For the IMA SHOP SERIES – VESSELS – JORDAN AZCUNE presents a series of vessels, ideal for ikebana.

Who are you ?

I am an artist and maker based in Meanjin/Brisbane. In this city we have a love-hate relationship with temperature but I use heat to harness materials in both liquid and solid forms. Within my visual arts practice I connect this transfigurative quality of materials to communicate a relationship to body, environment and vulnerability. When making, I am drawn towards gesture within formality, and play with these motifs often connecting them with spirituality and sex.

What did you make ?

I sculpted a series of terracotta forms that resemble water vessels but are given handles squeezed from my hands, that attack and puncture the ceramic walls to make them more ambiguous. These gestures warp the structural form of the clay while it is still wet, and are captured frozen via firing kiln. The works are wheel thrown, untrimmed and unglazed.

I would like to thank Richard de Haan for his practical and conceptual wisdom in his mentoring of me working with these series.

Why did you make it ?

These works are really quite emotionally loaded I feel, the process originated from a place of grief and angst and migrated to play and eroticism.

When making the vessels I was thinking about the emptying of volume, and what it would be to make a vessel both more and less functional – yes with a handle – but now with a permanent rupture, limiting its ability to hold liquid. The grabbed gestures allow a view, like through a keyhole. I feel we are peaking at the insides or something private within which feels very voyeuristic towards the ceramic and there is an unexpected amount of light within the open vessel. The architecture of the vessels and the multiple holes and folds of the clay leans the practical use of the vessel towards ikebana – and I would be very excited to see them used within that practice.

Medium: Black Clay