This ongoing series of images are some of the early and unexpected ‘finished’ works to come out of my long-running London Clay project and creative residency at MOLA. They sprung out of a creative dialogue with ceramicist Orli Ivanov, looking at themes around the Anthropocene and what it means to be human at the changing of an epoch.
The work is inspired by the concept of technofossils, a term coined by Professor Jan Zalasiewicz and colleagues at the University of Leicester, to describe the material footprints that humans will leave behind through their material goods. Globally, the majority of the objects that we create end up in a landfill. As a result of government legislation about how we should deal with our trash, landfills have become modern-day tombs that extend the time it takes for things to decay, which means that the vast majority of our stuff will be hardened in another geological layer before having the opportunity to decompose and disappear. What novel geologies will the future hold? As dinosaur bones fossilise over time, so too will lounge chairs, ballpoint pens, safety pins, compressed media drives, cars, and so many other objects become archaeological artefacts.
I have been exploring ways of recreating the natural language of the earth through experimental ceramics, working in an intuitive, almost painterly way, but with a scientific grounding. Rooted in chemistry, the works examine the interplay between man-made and natural materials, pitting them against each other under extremes to uncover the fundamental laws of logic and elemental compositions. I then examine the underlying order of the work through a magnification lens, showing what lies just beyond what is visible to the naked eye, discovering its micro universe. At this level familiar patterns emerge, resembling images from telescopes of nebulas, weather patterns, brain scans, earth's landscape images from satellites. I am fascinated by this iconographic resonance across different areas of life, which is repeated within the micro and macro.
