It is intriguing to watch how people communicate with each other in their home landscape verses an environment that is foreign to them. Our body movements change in order to accommodate the contours and textures of the place where we are. Even the rhythm of a conversation shared between two people changes in relation to their immediate environment. A specific landscape and the bodies within it begin to function together as a unit, creating a single form that represents an experience of that specific place.
I am making sculptures that express this experience shared between our bodies and the landscape. I use porcelain because the smooth and subtle sheen of its fired surface relates to the soft and glowing appearance of skin. These sculptures are composed of contours that suggest the curves of the human body and also the curves that a mountainous landscape can mark on a horizon line. Curving surfaces are stacked against piled forms, compressed together creating the same dark lines, shadows, and cracks that our bodies can sense when moving across the earth. Glazed areas on these sculptures are like tattooed skin, clothing, or flowers that become the colorful jewels of the experiences of people and places.
In addition to the sculptures, I also make pots that represent the experience of place. The forms of my pots are wrinkly and irregular, similar to the many textures of land. Places and pots are similar as they both become more understood through experience and time. Utilitarian pots offer experiences of touch and change through time, which relates to our bodies’ ability to sense changes in our environment over time. Pots change over the course of a meal as food is added or emptied. Drawings on the interiors of the pots are visible or inaccessible in much the same way as shapes and colors in a landscape become accessible during the changes of a single day.
Each new place where I travel provides new formal and social relationships that continue to inform my work. As we travel, we use our eyes differently. When I worked in Taiwan, a local artist told me that I needed to stop using my American eyes. For two years I have considered what it really means to change my eyes. I believe it means we must be responsible for how we experience what we see. Experience, like knowledge is accumulative. When we see a new place, we will experience it in the moment as well as through memory. If I am to change my eyes, then I must allow the experience of each new place to teach my eyes to grow less naïve.