Arts Thread

Project Statement: ‘Petrified Suckers’ are a series of ceramic sculptures whose origins belong to an unknown, disguised or forgotten point in time, where, through rapid advancements in technology, mass-produced objects have quickly become outdated at an astonishing pace, surpassing the human capacity for understanding and even documentation. The memory of their function is stripped immediately after their creation, and they are left to remain as lifeless riddles for millions of years into the future. They have become misunderstood victims of malicious manufacture. I’m interested in objects and their potential journey to redundancy, becoming obsolete and removed from their original function, like a signpost or fossil from a time when our primary interaction was with tangible form. The importance of using ceramic material lies within its long historical links to humankind: it evolved as one of the earliest mediums for sculpting utilitarian vessels…our first steps towards generating what is now a very human-made world. The sculptures seek to evoke a sense of nostalgia for the tactile, the organic and the imperfect. By incorporating discarded mechanical objects and traditional craftsmanship (hand-building and mould-making techniques) I aim to highlight the tension between progress, loss, and preservation. The work provokes an aliveness to, and familiarity with, the organic, human form and the mechanical. However there also lurks the ‘threat horizon’ of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, in which the digital has begun to merge with biological and carbon entities, posing the unsettling emergence of the surreal and uncanny transmutations surrounding the alien logic of AI.’

"Technofossil"; objects manufactured specifically for human use, to facilitate or enhance contemporary existence, and having outlasted their useful function, are thoughtlessly discarded into the environment. Like fossils, these objects will become embedded in currently forming geological strata leaving traces of themselves.
 Geologists have already used these objects to propose a name for our era, calling it the "Anthropocene" (trans. the human epoch).
 In the process of making the work I am able to decontextualize these objects and subvert their function by casting; reproducing sections in clay, then applying them to the surface of my hand-built forms. The sculptures themselves are an amalgamation of the familiar and unfamiliar. Once produced, my ceramic creations become petrified (an anticipation of our story told in rock), a vision or premonition serving as a message to a future beyond our knowledge. Inert objects in the environment; impermeable, persistent, permanent, outliving me to tell a story of our failed relationship with our Earth. A warning of a post-apocalyptic world where, through human activity, life on earth has vanished and all that remains are enigmatic ghostly traces of our long-gone 'civilisation'.