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ARTIST STATEMENT

“Porcelain, Utz concluded, was the antidote to decay.” - quote from Utz by Bruce Chatwin, (1988)

Memory is mysterious and unyielding. Attempting to confine it within a finite frame is illusory, if not absurd. Yet, it can be summoned in multiple ways, photography being one of them. Printed photo- graphs continue to be one of my primary sources of inspiration to explore memory’s echoes and metamorphoses.

At a time when the ubiquitous digital image glows on our screens and vanishes in an instant, the printed photograph – long a tangible repository of our existence – gradually fades from our lives. The progressive disappearance of such a familiar, such a material object, has been the backbone of my investigation for years. What have we so easily discarded and what will be the repercussions of its absence?

To examine this question, I imagine how the printed photograph might be perceived, in the distant future, as a fragile receipt, a fossil, a half-truth – the remains of a captivating moment in the past. Printed photographs are captured moments of light, reduced to stills, fossilized in paper. A printed photograph is not simply an image, it is also an object we hold onto. Like memories, they risk disappearing altogether. Yet in this digital age, all we hold onto is the technological apparatus that projects an ephemeral fusion of pixels, forming luminous and virtual evidence of past and present moments.

Water, lead, felt, graphite, wood, marble and porcelain are all organic materials I use in my paintings, drawings and installations. Porcelain, a composition of ancient minerals drawn from the very depths of the earth, allows me to reimagine printed photographs as image-objects. The result oscillates somewhere between two-dimensional paintings and three-dimensional sculptures.

These fired three-dimensional, hand-painted interpretations of photographs on kiln-fired porcelain, resemble printed photographs that have metamorphosed into an altered state; these fossils, or Phossils as I call them – become past moments captured and petrified into porcelain by extreme heat, its necessary alchemical acolyte.

Memory inevitably degrades. A photograph is a symbolic antidote to this loss, allowing people to revisit their past, or the past of others, as fragments of personal history, recorded on paper. With the digital age threatening the existence of analogue photography, the recording of our individual and collective past is undergoing a profound transformation. An important chapter of our pre-digital history is fading away.

More recently, I have experimented further with porcelain but in its raw state – slip – as a substitute medium for paints on large-format paintings on plywood, developing organic forms, often inspired by the plant world. I see them resembling bleached coral or fossilised moments that suggest how our intangible memories would visually manifest themselves, if they could.

Porcelain slip, like other organic materials such as charcoal, remains inert once dry but is always primed to be reactivated. Though, much like memory, it only reassembles itself when summoned.

CB ‘26