Compressing Atmosphere: Ceramic Encounters With Clay, Body and Site

Compressing Atmosphere: Ceramic Encounters With Clay, Body and Site identifies compression, the decisive touch and resulting mark of the artist’s body on clay, as a potent starting point to consider practice-led research. The sense of being in and attuning to the world is through encounters with atmosphere and with the assemblage of material bodies. Linking material and site enquiry, the research reveal how compression is both a method of making and a conceptual lens through which to investigate affective interpretations in ceramic sculpture and exhibition practice. Compressive potential is understood through the concepts and language of autotheory and theories of affect, feminism, and new materialism. It is established that affect and autotheory is a theoretical framework from which to consider a creative condition of lived compression as experienced by the inhabitation of different sites of research. By challenging foundational principles of ceramic hand building, this research has revealed ways of producing artwork that manifests a condition of maternal longing, call attention to climate crisis, and presents artefacts of Melbourne’s Covid-19 lockdown period. Atmosphere under compression is a creative condition for a ceramic art practice to perceive, synthesis and critique cultural, social and environmental events as embodied material experiences.