Our planet Earth is passing through stages of destruction and reconstruction of familiar landscapes, civilizations, nations, and cultures. All have their cycles of glory and decline. It seems that at this time, we are all going through a period of vast change. Landscapes are changing, fertile lands are drying up, jungles are burning and vast groups of people are on the move running from hunger or war. Nothing seems to be stable, and the pandemic is just one more brick in this wall of chaos.
We are afraid of the unknown and the sense of a chaotic world engenders anxiety, but there is also a great beauty in the process of change, and it’s these changing landscape forms, as a metaphor for the restless period we are currently living through, that I wanted to capture in this work.
The work is made of very thin sheets of paper porcelain, each one painted with soluble salts, crystalline glazes, and volcanic effects. Stacked on bases, they create landscape capsules at different stages of collapse. In the case of the flat landscape, I let the heat (cone 10) do the work of flattening. In the other pieces I create the desired angle after firing.