STEPHEN-BERNARD DEREK CALLENDER, 2019
www.sbdcallender.com

I recently became interested in the cultural use of ceramics, as both a formal and conceptual practice that predates human history. We’ve used it to shape our homes, and to create the objects that filled them. This practice has been retained throughout our expansion and domination over the natural world, expanding our skills and material knowledge in each location we settled. My interest in art, history, and anthropology, has inspired an attempt at reliving this experience that shaped the lives of our ancestors. Being a sculptor, I am obsessed with the poetics of material. This has made me a strong believer in a thing I like to call object metadata. I find that the location where a material is from, and the process by which that material is transformed, is embedded in the object created. I also feel that this embedded information, or metadata, changes how we interpret objects.

At Residency 108, I continued a project began at Oxbow in which I created ceramic objects, solely from the resources presented on-site in southern Michigan. This process included finding deposits, harvesting clay, processing this clay, and using a kick wheel to create objects that I finally Pit fired. Upstate New York was located at the bottom of the North American glacier during the last ice age. Because of this the soil in the area holds a significant deposit of clay, especially along the Hudson. While in residence I used the clay I collected to create replicas of prehistoric ceramic tools and built a kiln to fire them in.