During my residency at the Danish art workshops I am working on a specific Ceramics and Clay project.
I wish to develop and experiment with a new body of sculptural objects, that I have started to work on earlier this year. It is based on experiments with fabric directly dipped into raw porcelain and placed on cardboard structures to support. I wish to experiment with different types of fabric, foam, sponges and mixed materials, as well as to find the way to build the supporting structures in order to burn these pieces in the best way and obtain as a result fragile but subtle and precise draped shapes and enigmatic objects. Once fired, all the supporting elements will burn away and only the movements of the fabric onto the objects filled with clay will remain petrified.
With this body of work and research, I wish to develop a specific and experimental ceramic project focusing on the materiality of the objects and reflecting on extreme fragility and vulnerability into sculpture. I want to point to the strength in daring fragility, uncertainty, the uncontrollable and the imperfect. Furthermore, I wish to place the viewer in front of a kind of poetic and sensuous aesthetic experience.
When I first started to get interested in the concept of extreme fragility into objects and sculpture as a direction to cultivate and reflect on. I have been extremely sensitive and inspired by the ideas behind a Japanese form of art and philosophy called:
Kintsugi “golden joinery”,”golden repair”: The Japanese art of repairing broken pottery by mending the areas of breakage with lacquer dusted or mixed with powdered gold, silver, or platinum.
As a philosophy, it treats breakage and repair as part of the history of an object, rather than something to disguise. kintsugi embrace the flawed or imperfect, acceptance of change, and fate as aspects of human life.
Primarily I wish to explore and experiment within the possibilities of the ceramic medium and produce a series objects made out of textile and porcelain where the textile will be dipped directly into the liquid clay and place onto an abstract structure or shape made out of cardboard.
Once fired, all the imprints and shapes of the fabric will remain, together with the movements, petrified and fixed. Cracks and breakage will appear and because of the implications of the technical process and the material, the final sculpture will end to be very fragile, almost like an eggshell…The fragile object will be place on a proportionate and more solid small block of tight cut marble or plaster and the whole in a museum kind of glass display made out of an aluminium structure and a glass “cube”.
The eggshell looking object is taken in a state of beauty, precision and extreme fragility, due to the qualities, thinness and subtleties of the material.
The project, grounded in contemporary concerns, resonates also with different historical connotations regarding sculpture in general and the use of the drape, as well as the material porcelain that was praised and preciously collected because of its fragility, transparency and thinness qualities.
The new directions offered by the ceramics medium with this new project resonates strongly with my recent concerns and experiments in sculpture and photography as well as with former works:
In recent works, I got interested in the history of drapery in sculpture and photography, the idea of covering, wrapping.
When the covered element loses its visual identity, its shape, its material, its colour in favour of the fabric that covers it, with its colour, its texture and its folds. It creates a tension between
presence / absence, appearance / disappearance, inward / outward. The element is present, but more or less discernible and ghostly.
Concealment is a source of mystery, fantasy and frustration and it creates inside of us a form of desire. Desire, as a thought movement, has the capacity to give substance to what have none; what is observed becomes porous to possible becomings, and in this movement which resists to fix itself, what we are looking at does not end to close itself on its own enigma.
What is a form? Are there any forms which resist our understanding?
I wish to take an interest in thoughts and fantasies evoked by forms when they are not perfectly conceived or perceived, to reveal the most intimate expressions of imagination. What becomes of a form in the place of its uncertainty: where it it suspended, just before to be recognise, at the limits of any interpretations, when any thoughts can embodied it and still remain possible and present. What becomes of a form where it is lacking, because it is absent, fleeting, subliminal, fragile, inconstant, that it has no definite contours, that it is not located; or on the contrary, to the point of its excess, when we want to recognise a form where there is none, because a surplus of form sometimes comes to cancel the possibility of existence of a form, bringing us back where we try to perceive something in our own imaginary.
The type of visual and aesthetic experiences I am aiming to create for the viewer is a sort of intellectual uncertainty and a feeling of uncanniness questioning and posing a radical doubt on how appearances are grounded. Furthermore, I wish to capture the viewer in a sensuous and poetical space.
