Friends with Chaos

Drawing on ideas of Rhizome theory, Chaos theory, philosophy, environmental science and aesthetics, ‘Friends with the Chaos’ suggests a fragile yet sensual engagement with materiality.  I use ceramics to map the complexity of my life. The mercurial process of firing and glazing ceramics is a fit metaphor for me to explore being in the world, my relation to different places, and the overwhelming sense of the self as a form in continual reaction and relation to an uncertain, unpredictable world. 

My sculptures are misshapen, intuitively built using the slab technique. Maneuvering folds and curves helps me to reflect on contradictions because I don’t want the structure to collapse.Within this practice as within my life, with all its bumps, and turns, and screams, and laughs, clay becomes a vehicle to contain the layered and contradictory fragments of what it means to be human.

Through my research I’ve discovered that chaos is the order we can not see at first glance. It requires retrospection; connecting the dots by looking backwards. That is what the process of working with clay and building forms allows me to do. Every step of making a sculpture is its own cycle filled with uncertainty. Every slice of a slab takes me in a new direction. Every step I feel like I don’t know what I’m doing, but that same step also carries the potential of a discovery. 

I also found that it’s impossible to talk about chaos without talking about oppositions and contradictions. Chaos and order, random and structured, confusion and inner peace. One leads to another. In a cycle. Chaos becomes order, order becomes chaos. Weirdly enough, I think we create these contradictions in order to understand and find structure in the universe, yet it is always so much more complicated than black and white. And so within my clay work, my goal is to reflect and analyze the chaos to see the order. Most of the time the only problem I’m solving is understanding myself and my surroundings better. And that is it. Reacting to chaos by creating. On a loop. When I cut out the first slab the possibilities are endless. With each step I slowly restrict myself more and more until the form is closed and complete. Then the piece gets fired. I cover the surface with glaze until there’s no more spots left uncovered. Then the piece gets fired again. 

As one cycle ends, another begins. 

Freedom and structure. Chaos and order. They seem to always walk hand in hand. And now I’m walking with them.