My curation of works reflects my personal experiences and interests. This selection seeks to explore human relationships and the natural world, between pottery, photography and electronic machinery. The human presence is either suggested, by inviting audience interaction or metaphorically, or made evident. This last one happens mostly through photography. Through these juxtapositions, my practice aims to explore relationships between people and nature, namely human intervention in the environment without the presence of human subjects.

 

My practice is process-based, and my research investigates this way of working in different media. In photography, this occurs by making the entire process of photographing an analogue one, from shooting to developing and then scanning my photographs. In ceramics, I looked to develop its different components myself; making my own clay, my glazes, and then my thrown pieces. This led itself to works such as Golden Mine, which seeks to reflect my journey of research and making, We’ll Just Set Fire to the Pub, exploring experiments gone wrong and new techniques learnt from it, and Menace, an experimentation on the agglutination of experimental ceramics and technology. Finally, in machinery, it occurs through my interest in disassembling and assembling machines, exploring their inner-workings, and exposing them, akin to viscera in Fire Engine.

 

A major theme present in all these practices is unearthing. Visually, this becomes more evident in The Greater Good, but it is present, in different ways, in the process of making clay and glazes (I Wanted to be Kermit the Frog), in developing film, in discovering people’s political views in protest shootings (It’s Our Basic Human Right), in digging ways to find and go beyond the surface, exposing inner workings, feelings and political beliefs. This reflects my ever-present urge to explore, and to understand and unearth as to why things work the way they do, exploring what is often overlooked. It also unearths my own interests and experiences, from pottery to nature and even movies – these latter ones present in this exhibition through my artwork titles, seeing as all of them are references to movies I enjoy.

 

Unearthing, I believe, leads to interaction. By discovering the inner-workings of something – or someone – we may better understand it and, thus, interact with it. I looked for my artworks to have this interactive component, materializing it in different ways. The area in which I exhibit It’s Our Basic Human Right and Menace explores a cupboard which connects two spaces in the school, an area which was previously unseen and is now unearthed. The Second Album playfully encourages audience interaction to unearth and explore the work, allowing art to be explored in a tactile manner. My work is also curated in a manner which allows it to appear under construction, inspiration I took partially from Guemhyung Jeong’s exhibition of the same name at the ICA. By leaving materials on display, showing how works are made, and which materials were used, an idea that materializes in The Greater Good.