Double Slit

In Quantum mechanics, the Double Slit is the name of an experiment that reveals the simultaneous nature of energy and matter, as well as the imprint consciousness has on our material world. Is the body a wave or a thing, an event or a subject? Do we move in stops and starts or is our lens too small to see the flow? Maybe we are always in simultaneous states of pause and action, if we could only see energy and matter at once.

In 2021 I began a series I call //, or when spoken, Caesura (which references a pause or cut). The project, not so different to bricklaying, involves the attachment of fired clay forms using concrete mortar. However, unlike bricklaying, my forms maintain a logic that challenges traditional order, oftentimes sitting on top of one another and breaking linear grids. The concrete oozes and overflows; it stains the clay and sometimes swallows it. There is a reliance and resistance, borne from the clay and concrete’s more malleable states, as these materials hold one another in perpetual—or at least indefinite—petrification.

It’s by no accident that I’ve found myself here. I think of concrete as a material that holds us to place, sometimes so firmly—or aspirationally—that it becomes a vehicle of power and war. Yet concrete originates in limestone caves, where we locate our first records of humanity in the form of calcified ochre and charcoal tableaus of symbolic thinking. From footprints to talismans and pottery, electrical outlets to space shuttles, clay has carried the record of our movement and capacity to transmit. Two entities, side by side, holding one another; one defiantly immovable and infinitely permeable; the other explosively nomadic and so fragile.

Ceramics bear the imprint of an environmental, chemical, and somatic transformation. There is only a small moment when this fusion happens. It’s a moment where minerals converge again, reunited after nearly fourteen billion years of separation. And in this moment, their binding is mediated by touch and body pressure. What does my touch know? What gets transmitted through my body’s memory? I’m amazed at the way flesh is capable of absorbing the frequencies of ecstasy and terror that enable us to do our life’s work—the things we run from and to.