Attachment wounds and a second skin

A fellow ceramic artist asked me about these pieces,  until then they were made but somehow still dormant in my conscious mind.

I started them by making moulds from ornaments, artefacts and objects I felt drawn towards. Not just mine but those of friends. Friends I felt close enough at the time to ask.

This process felt furtive as if I were coveting objects and stealing their imprint. This relates to the theme of the attachment work that gradually reveals itself to me. 

Seeing the porcelain plates as mandalas, I used them to draw into with the cast pieces and I added ‘drawing’ using threads and embroidery I had made. I left the pieces bisk fired for months, then when I had no feeling of their preciousness,  I painted them with black oxide, rubbed them so the oxide sat in the cracks and crevices, added a clear glaze that I worried might simply lift off the oxide and put them in a high firing for porcelain.

No test pieces , not knowing if the high firing might reduce all the definition of the forms … an experiment.

On reflection I see these pieces are about maternal attachment , there are Madonna figures, some with child , there are vulva shapes which also resemble nooses. If you look closely you can see sacred hearts, skeletons and dogs. The threads seem to link the pieces like a mind map or umbilical cord. The fingers are cast from my own. My own early grasping omnipresent.

The women I loved have been lost . These pieces are about processing the grief and the wounding. I see them as a skin perhaps of scar tissue.