Porcelain to Print

During my PhD research I had started to make clay grips that formed a cast of my hand and enabled a potential material handholding to those who held them. The grips have felt like many things, an offer to hold my hand, a prioritisation of a sense of touch, a burden, a small unfamiliar provocation. When used by some of the students at Cambridge it was interesting to hear them talk about the objects as giving them confidence, slowing down the way that they looked in the space, a feeling of being grounded. This way of physically getting to grips with meaning and knowing by; building, extending, making, and joining, could start to challenge the notion that, ‘artwork is a prime example of the objects capacity to avoid the knowing grasp’ (Hudeck, 2014, p.14) and rather seek the knowing grasp to potentially extend an art objects capacity and its pedagogical potential. This is where the act of touching can potentially become more than its action. A gripping that seeks new knowledge or a differing experience of encounter. 
 
The grips were initially unfired clay, the following set made in porcelain and glazed but through my fellowship I was able to see what would happen to the materiality and presence of my body, the physicality when the grip was again once removed through the printing process.
 
These objects have become something else. The object-ness altered through their constituent parts, or the layering of material needed to make a new version of the human action. The scaffolding around one of the prints held the form, supporting it. Although in the making process the idea is to break off the scaffold, I felt unable to do so. The structure seemed to echo the reciprocal metaphors I was working with. One thing connecting to another, reliant on the other, interconnected as a form of intra action. 
 
Thank you to Andrew McDowall for his help with the objects printing process.

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