Preview
Creation Date
2025
Dimensions
9 x 9 x 2 Feet
Materials
Earthenware Clay
Medium
Ceramics
Medium
Installation
Project Advisor
Meghan Sullivan
Year of Graduation
2025
Rights
Copyright for this work is held by the artist.
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License
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Artist Statement
Why do things feel immediate and too fast? Deadlines, expectations, resistance to growth and aging, unconsciously moving day to day… Rather than interacting with life in a thoughtless stumble, we can be aware of time and our place in it. This piece explores different scales of time. In a current timescale, a tree grows in decades and centuries, while the timescale for my ceramic tree was my four years of college.
While we are primarily occupied with the current timescales that we see with our eyes, there are other timescales larger than us at work. This sculptural tree is made from clay and so I have been considering the geologic timescale, where clays become a representation of time’s vastness. They are weathered away from cliffs that rose as tectonic plates. Acknowledging the geologic origin of the clay body reconnects us to a deeper root of time. Meanwhile, the tree signifies potential growth within our lifespan. The texture and form are an artistic exploration of slow growth with branches reaching upwards, suggesting movement and change. By acknowledging and becoming familiar with time’s passage and vastness, we can appreciate our place and growth in the present.