a journal & a show
it's the final pots of the year.
Hi friends ~~
I’m so excited to share that my article is featured in this month’s JAC. What’s even more exciting is that the JAC team has chosen a photo of my work for the front cover, so my pot is now the face of the very issue that features my first-ever article with them. I am so grateful for their hard work in putting this beautiful publication together.
The piece shown here is from my show “Here, There, and Here Again,” which I did this past July with some amazing potter friends at Stockroom Kyneton. The article, titled “Plates, Bowls, and Blankets,” features a conversation between my beautiful friend Emma and me, where we reflect on the intersections of craft—particularly ceramics and weaving—in today’s contemporary art scene. Emma is an incredible weaver—you can view more of her work here.
I hope you stumble upon the publication in the wild, maybe on a bookshelf near you. If not, the team has also made it available at their online shop.
The other thing I want to tell you about is that I’m having my last exhibition of the year at Montsalvat Resident’s Gallery with my dear friends and fellow potters Pauline Meade, Goosullae Kim, & Janice Keen.
The show is called “The Poetry of Material Things”, and in this exhibit, we considered the poetry of everyday material objects—vessels that cultivate the fabric of our being, carrying the quiet heaviness of our daily lives. Each collection within the installation is construction around the functions these vessels traditionally engage in: that of containment, of libration, and of adornment.
“The Poetry of Material Things” will open this Friday 13th (Dec24) | 6-8PM. I really hope you can join us in Montsalvat. Yes, the Friday night traffic might be bad but the art and company will hopefully be very good.
*As Friday is usually a busy day for Montsalvat events, I’d really appreciate it if you could RSVP here so we can gauge the amount of people planning to attend.
~~
Now,
On tracing the work
My work almost always begins with a story—a thought that finds its shape in letters on a page and eventually completes in the physical form of a pot.
You can read through the unformed stage of my thought behind “The Poetry of Material Things” below.
~~
There’s a restaurant in Sài Gòn called Cục Gạch Quán.
Cục Gạch is an upmarket establishment that opens almost ten years ago, in an old colonial villa, nestled in one of the city most expensive zip codes. The restaurant serves everyday fare, familiar and unpretentious—the kinds most Saigonese grew up eating at home.
At the time, it was a kind of statement—a place that charged steep prices for very simple meals, only to serve them out of chipped ceramic bowls and plates, the kind that didn’t belong to the leisure class, which is the very class who wouldn’t think twice about the price tag.
My father never understood the concept. Shaped as he was at the fringes of war and poverty, my father could not understand how anyone, now free from such a life, would seek a reminder of what they had barely, narrowly escaped.
The friend who introduced my father to Cục Gạch, however, understood the concept just fine. He too, was shaped at the edges of war and poverty; but where my father saw only a reminder of suffering, he saw hope. In a way, I think he saw his presence in the perimeter of the rich, eating common meals out of broken tableware once reserved for the poor, as a sign that he had transcended poverty—had arrived, at last, at the dissolution of one life and the reconstruction of another—a life remade, in spite of it all.
James Baldwin wrote this about the class system in America vs Europe at the time
But Europeans have lived with the idea of status for a long time. A man can be as proud of being a good waiter as of being a good actor, and, in neither case, feels threatened. And this means that the actor and the waiter can have a freer and more genuinely friendly relationship in Europe than they are likely to have here. The waiter does not feel, with obscure resentment, that the actor is not tormented by the fear that he may find himself, tomorrow, once again a waiter.
Listening to my father and his friend talk about this seemingly random restaurant in our town was the first time I thought about the actuality of these words.
It was sorta the first time
I realise that
my father,
long after the haunting of poverty has faded,
still maybe a little bit tormented by the fear that
he
may find himself, tomorrow, once again a waiter.
~~
The series of vessels I’ve made for “The Poetry of Material Things” mirrors the objects found on every Vietnamese dining table: a bowl for rice, a glass for water, a chopstick holder, sometimes a small flower vase. The chipped tableware is reimagined through a meticulous arrangement of fine coils, light in weight—a contrast of the sturdy, thrown tableware. The edges of the work are reconstructed through a deliberately pinched process, leaving the rim raw and sharp, The glaze is applied in thin layers, using a dry hog hair brush or scraps of old newspaper, so to retain the papery texture of the bisque pieces underneath.
t.
Thank you Thannie , you have a beautiful way of creating images in my mind with your words .