si sapsford
Fragments
Text Vases
What Survives
Each vessel holds a moment: a word, a half-remembered story, a page of handwriting inscribed onto the surface of the clay. Together they form a self-portrait in pieces — fragments of a personal history offered up, but never assembled into a whole.
Drawing on the way ceramics survive as shards, turned up long after the maker has gone, a life can be read from what happens to remain. The work looks at the small, mostly unnoticed changes that redirect a life, until some larger event makes us recognise that the person we once were has changed.
Each vessel arrives with a history of its own: a demi-john, a jar, a bowl, an object made to hold something before it was found and given another life. I inscribe onto these surfaces fragments of journeys, stories, drawings, maps and memories — things seen, remembered or imagined. The vessel becomes a kind of diary, holding a moment from a life alongside the traces of the life it already carried. The glass is both container and record: transparent, fragile and capable of carrying one history over another.
Fragments
how fragments can be gathered and transformed into something new.
Miscellaneous found objects, each carrying something of its own history, are gathered together and cast in bronze. Once joined, their original identities become partially obscured, while traces of the objects remain. Each becomes a kind of three-dimensional drawing — a collection of fragments brought together, as memories might be: partial, layered, displaced and sometimes jumbled. Around twenty of these bronze drawings hang on the wall, forming a larger constellation of fragments and associations.