At home in the metropolis, the residents of the city are always on the move, both literally and metaphorically. Indeed the city itself is constantly in motion, the crowds and traffic forming the skeletal heart that swarms and flows, rarely stationary, a tide travelling relentlessly forwards. Sometimes this fluid journey becomes snagged along the way where a pathway is blocked or an individual pauses to rest, die or give birth. Baudelaire, Freud, recognise this endless flow, its strangeness, its uncanniness, that rarely surfaces into the conscious minds of the city’s residents, so attuned are they to the ubiquitous sights of destruction and rebuilding that form the backdrop to their lives.
Pottery, by contrast, is a slow process. To form an object from clay requires the commitment of time and concentration, and the physical effort of shaping its plasticity in response to the mind’s projections. Graffiti is covert, drawing attention to the city’s forgotten and neglected spaces or challenging the ethos of consumption and aspiration for economic power. Combining these two artistic imperatives creates an illogical and uneasy fusion that materialises into functional objects that merge into the internal or external environment providing places for a flower or a weed to grow. The feelings of extimacy produced by the city are channelled into the production of ceramic vessels that can relocate from the street to the home, allowing the boundaries of private and public to dissolve in the way that is so much a part of imagining Hong Kong.
rachelceramics 