One of my biggest motivations in making my art is the transformation of soft, squishy, fuzzy, or delicate organic things turned into cold, harder-than-a-rock, pure white porcelain. What a contradiction! It's kind of hilarious to me, but also really poetic and contemplative.
I'm really drawn to art that challenges perceptions of reality - some of my faves are #JamesTurrell #MarcelDuchamp #AiWeiwei #ReneMagritte. Art can embrace the contradictions of life with curiosity and sense of humor. The preposterousness of puffing ouid from a porcelain facsimile of a real piece of fried chicken (that just happens to really resemble the shape of a traditional pipe) makes me feel a little ownership over the craziness of life, or maybe that I'm making a joke back at the universe.
And it's simply amazing that the delicate beauty of a little kernel of juice inside a lemon can be carefully captured by plaster, then reproduced over and over into this super permanent material (porcelain is harder than most stone, harder than glass, endures millennia after all other remnants of society are gone). I never get tired of seeing the crisp details of a live, natural object reproduced by my own hand. I get so excited to try new molding techniques to try to accurately capture the true texture of a furry okra, the bursting smoothness of a pomegranate seed, the luscious tufted strawberry.... It's almost a shame to glaze them because it covers up some of the incredible detail of the cast
s. Everything I cast is a love letter to how beautiful life/reality/the universe/whatever is, and I also hope that using it gives other people that experience.