Matter in a Floating World

My large seemingly heavy clay objects respond to and appear to defy gravity, at times due to intervention and manipulation or due to the material properties of soft clay and temperature and time  with clay’s ceramic transformation in the kiln. In the titular book, Matter in the Floating World, architect Blaine Brownell converses with Japanese visionaries about material buoyancy, substance, presence and absence and ever expanding boundaries of engineering form, expressing spirituality with lightness and discovering the possibilities of material. Gravity is empathy in material and Heaven is both earthly delights and as light as cloud.

https://metrophiladelphia.com/the-clay-studio/

Either way, as earthy ground and tangible material, the work in this exhibition hints at something less obvious- a step back into space to see/understand our spherical rock, reframed with a wider lense, an expanded point of view. The earth is round and gravity does not, ultimately, create a flat stable plane. Our solid ground is floating and with this vantage point in space, we see a worldly common thread. We must continually revision and reframe our everyday.