Sand-pit

Solo exhibition, Rm Gallery, 2020.

Ceramic objects (paper-clay, stoneware, glaze, pigments, stains), sand, raw clay, 2018 - 2020

I was born worried.

Obsessive, introspective – with fixations that have cluttered and narrowed my experience of the world.

When I was eight, my anxiety and looping thoughts took on a new intensity. With unrelenting focus, I tried to pin down the nature of my own consciousness. Was that stream of internal language me? It seemed to flow on as if it came from elsewhere. But if it wasn’t me, which bit was? The harder I peered inwards, the more disconnected I felt from my thoughts, my body, and the world all around. I found myself stuck far back inside my head, looking out through a tunnel – my hands miles away, my mouth operating remotely.

My Mum found a child counsellor, Trish, who had an office in the city. I remember we had to take a lift in the building; there were corridors, carpet, a palette of beige and navy. Inside her office, Trish had a large sand-tray, and an array of plastic animals that came in bulk packs. Those little fences that you unclicked from their thin mouldings, and small green trees with webbed limbs. She wasn’t a very effective counsellor, I’ll be honest, but I’ve never forgotten that sand-tray, nor the soothing graspability of mapping out some scenario – swells of fear and threat made simple.

I suspect my ferocious love of the palpable began that year; grown as an antidote to countless hours bound-up in weird thoughts. Clay, trees, dirt, sand – it’s so delicious after swallowing all that abstracted vaporous stuff – “The Nothing” that worries are made of. 

This qualitative polarity of head-matter and earth-matter lies at the foundation of Sand-pit.

I began the project with an intention to diagram my inner landscape through a spread of ceramic objects – which soon proved to be impossible. Glaze-fired forms are fixed like concrete, geologic in their solidity, with none of the shimmer or suddenness of what may be thought or felt.

I’ve turned instead to a wobbly breed of translation, categorising broad species of felt experience into groupings of repeated shapes. Pulling slippery content out of mind and squashing it into mud. These works are a simplified alphabet of my emotional and thinking life; mecurial forces palmed into chunks, loops, towers and squeezes, that I can see and hold.

Sand-pit operates as a loose map for keeping myself well. It is peppered with tangible reminders of what enables me to thrive, alongside cognitions that spawn unhelpful inner patterns. It has been useful, as it was when I was eight, to distill the weather of my mind into solid things, that I can pick up and move around. They are smaller than me – I have so much agency here. I can pile them up, grow them taller, and make more of what I need.