Archaeologic, series 4 & 6

Here are some new images of vases in my Archaeologic series, photographed for an article I recently published in the Journal of Australian Ceramics.

In this article, I discuss the need to innovate repair as an aesthetic craft in the context of fossil fuels and cheap energy. Using some basic historical pricing data I discuss how much cheaper ceramics have become over the past hundred years or so. This is a consequence of extraction and production efficiencies, of course, but also cheap kiln fuel. The demand for ceramic repair services has declined, just as it has for many other things. It is, unfortunately, that much cheaper to replace a broken object than repair it in many situations.

Perhaps the popularity of repair depends on a future return state of energy poverty, maybe through civilisational or ecological collapse? Or, perhaps the technology of renewables creates an energy utopia in which energy becomes more or less practically free….In such a world, machinery could conceivably power endless material circularity through recycling, making repair even more anachronistic than it appears now.

But I think this is not the important thing to consider when evaluating the need or desire for repair. Rather, it is that repair has an aesthetic value. An aesthetic value that opens us up to the capacities of repair in systems and things that require more than just energy to fix. It conserves embodied energy, but also heritage. For the kinds of transformative repair that intrigue me, it also creates the possibility of meaningful change. In the article I talk about the concept of perdurance, the shifting identity of things across time. Objects, and people, have a temporal form, a space-time shape that reflects the past and teases the future; a scar captures a battle or trauma, a flower bud promises the flower the day after tomorrow. In the form of a smashed and repaired vase we can sense the human potential to survive and flourish in adversity.

All works on this page are made to bisque by Kiyotaka Hashimoto, repaired by me and photographed by Carine Thévenau. My article “Ceramic Repair in the Age of Fossil Fuel” is out now in the Journal of Australian Ceramics Vol. 59 No. 3 November 2020.