Guerilla and ephemeral ceramics
May 2024
Inviting the act of noticing in abandoned urban landscapes with raw clay
“We are here to abet creation and to witness it, to notice each thing so each thing gets noticed. Together we notice not only each mountain shadow and each stone on the beach but we notice each others beautiful face and complex nature so that creation need not play to an empty house.”
As my time at my last ceramic residency was drawing to a close, where my pieces were in the kiln, marking a key point where I ‘had to stop making’, I noticed a distinct depression that came over me that I was no longer able to create. After some thought, I realised that I still had clay to work with, and it did not have to be fired in order for me to still be able to use it and still enjoy the creative process. And so the idea came of creating ‘biodegradable’ land installations, that eventually over time would degrade with rain and weathering and be returned back into the earth. There is no concept of waste in nature, everything is endlessly used and recycled in her complex biorhythms and feedback loops, and so I decided to create small installations in various urban and woodland environments, of stylised and three dimensional clay leaves, and scatter them across considered landscapes and wonder if anyone will notice them. Some were hidden, some were obvious, the act of noticing both the beauty and the mundane of each environment.
Raw clay installations, Kecskemét Hungary 2024.
