‘Like Breathing’ -  2024 

This video work, made over the period of a day and night in the my studio, shows the drying and shrinking of a clay vessel, from the ‘leather hard’ stage to ‘bone dry’.

This is an important phase in the ceramic process and one that’s difficult to control. If the clay is dried too quickly cracks can easily form which are tricky if not impossible to repair.

There are two videos in this work; the one below is a speeded up wide view of the vessel in my studio - you can see it drying from the top left down in a spiral pattern, mirroring the throwing technique used to make it. You can see the light changing as the weather outside darkens, eventually turning to a nigh-time stillness, with flies occasionally landing on the vessel as it dries. 

The second video is a close up, super speeded and altered video showing the shrinkage of the vessel. It is reminiscent of our breathing, set in time to the 5-4-3 breathing technique used to reduce anxiety. This technique ‘hacks’ the amygdala area in the brain to trick our bodies out of the ‘fight, flight, freeze’ reaction to stressful situations and into a calmer state. It invites you to breathe with it

This work references the processes fast and slow that dictate our lives, how our reactions and the ‘choices’ we make are actually quite uncontrollable, if controllable at all. How the way we will behave in any situation is laid out in our biology and how we are made, what we experience, what has been passed down to us, consciously and unconsciously.  Our behaviour is as dictated by the laws of nature as how this vessel dries.