Ceramics Monthly: Can you briefly discuss your creative background, your inspiration for using antique functional wares, and your methods for excavating their second-life surfaces?
Caroline Slotte: Objects from our private sphere evoke feelings and connect us to our past. They are tangible reminders of what has been; the history of ourselves, our family or relatives, our private or cultural, historical background. The poetry of everyday things, borne by the memories and stories that these objects hold, is a central theme in my practice.
It was at the end of my MA studies, some 20 years ago, that I first began to approach the fired ceramic object as a potential raw material. This was for a number of different reasons—partly a strong wish to enter into a dialog with a material that spoke back to me more distinctly than clay did at that time, and partly an attraction of a more physical nature toward working in a hard material, a material that provided resistance.
My working method is relatively straightforward. I rework secondhand ceramics sculpturally, testing out physical manipulations often without any kind of preparatory sketching. My material is my collaborator, an aid for thinking and a dialog partner in a multi-step process. I throw my questions at it, test them out, and analyze the answers. If the answer is something unexpected, something puzzling, I know that I am on the right track.
CM: Sandblasting these objects leaves their surfaces porous, negating their ability to function as intended. How does this intervention change the conceptual function of these plates and platters, and how do you view your position in the process?
CS: I’m inspired by the rich and complex cultural-historical background of these objects, in addition to the visually intense imagery. Perceptive ambiguity is at the core of my practice, the things that make us stop and look more closely. I want to create open-ended, optically stimulating objects, aiming for an experience closer to an opening, a space where thoughts can expand, rather than a straightforward transmission of meaning.
The conceptual integrity of the material is central. I want to know what the material itself can do, the potential of the material as something with intelligence, a substance that can reveal new insights, that can expand our perception and understanding of the world. In my own interventions, I tend to gravitate toward reductive techniques, using sandblasting and other sculptural alterations to isolate or simplify pictorial information, hence allowing us to see things that would otherwise have gone unnoticed.
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Ceramics Monthly: Can you briefly discuss your creative background, your inspiration for using antique functional wares, and your methods for excavating their second-life surfaces?
Caroline Slotte: Objects from our private sphere evoke feelings and connect us to our past. They are tangible reminders of what has been; the history of ourselves, our family or relatives, our private or cultural, historical background. The poetry of everyday things, borne by the memories and stories that these objects hold, is a central theme in my practice.
It was at the end of my MA studies, some 20 years ago, that I first began to approach the fired ceramic object as a potential raw material. This was for a number of different reasons—partly a strong wish to enter into a dialog with a material that spoke back to me more distinctly than clay did at that time, and partly an attraction of a more physical nature toward working in a hard material, a material that provided resistance.
My working method is relatively straightforward. I rework secondhand ceramics sculpturally, testing out physical manipulations often without any kind of preparatory sketching. My material is my collaborator, an aid for thinking and a dialog partner in a multi-step process. I throw my questions at it, test them out, and analyze the answers. If the answer is something unexpected, something puzzling, I know that I am on the right track.
CM: Sandblasting these objects leaves their surfaces porous, negating their ability to function as intended. How does this intervention change the conceptual function of these plates and platters, and how do you view your position in the process?
CS: I’m inspired by the rich and complex cultural-historical background of these objects, in addition to the visually intense imagery. Perceptive ambiguity is at the core of my practice, the things that make us stop and look more closely. I want to create open-ended, optically stimulating objects, aiming for an experience closer to an opening, a space where thoughts can expand, rather than a straightforward transmission of meaning.
The conceptual integrity of the material is central. I want to know what the material itself can do, the potential of the material as something with intelligence, a substance that can reveal new insights, that can expand our perception and understanding of the world. In my own interventions, I tend to gravitate toward reductive techniques, using sandblasting and other sculptural alterations to isolate or simplify pictorial information, hence allowing us to see things that would otherwise have gone unnoticed.
Photos: Chikako Harada.
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