Beyond the pleasure or terror or cathartic nature of a story is the actual process of telling it.
I want to look at how and why stories are told. Casual communication and epic tales both
have their own contexts and significance. By shifting some element of the space a story
occupies, a different story may be read. Placing and rearranging text, images, and forms in
clay creates an unexpected page and space for communicating. What might be a cliché
or familiar on paper or on a computer monitor or over dinner can tell a different story
when the context is changed. Work in clay, unlike the ephemeral nature of high tech
communication or oral traditions, is fixed. Shards with fragments of illustrated narratives
can be read just as they were hundreds of years ago. I have converted a vandalized text
into pottery shards; fragments that will be preserved and continue to tell stories indefinitely.
The shape I chose for these fragments was the result of that initial violent incision into the
pages: two intersecting curved motions that produced a confetti of paper leaves.
Memorializing and arranging these fragments let the violence act as a Beat type exercise
in chance poetry.
Previous
