Love so so Ordinary
The sculptures and installations in my most recent series, Love so so ordinary, are an examination of cast-off or overlooked forms that occupy the space around us. I question assumed hierarchies of objects, taste, and markers of class, bringing concepts like importance, beauty, and decorative value into direct conversation with the unimportant, the worthless, the tacky.
Much of this work was inspired by ancient Song Dynasty celadon. Historically, celadon glaze was valued for its ability to mimic the colors and luminosity of jade, and was intended to appeal to the elite. The cinderblock is a low-cost building block, an extruded form made from a mixture of cement. It is easily mass-produced, cheap and durable, heavy, and often considered clumsy or ungraceful in form. I recreate these forms in slipcast porcelain and bone china - the fussy, delicate material more often associated with fine china and collectible figurines. Not only does this material void the functionality of the cinderblock-- these sculptures are much too delicate to serve as structural forms-- it also creates a kind of artificial importance and preciousness. The process needed to make a cinderblock from these materials, involving a complex multi-part mold, means that far more labor is expended on each unit than would ever make sense for even a hundred standard cinderblocks. The complicated solutions needed to produce these pieces bring a level of absurdity to the work, to the objects themselves. I use this invented, excessive labor expended on something so seemingly unimportant as a way to question the meaning of taste and class.