TRICIA  LIM

My parents were artists and ceramics used to be a therapeutic hobby for me. Having lived in different places as a child, I found con-solace at home and empathy in nature. When I returned to Singapore and moved out of home, I started working with clay again as a way to reconnect with my childhood habits and memories, and also the ground beneath our feet.

 

I started with no professional ceramic equipment, so hand-building became the natural choice of approach to working with clay. The pinching process is simple; one circles a sphere of clay in the palm of one's hands and pinching its walls repetitively to produce a palm-sized vessel. It is a foundational technique that has never left me. 

 

As I work with larger amounts of clay, pinching becomes more and more a physical process, and I develop a system of working the clay body which is very personal and intuitive; Considering pressure on the roughness of clay, how much clay I can handle, and the beauty of simple symmetrical forms become part of the process of making. 

 

Pinching a vessel is a primordial gesture;  this technique has been used for 10s of thousands of years. As I work with the same technique and minerals as those nameless pinch pots in ethnologies museums from different civilisations. I feel I am responding to this history and connecting to this history of craft, and mark-making with my hands no different physiologically from the maker’s hands 10-20,000 years ago.