M202      

Transition to Occupation

My interest in the transitional object led to the making of numerous small, fragile, pink ceramic objects, intentionally ambiguous in form to allow them to remain between categorisations for both maker and viewer.   Evolving from simple enclosed shapes, through direction seeking, indexical, outward-looking forms, to increasingly complicated ‘thrown’ forms and accumulations.  ‘Assemblages’ that grouped together, creating ever larger assemblages.  Key words for this early work were ‘affect’ and ‘immersion’ - and it was not hard to maintain this attitude during the making, as my throwing skills were minimal and absolute concentration was entirely necessary.  Each shape was thrown almost to the point of collapse – and frequently did.

However, a point arrived where I realised that very little ‘affect’ of any type remained in the making.  Due to the increased pressures of employment and my attempts to simply produce the necessary quantity of work, my throwing time became piecemeal.  With an hour before work most days and an occasional evening stint, the project had become focused on the actual occupation of making and doing.  In place of the earlier attempts to imbue some secondary content, such as resisting identification through ambiguity of form, it had become merely a temporal process of consciousness, each piece an individual experience pushed to its limit in an open-ended series, with no final point in mind and no selections or rejections made. The repeated process of throwing on the wheel and amassing pieces was followed by a repetitive joining of pieces, with no pre-conceived plan; merely which fitted end to end.

The work was in transition to something new due to my changed circumstance and time use.  But the activity itself had also become a point of stasis between tasks.  The objects may have become detached from an intentional ‘affect’ of making, but the activity, the occupation of making, had become a place of security between transitions; related perhaps to the ‘transitional experience’ discussed by Johanna K Tabine, or by Winnicott as ‘transitional phenomena’.

Johanna K. Tabine. Transitional Experience

'transitional phenomena'. Transitional Objects