Century of Innovation Inside/Out
Century of Innovation Inside/Out 1 & 2, 2018
high fire stoneware and porcelain with telecom cable and steel
I started this series because I was off put by the obsession some potters have with the "pure whiteness" of porcelain. The fact that porcelain objects were commonly used as gift items among some of history's most expansionist regimes - the Imperial Chinese court, the British Empire and the Nazis - imbues this quest for "purity" with a meaning I am not comfortable with.
Digging into the history of barbed wire in the Post Civil-War era, and its use "taming the west" (expropriating lands from people who had historically had rights to them,) as well as its early use as a primitive telephone system giving ranchers weather information, cattle prices, etc. and aligning that with the history of how contemporary information technologies have been leveraged to create greater divides between those "inside the fence" and those "outside the fence."
