Future Ruin, 2022

"Allegories are, in the realm of thought, what ruins are in the realm of things." ~ Walter Benjamin

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Future Ruin is a series of ceramic work exploring the architecture of today through the lens of an imagined future. Drawing on ideas of decay and erosion, rewilding and the Anthropocene in the form of the architectural detritus we leave behind, it seeks to employ the symbolic language of ruins; namely their potential as manifestations of the uncanny and their unique position as markers of both time and civilisations, to help us reflect on our own place within the chronology of the world from the safe and potentially freeing space of an imagined future position. A range of ceramic processes have been used to create the series including slip casting, ‘burn out’ using natural inclusions, and the mimicking of natural erosion in water.  These techniques were chosen in part to further emphasize the themes underlying the work, as the processes listed necessarily involve loss, the memory of an object or its ghostly preservation in the form of replica.