A Place I Thought I’d Forget
Egyptian faience, 2019. 0.5” x 10” x 7” (individually)
A childhood concussion sparked my intrigue with human memory and the archival acts that are taken to preserve these memories; writing, photography, ceramics—to name a few. However, nothing is immortal to time, inevitably they will deteriorate and fade into obscurity. By telling an incomplete and imperfectly archived story, my work seeks to explore the ways in which photographs, memory, and ceramic archives can warp and fragment over time. My medium of choice, Egyptian faience embodies this. Over time the ‘flaw’ in my material—efflorescence—will form a layer of salt over my images, obscuring them even further, and gradually my ceramics will erase themselves.
Individually these tiles are explorations into different ways to recreate photographic images using Egyptian faience. What details are lost in the translation between materials? What remains? What is emphasized after the shift? Mixing my own material from scratch has allowed me to intentionally choose to document a permanent flaw in the material. As time passes, a coating of salt will form on the work’s surface, clouding and obscuring the image. Efflorescence is a physical glitch, frosting the work just like a faded memory. These replicas will not last in a perfect state forever. Serving as an example to how, no matter how desperately we try to preserve them, our experiences are not immortal. Photos can be damaged. Data can be corrupted.