Since you Left my Wet Embrace

“Since you left my Wet Embrace” created in China in 2004 echoes a recurrent theme permeating my work: Places of healing, where social networks and possible futures can be created, imagined and inhabited. A communal reminder of loss and a personal reserve for ‘constructive forgetting’, both of which are central to remembrance and embodied-social memory work.

Since you left my Wet Embrace”, a well-like construction is built by an assortment of individually made, handcrafted porcelain vessels like bricks. The title is borrowed from a love song by Bjork, is in self nostalgic and distressing, suggesting a continuity of an ambiguous narrative.

Over-glazed with ceramic mother-of pearl, the vessel-bricks reveal protruding apertures, suggesting sexual parallels which grow to be both attractive and self-protective. They become an unattainable container since the constraints of the sculpture’s form displace and cancel its function. The sculpture’s use of architecture and framing intends to demarcate, enframe and contain its own void imbued with a red interior extending infinitely downwards.

The casing’s most elementary function is the partition, whether wall or border, creates a first human territorialisation and constitutes the possibility of an inside and an outside, dividing the inhabitable from the natural (the chaotic), transforming the earth itself into a delimitable space, a shelter or home. Containing is how chaos becomes territory.

The notion of water embedded in the core of the work, depicts the deceptive quality of memory, whereas the dysfunctional, harsh vessel emphasizes the unavoidable sense of loss. The work becomes a painful statement to the curtailed and disturbing nature of rupture and loss both internally and externally. (Klitsa Antoniou)