Chris is showing Westerlies, a series of seascapes in oil paints and tar.
The pieces in my installation, Gather and Sort, are made of clay, vintage scientific slide boxes and digital
images. Pot shards, an inevitable and often discarded product of making pots, are
tumbled with sand and water into smooth round forms, imitating geologic
processes of weathering and erosion. Assembled over years, they are presented
here in various states of chaos and imposed order, making reference to the
persistence of pottery in human and archeologic history and the scientific
practices of taxonomic organization. The work speaks to the way we select, gather and make order and use of that which is collected. A stone is placed for the dead, a cairn to mark direction, a “sekimori-ishi” at the entrance to a meditation space of solitude. Just as we share the impulse to pick out stones on the beach, we are impelled to touch these curious objects. Please do.
“A Taxonomy of Sorts” comes from this natural impulse and the action of sorting these objects in the studio, giving them context. The work “...plays with the conventions of taxonomic cataloguing and storage in the natural sciences.” In the work they “look like they’ve been sorted according to some kind of taxonomic logic, but in fact, they have been sorted by a shifting, undependable logic that is neither chance – decisions are specific and particular – nor rigor.”
“Stone Flow” refers to archaeological time and the slow movement of material from the earth, through the hand of the potter and back to the earth. As more work is made, more pots are lost in process, and more shards are added to create new iterations of this long term project.
