Precarity Structures

These ceramic sculptures represent objects that evoke varied degrees of social oppression or economic alienation in states of creep rupture. Creep rupture is where infrastructural materials or machine components degrade over time due to stress.

The chosen objects are often spindly in form, making them challenging to sculpt in clay and push the limits of the material's structural capabilities. This process amplifies a sense of precarity, with ceramic melting into twisted forms that capture a state near failure. The objects hold a desire: How might we achieve the collapse of oppressive systems without descending into total anarchy?

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Mind the Gap

2024
Glazed ceramic, concrete on wood, grit tape, paint, gum, grime
62” x 23.5” x 23.5”
19.5” x 12.5” x 12.5”

Photography credit: Matthew Bailey

Mind the Gap 02

2024
Glazed ceramic, grout
19.5” x 12.5” x 12.5”

These turnstiles, as objects of socioeconomic oppression, look to the subway experience as a metaphor for collective movement and references creep rupture, the gradual degradation of structural materials over time. Sculpted in clay and twisted towards obsolescence from the heat of the kiln, the object holds desire for public infrastructure that might actually serve the public. Why can’t the subway be free?

Both turnstiles were made using the same process, hand-built using ceramic coils. This second turnstile however, upon picking it up as greenware, shattered into a hundred pieces. I fired it in the kiln anyway and then glued it back together. The shattered version holds more creep rupture and the impossible erosion that I was drawn to with the first turnstile. Precarious structures of capitalist oppression melting and twisting… Burn down these police objects!


 

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Is it About Capitalism?

2024
Glazed ceramic, sand
12" x 16" x 11"
20" x 16" x 13"

I’m currently experimenting with display methods with these baskets, including placing them in a pile of sand to evoke a dystopian or utopian future where remnants of consumerism are found in a desert. Sand is intriguing as it represents both uninhabitable ruin and unlimited potential. It is a foundational raw material for our built environment—without it, we wouldn’t have concrete, glass, or computers, or the many products and infrastructure those materials enable.

I’ve also placed the baskets inside storefront doors to mimic real ones, using a trompe l'oeil ceramic technique. Viewers often struggle to resist picking them up, a subconscious behavior ingrained from years of shopping. As fused ceramic sculptures, this impulse is disrupted, creating an effect on the viewer that I find compelling.

The deliberately handmade quality of my ceramics creates tension between mass production and slow, physical labor.  I often render commodity objects useless through distortion or failed mimicry to expose their role as mediators of social relation. Their ubiquity and invisibility, like the hegemony and ideologies they reflect, become allegories for the forces that shape the public sphere and workplace.

Study for creep rupture 02 & 03

2024
Glazed ceramic, steel, brass
14” x 16” x 8”
11” x 10.5” x 5.5”

Photography credit: Matthew Bailey