Industrial Kin
Fired and unfired clay, industrial impressions and assembled ceramic fragments.
Industrial Kin is an ongoing body of sculptural work exploring the relationship between clay and the materials, forms and forces of industry.
The work began through making directly with industrial objects — particularly engineering bricks — using their surfaces, cavities, edges and manufactured textures as tools for forming clay. Rather than reproducing the brick itself, I became interested in what could be transferred from one material body into another: pressure, texture, weight, repetition and fracture.
The resulting sculptures sit somewhere between built structures and bodies. They lean, carry, compress, balance and depend upon one another.
MAKING WITH INDUSTRYThe starting point was the engineering brick.
I used bricks and other industrial surfaces as physical tools: pressing clay into them, wrapping clay around them and taking impressions from their manufactured textures. Grooves, edges, recesses and marks became embedded into the clay.
The process allowed a mass-produced industrial object to become a kind of mould, former and drawing tool.
Clay records contact particularly clearly. Every push, scrape and compression remains in the surface, so the making process becomes visible in the finished object.
PRESSURE + IMPRESSIONMuch of the work is made through force rather than modelling.
Clay is pushed, compressed, folded and pressed against hard industrial surfaces. The engineering brick resists the clay while the clay takes on its geometry.
I became interested in this meeting between two very different materials: one soft, responsive and geological; the other fired, standardised and made for construction.
The impressions are records of that encounter.
They carry traces of industrial manufacture without becoming straightforward representations of industrial objects.
