Ways to Endure

This work talks about mixed feelings of fragility, vulnerability, resilience, and endurance. It is a representation of how unexpected and devastating situations can cause us to collapse in despair and make us feel shattered but also gives us an opportunity to transform ourselves.
The work is composed of porcelain sculptures. Each sculpture was created in the same way, with porcelain slip covering identical cardboard boxes. The boxes with slip were fired at a higher temperature than recommended, which caused crackles, deformations, and even total collapse of the pieces; each one endured the firing process differently. The look of the fired sculptures has nothing to do with the cardboard boxes from the beginning, all of them changed differently even they all went through the same process. Some pieces preserved in their shape the memory of what was ones a cardboard box, other pieces were so shattered that they needed to be re-fired at increased temperatures, fusing their fragments together in order to reinvent their shapes.
The intention in this work is to represent the different ways in which each person or in this instance, each box, can resist a stressful situation in their life. The cardboard boxes represent the stability and security in life “before the storm”. After being covered with porcelain and subjected to the firing process, the cardboard boxes disintegrated, leaving in the remnants (collapsed porcelain) not only the vestiges of the pain and suffering that comes with enduring a distressing situation, but also the human capacity of resilience. Nobody stays the same after overcoming situation of loss, illness, trauma, or any other devastating situation. I like to think these pieces represent those people who pick up their fragments and recreate themselves, people that find meaning and purpose and achieve wisdom and beauty in their transformation by surviving the worst of circumstances.