My ceramic sculpture has centered around the visible externalized stress of fitting into society’s molds and the effort to maintain authenticity as well as a celebration of resilience using slab-built art to create narrative busts and molded amphora form.
The narrative busts utilize found objects and preserving of self in the process of pushing through these challenges. The pressed molded figures lose some self and are reidentified and given a sense of history through the addition of found objects. Shattered Memories and Transient Tales features a lady in soft blue terra sigillatta sitting on an ammunition locker with empty photo frames bound in electric cord as she looks out solemnly. The seams formed from the plaster mold runs down her face, leaving the affirmation of trauma.
The connection to the vessel, specifically amphoras, is an embodied analogy for historical heritage and the strength of family. Clay slabs pressed in to plaster molds of the figure are then placed in a plaster amphora mold to build a vessel. The vessel becomes a history of an event in the materiality of the clay when given in to the pressure and forced to fit inside a new mold. These clay works give in to pressure while maintaining some level of self, diminished but still there, held up by strength embedded in family values.
