"Faultlines" is a triptych of ceramic sculptures developed from earlier work focusing on the peripheral, the edgelands - those areas where the natural, urban and industrial environments overlap. It is a work concerned with questioning materiality and the stability it appears to confer in the face of life’s transient nature. Impressed into the clay body are materials whose original purpose was to contain, limit, order, enclose and envelop.

A sense and spirit of place, time, absence, and dislocation have become central to the work and increasingly the sea has become a major motif, echoing concerns with climate change, global warming and rising sea levels. In this work the rising sea has also become a metaphor for widening social divisions and tensions and deepening political unrest, both nationally and globally. With Faultlines I, II and III, each piece is constructed then increasingly broken apart, an expression of fears and anxieties for man’s future in the world.

 

Photography: Alastair Duncan