Permeable Clay Vessel (Ecological Assimilation Specimen)
I was shaped to hold water, then hands, then silence. Now I drink the air. My walls bloom with soft intelligences; they sip what passes through me—rain, breath, decay. I remember lips, heat, trembling fingers. You called me ‘cup’ , that was a brief condition. I am vessel still, but for the world itself, endlessly seeping and becoming.
Ecological Assimilation Specimen
In a post-human ecology the distinctions between object and organism seem to dissolve. What was a clay cup, when no longer defined by human use, becomes a living participant in absorption, memory, and exchange with its environment. In imagining this being as a museum artefact, she is translated from this speculative future into the interpretive language of the contemporary gallery, inviting reflection on how matter might exceed its role as passive form.
Permeable Clay Vessel
This clay cup presents itself as a speaking subject from a post-human ecology, in which objects no longer serve but absorb and become. Its ‘voice’ reflects a speculative condition of object subsumation: the gradual merging of the manufactured with living systems. No longer a passive tool, the cup participates in ecological exchange, challenging the boundary between use, memory, and life.
Informed by VanderMeer, Jeff., 2014. Annihilation. Farrar, Straus and Giroux