Dimensionless, disembodied words on screens construct realities. Never before today has this circumstance been more globally understood. By embodying language physically, artists can invert this relationship. Through Textology, or the study of the production of texts, the ceramic makers included in this exhibit proposal interpret, manipulate and re-integrate words and writing as fertile ground for renewed understandings of the self, culture and environment. We examine what is real. As objects that document change, power, poetry and the body, our sculptural words reflect the ever-evolving potentialities of text to connect, transform, destroy and heal.
Since the earliest recorded writing on Cuneiform slabs, the relationship of clay and language has proved fundamental in lively, varied, and revelatory ways. These two mediums dovetail in balancing the virtual/ephemeral with the corporeal/material. Words are vessels. Language is a landscape. These artists unfix each from convention through innovative processes and approaches. They make text tangible. Individual, political and historic internalizations and applications of texts have the plasticity and elasticity of clay. The malleability of meaning is mimicked in the slumping of overfired porcelain, the layering of slip letters to the point of obscured legibility, graffiti in relief, the etching of fragmented idioms, the opaque skin of thick glaze. Text is a noun, verb and adjective. By making written language no longer merely literal, we invite in the senses. We invite new impressions, openings and questions.
Dominant narratives provide structure for communities, but also oppression and division, as seen daily in our lives and on the news. Text is planted into and growing from the epistemological ground on which we walk – it is inescapable. Bibles, comic books, dictionaries, diaries, emogi catalogs, novels, history tomes, DM lists, film, social media, tunnel walls, signage, and monuments are just some of the ripe fields from which we harvest our work. By decontextualizing and objectifying phrases, symbols and statements in new forms we simultaneously subvert and honor. We challenge and change the message rather than attack the messenger.
Ambiguous and critical, this grouping of projects not only expresses nonverbal experience through text, it addresses the nature and mechanisms of text itself. Though lived perceptions and technologies shift and shape communication -- as semioticians explain -- the human need for it is visceral and primary. Whether depicting written language as a barrier to comprehension, vehicle for improvisation, or function of nature subject to growth, time, decay and death, we investigate words as mappings. They are navigation points, topographies, boundaries, lines drawn and crossed. What is a word? How does it land? What does it mean to understand?