New Assemblages from My Alley

During the past few years, I have been systematically digging up the alley behind

my property, which was the site of a dump from mid 19 th century to mid 20 th

century . My finds sometimes include old ceramic pipes and dolls, but the vast

majority of objects I have found are mismatched pieces of broken ceramic

objects. I decided to give these discarded, broken, long forgotten, buried pieces of

ceramic trash a new life. By creating objects from these sherds, the rubbish of the

past is transformed into a series of small scale assemblages.

These sculptures borrow from the Japanese practice of kintsugi, in that they

embrace the marks of wear as part of the whole life of the object. The break is

celebrated as one more event in the life of the ceramic object. Similarly, I fix

these broken sherds together using a shiny, precious looking material to

illuminate each broken piece. Where my work differs from kintsugi is that I am

making sculptures from disparate ceramic sherds that ascend, swirl, or even

appear to dance. I am animating the buried trash of yesterday.

There are two series of work here, “Apotheosis Series” and “Arabesque Series”.