Clay Conversations

Clay conversations arose out of collaborative conversations I had with British ceramicist Joanna Still. After several meetings and exchanges, Joanna created some ceramics which evoked various forms of communication, for example a clay book, a calendar, and an abacus, but which also had an abstracted connection with the objects to which they refer. I wrote several short poems in response to Joanna's ceramics, conversations we had, and textual material she sent me (such as a newspaper cutting about Haitians eating clay plates because they could not afford food). My poetry also drew on experiences I had independently, which seemed to connect with the project, such as a visit I made to the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco. I then started to experiment with the video program Final Cut Pro, and with a variety of techniques and processes such as split screens, superimposition and merging of images, and a range of filters for image transformation. Besides the images of the ceramics, I worked with photographs and emails resulting from Joanna's travels in Zambia and Ethiopia, where she was sponsored by Voluntary Service Overseas to conduct workshops with local communities. These were very inspiring and suggestive, and seemed to fit well with my own increasing interest in a cosmopolitan poetics,which moves between different cultures in the same work. I adapted some of the poems I had written for the video, often fragmenting and reorganising them in new ways to optimise integration with the visual images, and to exploit the possibilities of the split screen dynamic.