In essence, these works are about: value systems, generative and degenerative processes, cross-cultural appropriation, and the rights bestowed by ownership and authorship.

The role of the object has evolved from utilitarian to merely decorative. Are ornamental objects necessarily ascribed more ‘value’ than more useful ones?

There are several value systems at play here:

• The commercial price-tag of the unaltered plate
• The perceived ‘worthlessness’ of an object broken
• The added monetary cost of a precious commodity such as gold
• The uncounted hours of care, of craftsmanship
• The inestimable worth of a now unique item
• The value inferred and conferred by displaying such an item

Gold adornments can be ostentatious. These are modest and unpretentious. It is the assemblage of a treasure, a taonga, not a flashy materialistic commodity. Its beauty lies within its imperfections. It carries its history in proud scars. Its worth cannot be measured in carats but in time and care taken. Work such as this cannot be achieved by machine. It requires an artist’s hand.

Additional considerations of using handmade over commercially manufactured ceramic ware:

Looking closely at the surface, slight indentations may be seen that document the fingertip pressure points of the artist’s touch. A series of these bespoke plates are fraternal iterations: however closely they resemble each other, they are in essence non-identical.

Commercial crockery – a succession of perfect clones, lacks the soul and evidence of authorship provided by ‘the hand of the artist’.

(Additionally, as a practical consideration, handmade ceramic ware tends towards more random and natural fracture lines, which is preferable and certainly more aesthetically pleasing.)

The structural breakdown though artificially managed, defies rational order and manipulation to create its own organic fractured composition. The control and taming of the natural world remains an elusive fallacy.

If perfection is merely adhering as closely as possible to an original archetype, then factory produced pieces would be the pinnacle of desirability.

In The Stones of Venice, Vol II, Ch. 6, the art critic John Ruskin maintained that, “no good work whatever can be perfect, and the demand for perfection is always a sign of a misunderstanding of the ends of art.” Also asserting that “imperfection is in some sort essential to all that we know of life. Nothing that lives is, or can be, rigidly perfect; part of it is decaying, part nascent.” 

(Ian Baucom, Out of Place: Englishness, Empire, and the Locations of Identity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 199), 65.)

As the plate is shattered, so too is its utility. It has become a ‘still life’. 

I am interested in how earth (with and without a capital letter) is valued. I have been exploring the materiality of mud and how it reacts under stress. Clay, like earth and sand, is specific to its own habitat; its constitution, an archive of its particular domain.

Fostering a deeper understanding of the natural world, its organisms, ecosystems and the underlying mutualistic relationships, is becoming more imperative than ever in our pandemic-compromised, latterly climate-change aware, natural resource depleted global environment.

Cracked earth: a wound. I have been ‘mending’ the fissures with kintsugi; healing the ‘earth’ with time, labour and precious resources. 

I am also interested in the unseen; the interconnecting structures that bind, mirroring the golden veins of kintsugi, which now link the previously disparate pieces.