(2021) Inspired by the idea of image reproduction and the intention of creating textures, I am reminded of the cylinder seals from Mesopotamia. I create a series of carved skin goddesses from thrown terracotta cylinders.
I remember first encountering cylinder seals from Mesopotamia (around 3500 BC) at the British Museum in London while on a study trip during my first year of the BA at Cardiff School of Art and Design in 2009. The vignettes remind me of comic book panels. Although carved in stone, they are vivid and dynamic.
(2022) I create a series of terracotta cups with carved drawings of Our Lady of Psoriasis, all unique, signed and numbered. Throughout civilisations, ceramics has take the form of figures, pots and tiles, as exposed by Paul Greenhalgh in Ceramics Art and Civilisation. Here the pieces combine figure and pot, and with the idea of the cylinder seal, it also contains the potential of embossing slabs to create tiles.
(2023) I revisit the idea of cylinder seals and experiment with rolling the skin goddess cylinders in soft clay. This allows the multiplication/replication of the goddess, and needs to be explored further.
A WRITER IN 1869 FELT so strongly about the importance of ceramic that he positioned it at the very heart of what it was to be human. Of all the arts, he thought, ‘the fictile or ceramic [art] is that which man has most closely associated with his own existence.’ […] He felt that there was something fundamental about the forming of vessels, figures, and tiles from clay that went well beyond technology and practicality, into a whole other, deeper terrain: primordial, of the earth, and connected to the body.
Paul Greenhalgh, Ceramic Art and Civilisation
THE SKIN PROJECT 