Chora, first series
October 2025
These ceramic forms exist in a state of perpetual becoming, refusing taxonomic certainties that typically organize our understanding of the natural world. Neither vessel nor creature, plant nor animal, they inhabit what Rosi Braidotti calls spaces of posthuman transformation. These are zones where fixed categories dissolve into something more fluid and generative.
The undulating edges and organic asymmetries of each piece resist geometric predictability and instead embrace the unpredictable gestures of soft clay responding to touch and gravity. Through their flowing irregular contours these sculptures propose forms that belong to no existing phylum, suggesting instead the morphologies of organisms yet to emerge from *natural* settings we have not yet imagined, but have shaped an influenced profoundly with our human presence.
The choice of deep ocean glazes that shift between blue, teal, and kelp green evokes the generative depths where light fractures and familiar distinctions blur. These surfaces with their glossy, almost wet appearance, capture Jane Bennett’s description of matter’s inherent vibrancy and agency. The glaze pools and breaks unpredictably across each form creating patters than the artist guides but cannot fully control. This collaboration between human intention and material self-organization mirrors the sculpture’s conceptual territory: forms emerging from the entanglement of maker and medium, neither fully authored nor fully autonomous. The raw clay edges deliberately left exposed reveal the material substrate beneath the transformative glaze is a reminder that becoming is always incomplete, always in process.
Each sculpture’s hollow interior and open structure emphasize receptivity and porousness rather than solid mass. This formal choice resonates with Plato’s description of chora as receptacle – a generative space that receives and allows transformation – and Martin Heidegger’s description of chora as a clearing in which being happens. The pieces curl and fold back on themselves creating interior spaces that are simultaneously architectural and bodily, functional and purely sculptural. Their scale hovers between holdable and commanding, substantial enough to assert presence, but intimate enough to invite touch. This ambiguity of scale precents easy categorization. Are they models of something larger, expansions of something microscopic, or complete unto themselves?
The works participate in what Donna Haraway calls speculative fabulation – the creative practice of imagining forms and relations not yet realized, but nonetheless materially possible. By evoking both the familiar vocabulary of marine life (the rippling of sea kelp, the mantle of a mollusk, the flowing locomotion of pelagic creatures), and utterly alien morphologies, these sculptures occupy what Harraway might call the SF terrain: science fiction, speculative feminism, string figures, and so far. They are propositions rather than representations, asking what other arrangements of matter might constitute life, what other organizations of form might move through future ecologies. The visible traces of making – the tool marks and fingerprints of the maker and the slight variations between pieces in the series – refuse perfect reproducibility of industrial objects in favor of what Harraway calls “making-with” or an acknowledgement that creation is always collaborative, always imperfect, and always entangled.
Ultimately these ceramic forms function as meditations on transformation itself. They capture clay at the moment it begins to move beyond utility toward something stranger and more speculative. In their refusal of a fixed identity – are they functional? Decorative? Sculptural? Organic? Architectural? – they enact the posthuman condition Braidotti describes when boundaries between categories become productive sites of generation rather than stables lines of demarcation. Like the formless interval or clearing from which they conceptually emerge, these objects are thresholds: spaces where matter becomes animate, where ancient material of earth transforms into visions of the future we cannot yet name, where the touch of human hands collaborates with the transformative agency of fire, glaze, and time to produce forms that point to ecologies beyond our current imaginings.
