Statement
I use the language of accumulation, fossilization, the void, and stratification to explore how time visually manifests itself in the physical world and how we as humans experience, perceive and record its passage in our bodies and the internal landscape of our minds in the form of memory. Physics, psychology, and philosophy surrounding the nebulous mechanics of time and the push and pull of the non-linear chronology of memory continually inform how I think about my work. I look to the ordered stratifications found in the geologic landscape, which is the record of the memory of the earth, for the visual language to help describe the complex expanse of human experience within an everyday fleeting moment to the sublimely infinite.
Clay itself is a material manifestation of geologic time and I use it for its conceptual ability to record, document, reveal, and transform. Using handbuilding, casting, slip dipping, and cold working techniques, I seek to describe the formless – the elusiveness of the present, the shapelessness of memory. I want to give physical form to the more intangible, unquantifiable human experiences. The ones that exist peripherally in the interstice between moments of tactility and absence, permanence and impermanence, past and future, perception and reality. Each is known by the presence of other, in the state of between. With a multi-faceted approach to the material of clay, I seek to create pieces that balance in these less absolute spaces –a between the familiar and the abstract, the formal and the metaphor, the natural landscape and inhabited architectural spaces of our human perceptions.
Each building process I employ brings its own conceptual offering to the work at different moments. Loss and absence are inherent to the slip dipping process and poignantly speak of impermanence and fragility. The disappearance of matter and the textural record it creates are as crucial as the remaining tangible material left after the firing. The voids of fossilized textiles point to a human imprint of everyday life, perhaps a past or future existence beyond now – found in the simple zig-zag of corduroy, a zipper, the cabling and loops of a knit sweater. When sliced post-firing, the remaining hollow spaces become stratified artifacts of chance and happenstance, a moment captured, a moment lost, a moment that will have always been, an historical future. They are a memory of an ever evolving present moment known through past a action or substance. I use colored porcelains, glaze and raw materials within the layers to mark a moment of change, the undulating nature of memory and the passage of time akin to sedimentary and metamorphic rock accumulating and compressing over geologic time.
The sculptures of porcelain folds created through handbuilding and casting techniques are an accumulation of moments. In the making process, as I build a piece, each new porcelain fold nestles into the previous undulation. Their placement marks a moment of decision, the future of the piece decided through a past action. They collectively amount to a timeline, with each compositional element guiding the next to form a tall column, a bending arch ending on the same plane it began. They become physical manifestations of my personal account of time and the temporal accumulations and contortions of memory as it folds and moves on itself- a rhythm known through the body and through the repetition of building the piece. The glazed surface is quiet, luscious, and soft and is a surrogate to the extravagancies of touch and to the mundanity of folding laundry, the sublime and ordinary coalescing. The frozen moments of fluid glaze, halted by temperature and time, offer a physical manifestation of the memory of the kiln, a moment in perpetuity.
Throughout the making process, the discarded materials produced from creating these pieces are scraped and collected from all surfaces and containers in the studio and cast in plaster molds. They become self-referential core samples of pure process, a veritable timeline of my thoughts and actions within the studio. The resulting striations, the cracks, fissures, the moments of almost-failure preserved in each core sample are a record of a day, a week, a month of making in the studio and are only revealed when they are cut post-firing with a wet saw, an undeniably violent way of unearthing their subtle, personal secrets. Throughout these moments of making, I become an archeologist of memory and an architect of a time.