Charlotte Maishman

As a visual artist, I handle pressure points of materials to understand their eccentricities. Porcelain became the material to personify ‘mankind’. Built of more than its nature, but of all its experiences, holding memory in its plasticity. Brittle, yet incredibly strong, a complex contradiction beyond initial recognition. My process for connecting and capturing the performer, like with my materials, is made through investigation, allowing me to understand and respect areas of resistance and raw vulnerability.

This exhibition, "The Fragility of Structure: Body and Mind," includes photography, silk prints, projection, and a book. Alongside a sculpted house made from extruded porcelain and steel bolts, suspended in a steel cube. As well as being the weight of an average body, it can be seen as a symbol of home, the beginning of our gathered experiences.

"The poetics of space" is the bedrock for my study of space, both architecturally and metaphorically with the 'interior' mind. Underlying my use of cross-cultural symbolism, scale, suspension, tension, and contextualisation of the ‘interior' and 'MA' (the spirit of spaces) in the overall composition.

I am drawn to this area of inquiry through a desire to invite empathy and attention to our collective nature as strong, but also fragile. As we endure in this journey we are all tentative, crumbling clay, made of flesh and bone, built of positives, negatives, and many unknowns, all deserving exploration beyond first appearance.