Imprints, tailored. 2025

unfired clay, steel, terracotta, hemp cord, sewing pins, ribbon, cotton

Human contact with the natural world rarely announces itself. It accumulates in small, almost unconscious gestures, like a thread looped once too tight, a pin pressed in to hold a shape still, a hand smoothing what it touches into something more familiar. Imprints collects these gestures and makes them visible: each unfired clay form preserves the moment something natural was touched, bound, pinned, or rearranged toward a human idea of how it should look.

The tools and clay form reference a sewing kit: sewing pins, a tomato pincushion, ribbon, hemp cord, which belong to the domestic technology of tailoring, the process by which we make things fit.

Applied to clay and terracotta, they reveal how much of what we call "nature" has already been altered toward our own use: trimmed, bound, shaped to a human scale, long before we're willing to call it touched.

These marks are careful and careless at the same time. And they outlast the gesture that made them: what the hand forgets and the clay remembers. Imprints asks viewers to notice how few surfaces around them have escaped this kind of handling, and how permanent even a passing touch can become.