This is the most recent piece in a body of work I've been busy with since 2015. This sculpture consists of three independent parts and is the first in a series to be fully attached and free-standing. Each piece is made from a 45cm slab-built ceramic cube atop four press-molded feet. On top of each cube are two coil-built tube "fountains" and glazed-fused letters, which create the "water" flowing from the tubes. Three different bodies of Jingdezhen porcelain are used in the construction of each piece, according to the building requirements of differing sections.
The work represents many things to me, evolving from three previous iterations over seven years. The inspiration for the series originally came from a fountain in a cemetery/park in Copenhagen. I thought about the fountain, and the place, for more than a year, before making the first tube piece in 2014. I then thought about the tube for another year before pairing it with the first set of fused letters. Originally this work was part of a body of work which was testing "bad ideas." I thought the letters were too cliche to achieve the ambiguous readability that I like my work to have, but when I tested that hypothesis I found that I was mistaken. The second iteration of this work I related to the contemporary flow of information constantly burying itself and at the same time undermining, for better or worse, the naturally curated cultural buildup of the previous millennia. By the third iteration the work reflected, for me, my reality in a new home I had made for myself in China, and the flow of language around me that I barely, or rarely understood.
This version, made of isolated parts for the first time, holds, in addition, a growing frustration of mine with the lack of accountability that I see as typifying American attitudes towards belief and opinion projection, which I observed, from abroad, as becoming amplified and uniform in the period of the early coronavirus outbreak during which this work was completed.