There is a book that I am reading and thinking about at the moment that is interesting in a lot of ways. It isn’t a straight art book that I would normally pick up and read, it isn’t even about ceramics at all. It’s actually about phycology, in a way. The title is ‘evocative objects’ and it is edited by Sherry Turkle, who is a Professor at MIT in America that focuses her study on physcoanalysis. The book is really interesting to me as a maker because it talks about the importance of objects in our lives and not only the role they play in our lives but the interchange that happens between the two, almost like saying us and them. The chapter I’m writing for my PhD at the moment (but to be honest, am struggling with) is all about art and its power and the relationship that we have with the art and the objects that we have around us. In ‘evocative objects’ however, the emphasis is on what we bring to the objects, not so much what the objects give to us. Thinking about it now, everything is interpreted from our own personal perspective. What you see in an image or narrative will be different to what I see and understand. This is true when I think about the objects around me, which hold meaning for me. When my Nana and Pop died and the family were getting the house ready for selling, we all chose something that was special, something we would want to keep. I chose three things. One has fallen apart – Pops old leather work bag, one sits lonely on the shelf – a porcelain plate with an image of a Scottish dog on the front and one sits under my bedroom window, in need of repair – a 1940’s fan-shaped mirror. These three things possibly didn’t mean as much to everyone else as they did me. Why I chose them was because from my memory and feelings, they spoke to me. Now, when I sit on the end of my bed, which faces the mirror, I see my reflection and I also see Nana and Pops front door behind me. As you walked in to my grandparents’ house, the mirror was situated right in front of you, up high, at the end of the entrance hallway. When I sit down to put my socks on, I see the reflection of their door, I hear the ghost of the patio steps I’ve just walked up and I feel the breeze as Nana had the back door open in the kitchen. I can hear sounds coming from in front of me and her shuffle as she pushed the chair back from the kitchen table where she was seated, to come and greet us. The mirror holds all the faces that walked through that front door, and when I asked if it was one thing I could keep, I had thought that those faces would remain. It is just a mirror though and it only reflects back what is straight in front of it. For me, it holds more than that, for me it is an object that gives me a reason to remember, to keep those memories in my life.
