LOST CIVILIZATION PROJECT
When I was working in ceramics, I was dealing with a lot. I had discovered how fragile the present was. I responded by exploring the most eternal art of all. I studied how to turn thoughts and emotions in stone.
Ceramics are one of the oldest arts, not as old as painting, but probably older than textiles. Clay and fire and not secret about their affair. The gateway into stone has been discovered many times.
Right at the start of my studies, I decided to work in red earthenware. Almost all of history’s ceramics are red. White ceramics are elitist, and environmentally wasteful. We were fine without them for thousands of years. Glazing is also a novelty. Ceramics are made of earth.
Right at the start of my studies, I decided to work in red earthenware. Almost all of history’s ceramics are red. White ceramics are elitist, and environmentally wasteful. We were fine without them for thousands of years. Glazing is also a novelty. Ceramics are made of earth.
My ceramics are not meant to speak to the present. Instead, I wonder who I might have been, if I was in 1,500 BC, and knew much less, and was starting again. And I wondered how I would speak to the future, when all words fail, and whether I should just use cups, accepting a deep level of muteness in exchange for still saying… at least something.
The heart of my work is the Lost Civilization Project. I know nothing about these people, except that I keep discovering their things.
They try to tell me stories, but they have no words. They have a whole grammar of pictures and signs, but I only ever discover fragments of it. They think about death a lot, and maybe there was a war…
My own soul is my Bronze Age. I dig in the clay to discover a person I feel, but never was.
It’s hard to write an artist statement for a sacred art. Are these art? These are offerings. They are expended the moment they are finished. They are made to be buried and never seen. They’re not supposed to be part of time at all. They are secessionists. Time is where they came from, not where they live.
Ceramics are about stone. We get to make stones. What is art, compared to that? All I have to do is throw away a cup, and it will outlive me, in a landfill, by ten million years,
