Plywood, Paint, Glue, Ceramic Pieces
1050mm x 850mm x 30mm
These works were commissioned by Luzerne – a Singapore based ceramics tableware company – for the hotel rooms of their new factory-hotel in Dehua, China. The brief given was to repurpose the broken discarded ceramic pieces from the factory into the works that would hang on hotel room walls.
The concept revolves around exploring and capturing the beauty of the worn and broken. A consideration was made to use similar materials found in and around the factory and to translate some semantics of the ceramic manufacturing processes into the making of the artworks. The final artworks were envisioned as panelled pieces, similar to those of traditional Chinese panel paintings and folding screen art.
The result was a total of 128 pieces of artworks. Each set of 32 individual pieces when pieced together paints a bigger overall picture – patterns of cracks and crevices which have been traced from walls and floors from the factory grounds and around Dehua. The patterns were routed on wood panels, painted and finally filled with the broken ceramic pieces. This idea of the cracked ceramic pieces occupying the routed traced cracks holds special meaning because these chosen patterns are often seen as old and weathered, and in these artworks the broken rejected ceramic pieces, in a sense, “repair” these fractures. Framing the artworks was a collaboration with the workers in the factory. They were integral in the framing of the works – cutting and painting the wood pieces, and finally assembling it to the artworks.
On each of the respective hotel room floors, a photograph of the 32 panels pieced together is blown up and placed in the lobby. For a guest of the hotel, it gives a summary of all the rooms on the floor and a brief encounter to one of the pieces which is hanging in their room.
