Raymond RorkeRaymond Rorke Ceramics

S T A T E M E N T

 

From the beginning, clay has been intimately bound to our most basic human needs: food and shelter. Clay has also been used to record and to remember — with tablets, tokens, or totems — translating between the hand and the mind what is real and imagined, concrete and abstract. Over millennia, as objects of clay have been exchanged, so too have their embedded ideas, values, and traditions.

Today, we could say that clay is the original social medium.

As an artist I work with the rich vocabularies of clay, not only to give shape and voice to new ideas, but to add to the language of artifacts. I’m fascinated by how clay can articulate any object or material, including itself. Clay's long and unique ability to be both real and symbolic in our everyday lives — integrating what's literal and metaphoric, what's natural and man-made — has, for me, boundless poetic opportunities for transformation.

This is, ultimately, clay's soft power.