A waste environment; The new normal.
The skeletal insect, colonises the post-apocalyptic landscape, creating its new world order.
The insect embodies the living dead, a ghostly shell of its former self. It is constructed by the meaning of and process behind the ‘burn out’–the remnant form after plant matter is asphyxiated in clay and incinerated. Hollow but uncomfortably resilient, they simultaneously evoke traces of life and loss.
The sculpture offers only the slightest sense of humanity as the cause of the environmental destruction, offering none of the surfaces expected of the ceramic arts. And certainly, no forms fashioned smooth by worn fingers. In erasing the efforts of the creator, the forms are escalated to their own existence.
The dripping glaze shows the aftermath of human-made devastation. Illustrating the disfigurement of the natural world. The decimated landscape form juxtaposed with the constructed Insecta thrusts the viewer into a dystopian world. Consequently, the sculpture challenges the anthropocentric view, depicting ‘the rest’ as the sole survivor of our inevitable environmental demise.
