Murmur

collections of artist statement from previous shows

Page 1

Newt

It is raining again. The damp air is stuck on the skin and your body disintegrates into it, so it becomes the whole scenery. It is very quiet here. The entire scenery becomes flat like a painted wall and your body becomes a part of it. The numbers of layers of coated surface are partly washed off by the rain over time and patches of memory gradually appear. You don’t know which layer it is. Sometimes primary colour appears underneath the layers. It recalls the memories we have long forgotten. The blurred images of something become visible out of blue. It is not a part of paint. It is the image which you have just created.  What do you see?  It is just like a crawling newt in the dark wall, creeping into your mind.
 
 You paint the wall again made out of your everyday life, nothing special, nothing out of ordinary, but there are a number of signs inside. You do not have to see them right now. It is probably not the right moment. You paint the wall again and bury them between the layers without realising what you have buried.

In the middle of the night, you wake up. You see a small creature quickly running into the darkest corner of the ceiling. It may have made a little noise, may not have, It woke you up and now It has gone. Your eyes slowly move down to your little corner table. There is a small glass vase with a tulip stem. Someone gave it to you two days ago. It is wide open now. As you look at it, one of the petals falls off. A moment of beauty, it evokes something very pleasant inside of you. You smile and fall asleep again.

Connections

You sometimes find a connection between two or more things that appear to be completely irrelevant.  We do not usually try to find these puzzles because they are hidden beyond our consciousness.  We do/can not see them as they do not exist, yet occasionally there are events that trigger that sense of connection. It is almost shocking when this sensation is awoken.
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 When it happens, we call it “coincidence”. I believe these coincidences are lead by the incompleteness of the events. In the world of physics, everything moves towards a balanced form and completion, as does our state of mind. When you see something that is not “quite right”, your eyes automatically try to adjust it, to almost make it look right. How do we know the balance? But we do.
 
So we gather trivial information from our everyday life and store it in a corner of our head. It is so unimportant and small if it exists solely as a fact. However, when it becomes part of something, it all makes sense.

What is the connection between my work and this small piece of writing?  I try to put similar thoughts of mine into my ceramic pieces. They should not have a clear message as they are supposed to fit somewhere into the users’ mind.

 

White Ware

 

My preference of choosing types of clay when making white ware is the dark and coarse clay most of the time. The whiteness acts as a membrane or a veil. The hints of the true nature of the material appear slightly on the surface. Dark clay which consists of many impurities induces strong chemical changes in heat and the trace of events remains under the veil when it cools down. White, on the other hand, is more stable because of its purity. It is already settled and has a feeling of “stillness”.

Superficially my work appears to be quiet in white. It does not show the rawness of Mother Nature directly. A symbolic figure always looks more perfect than the actual person he/she is. Imagination and fantasy always reinforce the imperfection and achieve the perfection with its own originality.
  Therefore the completion of my work is done by the viewers. My work is a creation on its own.