De-compositioning

This project was originally designed for a class assignment on 'containers'. Each clay ball is hollow, inserted with a little piece of paper in each one with "storage" written in differing fonts - storage being one purpose for a container but obviously difficult to store anything in a sealed clay ball. My intention was to not fire the balls and leave them outside in an urn to break down with the weather, a project I had to write a proposal for since it was on campus property and get a written approval. I photographed the balls almost every day noting their change - it took 2 months for any major change, other than people shuffling the composition and breaking a few, but it finally rained and the clay weakened sufficiently to crack the balls. I might be one of the few artists who was disappointed to see her art not falling apart and considered helping nature along by dumping a bucket of water on it.



After a few more days of rain the balls lost a lot of their original shape, are breaking down further and melting into each other.




The 'container' assignment was canceled but the balls were perfect for a different project for a different class "Fabricated to be Photographed" which was the intention of this project to begin with. I only printed one photo for the class critique, the bottom one, because I thought one photo would capture the process and intent as well as be kinda nice to look at and oscillated between showing a photo with a leaf or not. The photos with the leaves have a splash of color, a size comparison and a poetic reference to autumn and its association with decay. Conversely, photos without the leaves offer an image of something unknown and possibly create more questions. Decisions, decisions.

The photo, or perhaps the answers I gave to the questions asked, provoked a rant about whether or not the audience needs to know about the process, the underlying story behind the scenes, in order to appreciate or even look at the final work presented, a rant that might have left me feeling as hollow as my balls...