The Clay Studio : Shop

My work plays with clay’s responsiveness: its ability to be built and to break, to respond to gravity and succumb to heat. Objects in my work are processed through different material lenses; forms are built by stacking material like bricks, like layers of sediment; structures are piled and flipped upside down in the kiln; the tools of the making process become the artifact, paving the foundation for more work to come. Making ceramics is painful: the tedious ennui of the wait; the expense of time for just one pot to be fired; most importantly, the fragility and peril inherent in the material — a material that blows up, splatters, and collapses. Kiln-loads full of shattering and crazing; exploded shards and bits stuck to other pieces — all of which can lead to heartbreak and tears. Ceramics is a site of discovery. It is precisely this pain, this confusion that disrupts the understanding of ceramics of a practice of good or bad, right or wrong, profit or waste. Instead of a linear approach to the ceramics process, I have found that the residues of failure can be the central axis of the work—a catalyst for learning, reflection, and exploration. By paying attention to the shards, the leftovers, the underlying structures, the process of making becomes fluid and open for revision. The painful failure becomes charged with excitement and serendipitous new meaning. Clay allows us to have the opportunity to fail. My ceramic process also acts as a metaphor for and a reminder of my unsteady position as a young immigrant. Driven by the anxieties of failure, I often find my American experience far more complex than what I thought it would be. Lost somewhere in -between radically different cultural realities, no longer quite fully Chinese nor American, I find my thinking situated in a nowhere’s land, a place in which failure often seems imminent, and the painful anxiety never really leaves me alone. For me, being an immigrant is a process of unlearning, my new identity in flux, even tottering. Within my work, the ceramics process becomes a vehicle of growth— to rearticulate my new identity, to explore this space of being “in between,” and to embrace its potential riches. The process of clay is a process of migration, where every step is a unique way of moving forward, and where to be lost is never to be wrong, but simply more.

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Ryze Xu

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Ryze Xu

Did you Know?

Can We Help?

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