with natural features that are not present through the use of AI generation. Trees, rivers, and sky are seamlessly inserted in the place of human presence. The faint, ghosted overlay of the original architecture or infrastructure then reappears, haunting the manipulated terrain. Altered Reality questions how generative technologies will rewrite the memory of environments, our cultural drive to shape our world in our own image, and our faith in the information we see.

At Texas A&M–Corpus Christi, Manseau taught Sculpture I and Design II; additionally, he developed and taught Topics in Studio Art: AI for Artist Websites and Social Media Strategies, a 4000 level elective course focused on helping artists build their websites and navigate social media platforms using AI-assisted tools. Manseau has also led professional development sessions for Corpus Christi ISD art teachers to help K–12 art educators integrate 3D scanning, digital sculpting, and emerging technologies into their classrooms.

Manseau also worked to initiate a cross-institutional partnership between Texas A&M-Corpus Christi and the South Texas Botanical Gardens & Nature Center. The first iteration of the partnership was completed in 2024 with Wired Life, a public installation of wire wildlife sculptures created by his Sculpture I students. In 2025, Ian also collaborated with Botanical Gardens staff to expand the partnership with Wildlife & Wonder: Coastal Bend Creations, a multi-class exhibition of artwork by art students from five university courses.