Mark Makers

It’s revealing how when we most need to access our own thoughts we reach for materials. Materials have embedded themselves in our daily lives. They are a reliable foundation we have turned to to help us understand the world and understand ourselves. 

Materials have a memory, they are the archives for our conscious worlds, a matter-based data-base that we get to inscribe with our meanings and our emotions. It's through this storage that we can better access and understand our own thoughts. It's the metric of material externalisation that helps us get some clarity in our conscious life, think Diaries, think libraries;. 

Whether it's Hammurabi's code scratched into thick clay or the London stock exchange digitised onto glass rimmed magnetic disks, we have always trusted material to hold our most “valuable” thoughts. Hammurabi's code only became palpable when his clay tablets became ceramic. Only once there was permanence in the physical form of his clay tablets would there be permanence in the laws of his kingdom. A mark that remains is a thought that remains. The presence of the people who first smudge clay-baked plains may be gone, but their smudges aren’t. 

To make a mark is human. To make a mark for another, that is humanity. 

Go smudge some clay, go paint a canvas because it's when we reach for the material that we reach for one another. 

We reach to make.

We reach to reflect.

We reach to share. 

Cunieform (2021)

-raw clay