Eating dinner around the table with my family was something we did almost every night growing up. These were the moments that we would catch up and talk about everyones day. As we got older, us kids have now heard a few of our parents stories a few hundred times and would often tell them ourselves and now have a few stories of our own we like to tell.
I am a ceramicist making narrative sculptures that depict stories from my family that would be told around the dinner table. My sculptures are made in mid fire porcelain, and colored with underglazes. These are stories that don’t need to have a huge significant meaning, rather being stories that are unique to my family and are often told over and over again. From the time my brother almost accidentally killed himself because he thought it would be cool to walk on the floor of the pool to the time my dad ran over the neighbors chicken with his bicycle when he was a kid, these sculptures show the parts of life that make for an interesting story. The titles that go along with each piece help bring each story to life, as if it were the dialog being spoken while telling the stories around the table to each other.
Relief-composition is when the figures are arranged in in horizontal lines to record/tell an event or a story. Symbolism plays a big part in Ancient reliefs sculptures in the way they depict men, gods and the dead.
Like Ancient Egyptian reliefs that depict a story in each panel, I am telling stories with each sculpture around the table.
