If This Survives It Will Be A Fucking Miracle

If This Survives It Will Be a Fucking Miracle

This piece began with an unwillingness to waste a small amount of casting slip that I had coloured with red oxide and could no longer return to the original vat. I thought there was enough to cast a vessel. There wasn't. Remembering a technique I had previously used when making resin masks, I began rotating the remaining slip around the plaster mould, hoping it would gradually set against the surface. Against better judgement and possibly physics, it worked.

The resulting vessel was extraordinarily thin and broke almost immediately when removed from the mould. Rather than discard it, I used slip trailing to ‘stitch’ the fragments back together and added a spare cast cherub head. While repairing it I remember thinking, if this survives, it will be a fucking miracle, so I wrote exactly that across its surface.

It survived its first firing.

A photograph of the piece was subsequently selected to represent the Cardiff School of Art and Design Master's courses on posters displayed around Cardiff city centre. After travelling into town with my family to see it, however, I discovered my poster wasn't there. I later learned that the swear word had been considered unsuitable for public display and the university had arranged for another work to be photographed instead. The original image remained part of the Master's exhibition.
I understood the decision. A public street has an audience far beyond an art school, including children, and the alteration did not feel to me like a battle over censorship. What interested me more was the accidental irony of the replacement: the work chosen in its place was the piece I most strongly associate with dissociation. An artwork that had been selected to represent me had, without my knowledge, disappeared and been replaced by another concerned with altered presence and absence.

Meanwhile, I decided the original vessel needed more colour. Since it would require another firing anyway, I glazed it.

It broke in the kiln.

Part of it still made it into the exhibition.

The miracle, apparently, had terms and conditions.