Emma Marks

Each vessel is a testimony to the act of working with the more-than-human world with sensuality, curiosity and humility.

If I am reappraising the vessel, I do so with humility. The vessel is my microcosm to ask the question - what happens if..?  Like a world in itself, the idea of the vessel is a a huge and complex system with an enormous history. At the same time, both are ‘of the everyday’ and accessible to all.

Each vessel encounter (both for me as the maker and you as the viewer) is a small opportunity to look and feel through a less familiar lens, with more sensuality and with less human-centric narratives.

Plays on loop

For projection in dark room with double curtains to enter

No furniture or headphones within. 

Come to our physical degree show in Spring 2022 to see this immersive film.

Instead of the god-like gaze of a maker looking down upon their creation, Novum100* imagines different ways of conceiving how a vessel comes into being by filming upwards inside the vessel during the hand-building process.

Novum100 is a 7-minute mesmeric trip that transports us through multiple realms of creation fiction during the vessel’s making.

The critter-like hands that appear in the film, suggest more sympoietic** processes of becoming. 

*Darko Suvin introduced the idea of a “Novum” as a device or “strange newness” used in science fiction that compels us to imagine a different way of conceiving our world. Extract from Estrangement and Cognition, 1979 in SCIENCE FICTION: Documents of Contemporary Art edited by Dan Byrne Smith, Cambridge, Massachusetts, The MIT Press, 2020, pp 36-39.

** “Sympoieses is a simple word; it means “making-with.” Nothing makes itself; nothing is really autopoietic or self-organizing ... Sympoiesis is a word proper to complex, dynamic, responsive, situated, historical systems. It is a word for worlding- with, in company.” Donna Haraway, Staying with the Trouble, New York, USA, Duke University Press, 2016, p.58. 

Each of these vessels was made during during film experiments. Although my hands will have been intuitively working with the clay, my eyes and ears will have been entirely focussed on the recording equipment, positioning myself as best I could, to see and hear from the clay’s perspective.

Each vessel is just one manifestation of the making event, acknowledged with equivalence to the films, memories, speculations, bodily learning, sensations and other residues. 

I have retained 8 vessels from my film experiments. Here, 4 vessels are presented on acrylic plinths. When you look into the vessel mouth, you will see a still image captured during its making process - like a dissected slice of time.

Becoming 0.3 - glazed terracotta slipware on acrylic plinth, 21x10x10cm

Becoming 0.4 - unfired white earthenware on acrylic plinth, 23x10x10cm

Becoming 0.5 - High fired terracotta on acrylic plinth, 25x10x10cm

Becoming 0.6 - glazed terracotta slipware on acrylic plinth, 24x7.5x7.5cm

After the second lockdown of 2021, we were permitted to return to the Battersea campus in small groups on a periodic basis. The stairwells, corridors and in-between spaces that had once held the bustle of our art school now held the disquiet of a post-apocalyptic space. Workshops were empty and making equipment was cordoned off. One-way systems, electronic passes and online bookings governed our restricted and ultra- hygienic movements within the buildings.

Rewilding at the RCA is a series of vessels formed from nooks and crannies around the Battersea campus with the hope and defiance of weeds.

These forms have a nest-like quality against our human architecture. They could have grown organically or been formed by insects, birds or even alien beings. This provocation decentres our human narrative and turns our attention to the possibilities of unprescribed world-making.

“We are surrounded by many world-making projects, human and non human.... To see them in the shadow of the antropocene’s “anthropo”, we must re-orient our attention.” * 

*Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World, New Jersey, Princeton University Press, 2015, p21-22. 

An exploration of haptic experience with ordinary things. This dissertation defines and speculates what it means to practice Sensual-encounters within the context of multiple scenarios. It makes connections between sensuality and how we relate to the more-than-human world.

In the beginning, Lauren wrote –

“All that you touch You Change

All that you Change Changes you...”*

In this sense are we not all makers?

If living is making,

Let us revel in the consciousness of change,

Let us revel in the reciprocity of attuned touch,

Let us revel in sensual encounters,

Let us revel in the humility and wonderment of subjective experience,

Let us revel in the strangeness of the familiar.

*This devotion is inspired by the fictional religion of Earthseed written by Octavia Butler in Parable of the Sower, 1993, p.2.

“All that you touch You Change.

All that you Change Changes you.

The only lasting truth Is Change

God is Change” 

For enquiries, commissions or any information about our physical Degree Show next Spring, please email me at emma.marks@network.rca.ac.uk