Artist Statement August 2011

Clay as a physical substance persists in sustaining our material consciousness, even within the context of a clean, user-friendly, and technologically based digital age.  I find this dichotomous circumstance very intriguing.  The amorphous possibilities of clay continue to be influenced by the ambiguous context which we call virtual reality.  Outdated, yet analogous to the infinite possibilities of digital form, the plastic quality of clay serves as a relatable and familiar construct for affirming an adaptive hybrid psychology between physical and virtual realities.  I am interested in how digital material will continue to influence our notion of physical form in reciprocal and possibly reactionary manners. My work continues to explore these influences and possibilities in form and concept, reconsidering the notion of function within the hand-made discipline of ceramics. 

From Clay to Code

I am confused why we are not discussing what I consider a most pressing issue.  (Forgive me if I am being redundant.)  That issue being, that the very nature of things is changing right before our eyes and continues to do so exponentially.  Things, physical things, are increasingly changing from tangible objects to non-objects, furthermore, they are existing in a context that has fairly new and unprecedented conditions.  Non-the-less, these non-objects are serving the needs of people, of which are information, entertainment, and communication albeit in very different ways from which we are conditioned to.  I am, of course, talking about the digital world, or virtual reality - by extension, that which we call the Internet.  An intangible reality which we created and exist in that is not conditioned to how we have come to know and sustain ourselves by, meaning, physically, through a material consciousness - with psychologically structured knowledge based on the notion of resistance to material.  The very nature of things, a concept that has a foundation in natural material knowledge, said another way, traditional craft materials and practices, has no connection what-so-ever to the virtual world because that reality, if it is indeed so, is not physically based.  As a non-material, non-form, non-space, non-time, non-anything we can actually sense with a haptic experience based reality, the virtual environment is re-forming our very psychologies, social interactions, and ways of understanding.  The very foundation of humanity is transitioning right before our eyes from a material based consciousness to a digital material based consciousness. I am alarmed because crafts people who are intrinsically connected to this material foundation are not talking about it.  We are literally losing touch with our humanity.  Could this circumstance be the impetus to the resurgence in craft? Furthermore, if this circumstance is as critical as I suggest, does this new digital based psychology not reformat the very notion of aesthetics, nullifying the distinctions between the individual disciplines of art, craft, and design or in the very least, completely expand their previous definitions? I suggest that those who continue to practice making by hand will become the utmost revolutionary but not by continuing to objectify necessity or intention, but rather by reconciling in an adaptive manner the non-material qualities of traditional craft material, those qualities being likened to the amorphous and the metamorphic.