Control and Release at Linda Hodges Gallery, Seattle Aug 1 – Sept 1, 2018
Opening reception Thursday, August 2nd, 6-8pm
Interdisciplinarity is crucial to my practice even though my main material has always been clay. In the emerging area of ceramic 3D printing, tools, processes and outcomes are developed by a global multidisciplinary community through shared experimentation. Following the prescribed path of the digital design, the ceramic 3D printer extrudes a thin coil of soft porcelain and creates the object layer by layer, line by line. The form it makes is dependent on the “materialness” of clay and would not exist and often cannot stand without the human hand.
In between design and serendipity lies the resulting object, consistent yet unique. My work reinterprets the process of craft by considering the intelligence of not only science/technology but also the hand and material.
I collaborate with mathematicians and technophiles for coding and exploring the use of algorithmic principles similar to those used in machine learning, AI, brain mapping, and genetic transcription. The contemporary technological idealism is inescapable but our culture also witnesses the fallibility of algorithms every day. My current work with Cellular Automata, the mathematical field of modeling self-replicating, rule-based systems points to the difficulty in creating randomness by technological means.
Clay, in its own materiality and with a rich history that is tied to the mundane, bodily and the abject, challenges all logical and predictable outcomes. Responding to the ceramic tradition of the vessel, my work reinterprets technical, formal and conceptual aspects of digitally aided ceramics and reasserts them in the realm of human physical experience. Having recently been honored with a residency at the Museum of Glass, Tacoma, I also had a chance to combine glass and porcelain and explore the fragility and strength of each material when put to a co-dependent relationship. We blew glass into molds taken from the form of 3D printed porcelain and inflated them further to see how they stretch, deform and conform when pressed against the ceramic. The result is a series of sculptures revealing symbiotic relationships that uphold and obscure, support and obstruct at the same time. This work is also a tribute to my mother, Matild, and to the complex life-long bond between mothers and children.
Control and Release received support from a CityArtist grant by the Office of Arts and Culture, Seattle and an Individual Artist grant from 4Culture/King County Lodging Tax.
Still / Here and Mothering series was made during artist residency at the Museum of Glass, Tacoma.
Burst and Follow series is part of an ongoing research collaboration with Professor Sara Billey of UW Math. Collaboration is supported by a Bergstrom Art-Science Award.