I have been working for around ten days now on some of the components for one of the works. It is hard to keep the porcelain fresh to handle and yet not become deformed under its own weight at this scale. The material dictates much of the formal essence and I am working hard to maintain the traces of making as well as the underlying structure of segmentation. Although what I am making is not a vessel and forms part of a larger work, working in this way is giving me a wealth of ideas for future work.
I have been inspired by prehistoric pottery such as the beaker culture terracotta artefacts. This archaeological idea comes together with the biological, creating another layer in my toing and froing between the past and future. My aim is to decentralise the work from an overt iconography of the now and widen the scope for reflection which inevitably comes back onto contemporary contexts from a different perspective. A perspective that sees the human condition not stuck in the present but a chronologically universal one. Namely, the tension between the animal self grounded in a physical reality, and the conceptual self as a construct of the mind. This I believe is something that people have tried to come to terms with continually in different ways over time. Today this struggle is framed in the context of technology in its many forms and macro socio-economics. These are having the tendency perhaps to fragment and confound a sense of the whole in a way that has not been previously encountered on such a scale. What I am trying to do, is move out of a certain contemporary entrainment and present something that rejects horizontal collective solipsism. Instead, I am endeavouring to express the self as a vertical continuum in time that speaks of how we are the bearers of the past and the future. Here, the titles become crucial in opening out layered inferences that can move freely between formal, aesthetic, conceptual and contextual constraints.