Emma Mounsey The foundations of my practice lie in the exposed and enclosed, the void and the line, the chaos and the order, and the tensions between them. I construct spaces which abstract architectural, structural references into wholly sculptural forms. The work is based in handbuilding, hand rolling individual coils of clay and painstakingly constructing and finishing fragile and complex frameworks. The laborious and meditative nature of this process goes hand in hand with the focus on barriers, protection and entrapment. The constraints I place on the process, the repetition, the iterations of the same actions and forms working together, are my comfort zone, a shelter of safety but also entanglement and confinement. In contrast there is an element of play to the work I create, giving myself multiples of the same object with which to build intuitively, the act of abstracting and miniaturising the real world into something I can control, into play things, is of a childish nature. With each iteration and assemblage new connections are made, a conversation emerges both personal and public.
The constraints are decided before the making has begun, whether that be limiting the size and quantity of building blocks or building within visible or invisible confines. once these boundaries have been set there are no further rules, I am free to play with what I have given myself. The abstracted structures which appear unfold intuitively, each rod placed is a decision made as a response to the one before it. There can be a vague idea of the form I will create but ultimately it is an ever evolving construction which talks about tension and edges and connections.
The constraints and limitations imposed by lockdown forced me to explore a digital approach to my practice. The digital world lacks the tactility and intuition of physically building the objects. Gravity deserts me. Anything is possible. There is an inevitable void between reality and these idealised objects with precise axes and imposed textures. They do however provide a way of acting out compositions, situations, environments. They are a useful tool for beginning, not a method for creating finished objects.
A tendency towards the small is about control. A smaller scale along with strict constraints allows me to feel comfortable to play, it feels manageable. Once the rods are rolled there are no rules, I can imagine they can become anything, and when finished, though they are on this smaller scale, the objects can be imagined as larger objects, playground climbing frames, public art, the framework for entire buildings.
The work does not, however, act solely as models for public art, they are decorative artistic objects in their own right. There is a handmade quality, a delicacy, that only ceramics can provide, the time and labour I put into creating them is at least half of their value as objects. There is a real satisfaction to carefully creating my own building blocks, slowly and intuitively building an object up from nothing.
Rolling Process Video
Building Process Video