Thinking and Doing: Accessing One Via the Other
As I continue in this final year, the making sometimes comes about due to the compulsion to make ‘things.’ In contrast to this modality, I make work as a response. The first and strongest mode of thought is through my investigation into the withdrawn. Lensed trough Heidegger, Ahmed and Harman (The latter re-phrasing the withdrawn as “allure”) I find this brings the strongest definition to what I would say is my practice interest. The more I immerse myself in these ways of approaching thinking, the more I see how ontology influences my approach to making. This in turn allows the work to register epistemologically. The work is the evidence - the ‘how we know’. My ceramics evidence ecological states of being. I embody this by creating slabs of clay which ‘dry out’. The dry fissures stand in for a lack of nourishment. Embody neglectful inaction (see fig. 1) As artefacts, it’s hard not to consider the audience. Like with most of my work, I want the viewer to come into contact with my work at a critical distance from the material on presentation, and definitely not have the viewer given everything in a literal definition of an object. I guess I can attribute this to the “object becoming a thing” ethos. To consider what these things do, how they take on form, is to investigate what the form itself is doing. The openings on this body of work are about restrictions and opportunities. Each ‘vessel’, or for ease of definition, we will call them pots in this instance, either invite your gaze inside themselves, producing intimacy, or they restrict your gaze, giving only a glimpse, or a narrow passage into what is then hidden. This week I have taken that one step further by cutting into the clay in the casting process. This really is experimental, as I’m not even sure what the given feature will be upon the clay drying and being fired (see fig. 2)
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