You and I are Earth is a sculptural installation that interweaves ceramics, light-based therapies and altered found materials to explore the lived experience of chronic pain, bodily memory, and ecological entanglement. My process- based practice is grounded in the idea of visual generosity through deep material experimentation. I approach ceramics through a practice of surrender and reconfiguration. By layering glazes, reworking past pieces and the intentional embrace of failure, sculpture becomes a malleable archive that remembers touch.

 

A central element of the exhibition is the use of green light, which is being studied for its potential to reduce chronic pain. In my work, green light becomes both an ambient environment and an experimental therapy, it is yet another glaze that saturates the space and implicates the viewer’s body in the experience of looking. The intervention of coloured light invites reflection on how visual stimuli can interact with neurological processes, offering a multisensory encounter full of relief, distortion, and healing.

 

My visual vocabulary borrows from plant structures and the aesthetics of microscopic life. Root systems, lily pads, and the Venus flytrap recur throughout the installation as metaphors for resilience, fertility, precarity, and systems of unseen communication. I see parallels of colour and shape between the gut microbiome and grains of sand, each grain is an abstract sculpture, each bacterium a thriving coral reef. These colours are mirrored in layers of glaze on ceramics refired and reworked, treating the ceramic surface as an aesthetic mapping of these hidden worlds.

 

My assemblages embrace synthetic materiality while remaining all too aware of the contradictions inherent in producing new objects within a saturated material world. By doing so I work to draw connections between bodily consumption, environmental degradation and the aesthetics of waste. I’m informed by practices of thrifting and repair, where my sculptural landscapes mirror the visual excess of the city dump or the knick knack shelf of a thrift store. I mine these places of consumption and abandonment that hold our collective disconnect to waste, actors of our physical separation of ecological responsibility and crisis.

I link the complex root systems beneath our feet to the interiority of living with an invisible disability, to the abstraction of colour and form. There is a beauty in the unpredictable nature of ceramics, power in letting go of what we thought we wanted and strength in the ability to embrace the outcome. Clay holds memory, once fired it can warp to the movements your hands held in the making, cracks exposed and grown from the path of air in a kiln. Firing becomes both alchemical and symbolic, mirroring the unpredictability of pain and my ongoing negotiation with control and release.

Ultimately, I insist on the interconnectedness of internal and external systems, the root with the gut, the crack in the glaze with the fracture of the body. You and I are Earth offers a material language for living with uncertainty, making visible the often-abstracted narratives of pain and biological systems through sculptural form.