During this pandemic, as we are working from home, I have been thinking about the idea of home. As the Coronavirus situation challenges our well-being, I became more conscious about how the concept of home is being conceived. I had another blog about home and thought to take action and create something out of clay. With the growing motivation to work with clay after these months because of the temporary closure of the public Clay Open Studio, where I spent time there to make, fire, and glaze clay pieces, I decided to build a new collection to contemplate the concept of home. Here, I imagine a home in a very abstract way as a box -- a cube. An abstract version of a home was formed in this collection. The six images below are a small portion of this collection.
My intention in making these pieces is to show that each piece has its own shape and all pieces together bring several interpretations to a single concept or object -- i.e., cube. For each piece, I thought about my feeling that influences me recently. The idea of each work emerged with a question at the beginning of the making process. The questions were related to an expression of a feeling such as a feeling of joy, peace, sadness, grief, and fear, an experience of being an immigrant, living in pandemic time, uprooting from the origin and joining a new culture, and having a lot of aha moments during this growth, and an expression of literature like a word, poem, note, story, and so forth.
The following six exhibits show the simplest possibilities that one cube could be. I tried to show that one size can’t fit all.
Considering these six possibilities, you can imagine how each cube piece asks audiences to find a meaning behind its existence. Rebecca Solnit in "The Faraway Nearby" says: "… painters had begun a shift from an emphasis on objects to one on processes and the logical conclusion was an art of light, of gestures, of interventions in systems, of invitations to act and perceive. The dematerialization of the art object".
She continues, "At its best, visual art is a philosophy by other means and poetry without words. Visual art asks the grandest questions, about the most essential ingredients of existence: about time, space, perception, value, creation, identity, beauty. It makes mute objects speak, and it renews the elements of the world through the unexpected, or situates the everyday in a way that asks us to wake up and notice. This kind of art raises fundamental questions about the act of making, about what it means, whom it is for, what happens in that engagement with materials and history and embodied imagination."
The cube collection doesn't convey its whole meaning yet since the pieces aren't painted and glazed. There is also another dimension to this presentation. This dimension relates to you as the audience. And how each audience can understand the meaning and the feeling behind every piece.