Interstices 2023

“The Anthropocene has resulted in a planetary environment in which human and nonhuman, nature and ecology are bound together…material agency, material constraints and material exclusions of energy have challenged fixed boundaries between humans, nature and ecology” - Susan Ballard

The states of constant flux and entropy are strongly embedded in the making of clay objects. Material elements inherent in clay and their alchemical interactions within different kiln atmospheres are driven by the rise and fall of temperature cycles, and can never be fully controlled, or predicted. My work investigates the metaphorical allusions of such serendipity to the ecological uncertainties of the Anthropocene.  Even though the material culture of the clay form and its materiality support my understanding of human entanglement with the natural world, it’s through visceral treatment of the ceramic form and surface that I navigate notions of abjection. Repeated lockdowns during Covid turned the construction of my clay vessels into a flurry of destruction, tearing and piercing. The surfaces of the truncated, fragmentary forms became the canvas. Their unfinished rims, the immediacy of sgraffito and the mimetic layering of slips and glazes punctuate the tumultuous nature of these times. The physicality of gestural abstraction reveals a moving, sedimentary layering, one on top of the other, and across, echoing an inextricable, entangled topography. Interludes of vessels with unglazed, exposed clay bodies create visual juxtapositions conveying a vertiginous loss of balance. For Interstices, I bring together an assemblage of such ceramic vessels paired with a chaotic, web-like suspension of abstracted biomorphic forms made from black and porcelaneous clay. In reference to physicists Niels Bohr and Karen Barad’s concept of matter and its constant state of interactive entanglements, my body of work eschews aspects of post-humanist thought wherein the form and function of material culture are de-centred. Lived experiences and personal memory dictate an intricate visual vocabulary that conveys notions of life ensnared in the interstices of suspended liminality.

photo by Tharshiv Suresh