Slippery (2021)

My work currently investigates the slippery condition of language, technology, and epistemology through sculpturally manifesting words, phrases and symbols. Utilizing an analog 3-d printing process, or manually slip trailing, I trace and obsessively retrace to build ambiguous yet personally significant terms with liquid porcelain, facilitating the evolution of virtual thought into visceral object. As in the one-ear-to-another, whispered telephone game, these works are layered, interrupted, slow journeys and surprising destinations. Perhaps a single phrase can be a dimensional map, poem, or even an entire landscape - full of nuance, power, and possibility.

Over the past fifteen years, the forms have evolved from pacifiers to telephones to text bubble vessels to text. I have consistently wondered about the ways humans try to get what they want and need in relationship – and the substitutions and devices used (and misused). From the 4,000-year-old Cuneiform impressions on clay slabs to Saussure’s theory of Semiology, signs of language have always been elastic and transactional. Like pacifiers, phones and bubbles, words are vessels: shifting containers. As a twin, homonyms especially resonate with me. Present, state, and mean, for instance, reverberate and slip in definition: simultaneously simple, flexible, and deep. I am interested in expanding and compressing the contexts of words like these for new and poetic comprehensions.

Transforming things as elusive as digital letters on screens (really just light?) into permanent, hand-made objects with mass and texture is a meditation on reality. In a similar move from flat to dimensional, slip-trailing, traditionally a surface design process, is inverted: used instead as construction. These handwritten pieces amplify imperfections, insertions, and improvisations. They are often constructed with fragments recycled from pieces that have broken in stages from leather-hard to fired or in transit. Integrating and recombining these failed shards, these losses - is an act of hope, and mirrors the ever-mutating nature of language and communication itself. Out of the kiln, the works are often warped and fragile, and sometimes cognitively illegible, letting the act of understanding occur in the body.

 By isolating, objectifying, outlining, embedding, and placing words on (coil-built) pedestals, I emphasize their import and strip them of it, inviting viewers to examine personal applications. The word text itself is a noun and a verb, signifying presumed historical authority (the text) and ephemeral spontaneous messaging between individuals (texting): macro and micro navigation systems. Though referencing topography, the layered lines of these pieces do not describe locations, but the act of traversing across terrains-- inevitably turbulent, yet ever wondrous.