Julia Kerley

Potter's Field

2023

Medium: Ceramic (full material list: Black mountain stoneware, glaze and blood, 50 lbs of ice, sledge hammer, jute rope, barn pulleys, chain)

Dimensions: 6' x 6' x 3'

Price: Is it necessary for me to name a price at this point? I'm not super interested in selling this piece but if I need to put a number up then I guess I'd put $5k.

Description: In Potter's Field I suspend a 50 lbs. ceramic vessel and a 50 lbs. block of ice on a pulley system constructed of barn pulleys and rope. Through the piece I consider suspension, tension v. time in place, Percy Shelley’s Ozymandias, temporality, performance, transformation, and protection. “Potter’s fields” are sites of burial for unclaimed, unknown people. Prior to being used as a grave site, potters would collect high-quality, deeply red clay for the production of ceramics at these sites. As a result of this excavation, deep trenches marred the land rendering it “useless” for agriculture or building. Thus it became a site for the burial of the unknown, and the name potter’s field refers to the once clay- rich soil that bodies now return to. I consider this removal of clay for the interment of a body back to Earth as a metaphor for transience. This decomposition of a body into the mined soil that will one day return to clay is an example of the movement of energy and life amongst earth, and as examples of transformation of self into medium. Through the transformative firing to cone 10, the molecules within clay become vitrified stoneware-- the strongest the molecules can shape themselves into. And yet in the installation, the vessel yearn in suspension for the few inches of space that prevent it from breaking. Creating with clay brings me this awareness of the paradox of fortification. Clay can traverse intense alchemical changes to reshape its molecules into fortified bonds and still it’s vulnerable to the mercy of time. This tension between the vessel and the floor is brought into the present moment with the vessel at the mercy of time, as illustrated by the ice block slowly edging the rope closer to the floor as it melts. Additionally, the ice block is at the mercy of its environment in a different way. In another alchemical process the water molecules are rearranged to remember the shape of an object. Still it changes, its molecules excite and spread, hydrogen bonds break, and the system shifts. I see the pulley system as a metaphor for mercy, precariousness, and fragility and the role tension plays in keeping that all together. Without tension in the system there is no meaning, no direction. The relationship therefore becomes less about one object in contrast to another, but more about the two objects' relationship to tension. In terms of surface treatment, within this project I started an ongoing research focus and experimentation with animal blood meal as a glazing material. I began by asking questions such as what happens when a vessel becomes implicated into the fusing of itself with blood, when a life force is fortified through aggressive flame and then suspended in the matrix of evaporating ice and its own dust? What are the elemental changes that happen and can the memory of blood last on the clay, to decompose along with it, to transform and transmute life force into medium? Overall through this project I’ve found I’m interested in the heating and cooling of materials, the rearrangement of these same molecules into something different but the same. I use this for a metaphor of queerness and the mythology of a trans body. I am the same molecules as always but I rearrange and arrange them in a variety of ways as my identity flows and adapts through time. And in that sense, how much different am I from a bag of clay or a block of ice?