Memory Explorations

Found cloth gloves, 2020

Artist's family photographs and album, cotton thread, 2020

Cotton and cotton thread, 2020

Porcelain, 2019

Porcelain and wire, 2019

Porcelain, 2019

Porcelain and cotton thread, 2019

Porcelain, wood, and paper, 2019

Wooden drawer, porcelain, LED light, 2019

Found wooden plaque, porcelain, 2019
By intentional arrangement and radical transformation through refiring of commercially made ceramic dinnerware, I am investigating relationships through visual metaphors, evoking emotional memory, and looking at social interactions between objects and people. The arrangement of vessels and plates are emblematically speaking to different personalities and dynamics of family relationships through their precarious nature and sense of failure. I have chosen ceramic dishware for its specific material qualities and its direct correlation to family life within a domestic setting. These objects have been discarded from a domestic interior and are ‘rejects’ from their previous owner’s past, but their ordinariness and banality enhance their familiarity enabling one’s ability to construct a memory. Alon Confino, a cultural historian, writes, “memory is everywhere: we reconstruct a sense of the past from the most trivial, every-day life object.” By over firing the ceramic dishware, the objects go through an irreversible transformation leaving each object formally warped, distorted, and in a state of dysfunction that is a metaphor for human interaction and relationships.