Process art emerged in the mid-1960s and continued through the 1970s as a rejection of formalism and its focus on the finished art object. It pushed art beyond traditional media, testing the limits of abstraction through two key approaches: a close examination of the act of making itself, and a turn toward processes outside conventional artmaking methods. Inspired by this movement, I've come to see experimentation as central to my practice, an act of embodiment through material exploration.
My textile work began as an investigation into pattern and its relationship to my body. The tension within this work drew me to ceramics, and porcelain specifically, as a way to ground the textile forms and explore the gap between how a material looks and how it behaves. Slip casting became central to this exploration, and from May to June I spent time in residence at Medalta's International Centre for Contemporary Ceramics, developing a series of porcelain studies that examine weight, transparency, and fragility. Medalta, a historic ceramics factory and museum in Medicine Hat, Alberta, operates as a contemporary ceramics studio and residency space, providing access to specialized equipment.
Slip casting is a ceramic process where liquid clay is poured into a plaster mould to form a hollow object. The porous plaster mould, draws out moisture and builds a wall of clay against its interior. Once the desired thickness is reached, excess slip is poured off, and the piece dries and shrinks slightly, pulling away from the mould. After removing the object, it can be cleaned up by smoothing out mold lines, then bisque fired, glazed, and fired again. Because a single mould can be reused, this process is particularly suited to producing multiples which resonates with my skill set in design.
This modularity and repetition echo the pattern-making and attention to material surface already present in my textile work. Just as those pieces expose their pins and stitches, the seams left by the mould map the object's construction onto its surface rather than hiding it. Left unsmoothed, these lines resist the idea that a finished object should erase the evidence of its own making an ethos close to process art's core rejection of formalism.
Within this repeatable process, the maker's touch remains - in how far a seam is smoothed, how thick or thin a wall is allowed to become. These small, decisions position material research not as planning, but as knowledge built through the hand's direct engagement with a material's limits. Slip casting, in this sense, becomes a way of holding the trace of process and touch within the object itself. A quiet record of the hand that made it.
Please join me at the Alberta Craft Council to view Stillness. A ceramics exhibition showcasing this new, experimental work, created during my Medalta residency.
