artist statement
Over many years I have been drawn to investigate the vessel as a metaphor for the female identity and experience, stemming from my undergraduate days when I first became a mother. This massive shift in my identity gave me a new sense of clarity in my work and I became fascinated by the multitudes of identities women are expected the inhabit, and in particular I was intrigued by the mother/artist dichotomy.
In the past I have explored these themes of shifting identities in woven, stitched and quilted textile works, and yet I still find myself drawn back to the notion of the vessel.
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Through my recent consideration of form I have shifted my focus to working with porcelain - a traditional material from which to craft a vessel, and a material closely linked to domesticity. My ceramic pieces form a new body of work that explore tactile interactions, where pinched forms, imprinted with my own fingerprints, become vessels for the narrative of womanhood, resilience and transformation. The process of construction is both intuitive and considered; every piece is forged entirely by hand, my hands, that show premature signs of ageing through psoriatic arthritis. I find there is a subconscious need to have my hands physically present in the work, and so in my works I aim to emphasise the labour of hands, the manifestation of identity, and the fragility of existence.
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Both materials – clay and cloth – have historical connections to 'women's work' and have historically been devalued within the fine art institution, relegated to the domain of “craft”. It seems fitting to me, and a subversion of this history, to create artworks that seek to repurpose functional materials and recontextualise them. Porcelain has a long history of being used in domestic ware – it is both the strongest of all clay bodies and the most delicate which allows me to explore the intersection of strength and fragility. To the viewer, there is a sense of delicacy, yet these forms withstand intense firing to become vitreous and impenetrable.
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Through my recent body of work, I invite viewers to contemplate the duality of strength and vulnerability inherent in both the vessel and the self. These vessels tell stories, bearing witness to lives lived, identities forged, and histories rewritten. Women's hands have created the artefacts that tell the story of history. Hands that have quilted, stitched, woven and mended. Centring domestic materials and 'craft' processes offers a way to connect with the generations of women who were relegated to the domestic and devalued, despite the innate value in the objects they created. My exploration of vessel goes beyond the confines of their physicality; it's an excavation of memory, of societal perceptions, and of the fault lines that shape us.
