‘Formation’

The following was submitted for a paneled exhibition at the American Museum of Ceramic Art. The pieces featured are part of a larger, ongoing series of wall hangings that explore themes of memory and loss.

‘Formation’ explores the fallibility of memory and the impassable divides between past and present, ourselves and others. In this series, canvases of black stoneware clay are torn almost in two and fired in that delicate state. Thin layers of paint and paper are applied to the vitrified forms, obscuring the color and landscape of their tears and coarse grain. No one else will ever see the bare surfaces beneath those layers, and I will never see them again. The dark, brutal forms have been transformed into unassuming blanks, just as even the most intensely formative moments in our lives are eventually obscured and softened by layers of time and context. 

What we present to the world and to ourselves is never what we actually lived. But still, some moments in our lives fundamentally alter everything that follows in their wake, and each new experience is just a layer over that foundational form. Although we may try to cover them up, or forget them entirely, they are still there beneath it all. And though we may try to recall them, restore them to how they were, too many details have been lost forever. The changes made to each piece are superficial, they obscure rather than alter that core, and yet they are irreversible. We have to accept that we will never see that form clearly again, while still seeing such clear traces of it in what is before us now.