The potter-god and the creation of breathing clay is a story repeated in many tongues, many times over. The Abrahamic God, the Yoruba spirit, Obatala, the Greek Prometheus, the Egyptian deity, Khnum, and on and on were all the first potters of the human body, adding breath and blood and water to the clay.
When it doesn’t have to arrive or resolve, and when the heartbreak of the unresolvable thing can be thought about without having to be fixed, ‘perfectionism’ in creative practice can somehow be used to exceed or undo itself.
Surviving a collision of ‘text’ and ‘object’ identities – somehow existing as neither and both – art books are interesting because we don’t quite know what they are, and so we can think about them in as many ways as we like.
Humans have been mining and making things with clay for more than 30 thousand years. Long before formal agriculture, it seems that the worldwide use of clay — for pots, buildings, sculptures, ritual practices, pigments, medicine — is one of the most ancient human things.
CAPE TOWN