Brook Sigal: Reactivity as Shape, New works, 2023-2024
From February to March 2024, Brook Sigal was a resident at Guldagerggard Ceramics Research Center in Skaelskor, Denmark. Selected works, all produced in porcelain and stoneware, were exhibited in August 2024 at Harismendia in Sare, France, curated by Ombelline D’Arche for CompulsivArt.
Through a rich ‘composting technique, I create one-off pieces that bring topical emotions to the surface. My references are personal, aligning them to books, photographs and walks.
Texture and Colour engage in these new works as the result of being responsive to possibilities and changes as they occur. All assumptions of form are distressed, twisted, and assembled into their non-vascular shapes. And it is also the case of learning to let go. Added surfaces and openings are frozen precisely at the interface between mental decisions and practical realization on the material itself – where gestures and choices meet ceramics. These works can be perceived as provocatively disharmonious with a fragile equilibrium, bursting with flaws and cracks which are purposely accepted and accentuated.
Familiar forms are latent and become obsolete as the lacerations expand these pieces’ structural integrity and capability by destabilizing tension’s very nature and design. Voluntarily and involuntarily, shapes move into new positions in the kiln and the archetypical form is made even more apparent.
Ceramics is the process and material that gets me closest to my ‘desire to not be certain’.What initially drew me to clay was beginner’s luck immediately followed by its complexity. This suits me perfectly. My favorite pottery tools are simple: the whirler and my hands. Neither optimist nor pessimist, when opening the kiln, I am open.
I feel that the Ceramic Art scene has lost their art movements; where are the Japanese schools, the Arts and crafts movement, etc.… that once upon a time would organically together like-minded, experimental, process-sharing artists? Today, ceramic art is a solitary practice where competition to play a part in a fast-paced trend is the reality of the ceramic artist.
What next? Be part of an art movement, OR to see my work in the arms of an art gallerist ‘flogging’ it at a high price in the street like a fruit vendor, side by side with family china in a Sicilian castle, as a prop in the Netflix series ‘Vikings’.
Text and photographs courtesy of the artist.
