Pink bisque ceramics.

Pink, colour of infancy, of old fashioned building plaster beneath the paint, oil primer on wood.  Drawings in clay which do not lead to a finished work. Bisque firing, the transitional phase.

Transitional objects.  Transitional experience and potential space.  The space between things, places and meanings, the unfinished, un-decidable and un-named.

Our first object before language, before knowing the world.  Inside and outside of self Indistinguishable.  Hand, body, mouth, process, affect, evolving through time.  Sucking and biting, mouthing or devouring, holding, clutching.  Handling, eating, expelling; greed, need, excess. Empty or full, cavities or closed.  The feeling of shapes before knowledge.

Intentionally evasive, vague and uncertain.  Indecisive, anonymous and purposeless, unimpressive and unadorned.  Horizontal, one and then the next without focus. Unselected, all-inclusive, un-competitive. Blank of face, without voice, they refuse to take part.  Avoiding metaphor, figuration, predictability, classification.  The tedium of the already known.  They try to almost fail on their own terms - as they inevitably will in spite of themselves as nothing remains unnamed.

The toys and tools.

Objects that are nearly us.  Hand, handle, tool, an extension of self, of body.  Tools of volition, of affect, play, to mouth, hit, or feed.

Acknowledging that there is nowhere sensible from which to make a stand.  No objective point of view, no answers, only invented narratives.  Culturally constructed, we express no truths, we understand nothing beyond the latest fashion.  We see nothing but what we already know.  There is no truth to be expressed in language except current truth.  Even our affect, our sensory understanding, our gut feelings that mimic the truth are constructed in historical context.  I know only what I have been told to know.

These first pink ceramics, pursue time. Create a real-time archive of process, consciousness. Perform an arbitrary evolution of affect and interactions, of input and the daily dialogue ‘a la’ Bakhtin. [i]  Where articulations in the present are responses to the past, in anticipation of responses in the future.  And responses at each point in the progressive future are responses to multiple points from the past which feed back into the articulations of work created in the present, in anticipation of continuous futures….

Is the work resisting?  Resisting what?  Finishing?  Unity?  Wholeness?  Closure?  Resisting a decision?  Resisting the object, objectifying?  Resisting art?

By not finishing, not deciding, they remain transitional.  As in the early stages of creativity when nothing is finalised – things can morph, become something other than what one first thought, reveal themselves in unexpected ways.  Remain at the stage of emergent idea, and play.

Is this the stage where the thing cannot be taken away from me?  Where the meanings that are overlaid by others are unable to rest and possess?  I kid myself if I think so.