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Artist Statement
At the intersection of craft and narrative, gốm maker is the material extension of my writing practice. Each sculpture begins with a fragment of text, guiding the slow accumulation of ceramic form and surface. Built gradually over days, the works draw on traditional coiling techniques, rendered contemporary through the use of exceptionally thin, pinched coils, each measuring approximately 0.5 cm at the moment of construction. At this scale, the coils are more acutely responsive to moisture, gravity, and heat, allowing the structure to register all environmental conditions through to the finished form.
Prior to the mechanisation of craft, traditional coiling technique tended to preserve the coil's presence. The compulsory erasure of the coil emerged in response to the new ideals of speed and uniformity. Today, where mass production dominates, these standards are magnified even more intensely: all surfaces are levelled and flat to the eye, all traces of manual labour are scratched out prior to the final firing. Having learned how to fluently dissolve the process (to smooth the lips with a chamois, to remove my fingerprints with a metal rib, and to say nothing of the labour that came before), I choose instead to make visible the work underneath.
The micro-decisions of the hands in motion, the raw pinched edges, the base bearing the banding wheel markings, every join, compression, and shift in pressure are recorded and remain legible on the clay. It is in these interruptions and irregularities that the work finds its shape.
Theme: TETHER
'Tether' echoes my grandparents' Hải Phòng, an old city that still actively try to evade the encroaching high rise towers pressing at its edge. Downtown, most buildings stay low enough that the sky remains in clear view. For years, I spent most of my summer here.
Hải Phòng chromatic vocabulary is yellow: amber parchment of aged paint fading under decades of salty air and dust; turmeric of ripen trái thị's flesh in autumn; blonde mung beans fillings folded into our winter sủi dìn. On summer afternoons, sunlight would filter through the canopy and reflected off the grey concrete pavements, tinting them the colour of chamomile tea, shimmering, pooling in one corner, then stretching across the wooden shutters of weathered tube-houses in the old quarter.
I carried this yellow in my mind during the making. I made glazes of full throated, permanent yellow. I applied them in various combinations on the surface. Then I keep thinking about the texture of stucco flaking in the heat, the dimpled skin of trái thị I grew up smelling, and I returned again and again to this paler, gentler hue, barely perceptible against the translucent porcelain body. The finger marks I left on the coils seem most at home here, the yellow drifting along their edges, slowly tracing the crude shifts of the papery-thin clay as it yields to the kiln’s heat-work, not encrusting over them.
I think this colour comes closest to my city, distilled into something you can hold.
— Thannie Phan, Gom Maker, Brunswick, Victoria
