Vanishing

In the 2019 book, Trick Mirror by Jia Tolentino, she references Simone Weil and the desire to vanish: 

“The word “decreation” is Weil’s term for the process of moving toward a love so unadulterated that it makes you leave yourself behind. “Perfect joy excludes even the very feeling of joy,” she writes. “For in the soul filled by the object no corner is left for saying ‘I.’ ” She dreams of vanishing, but this fantasy reinscribes the dazzling force and vision of her intellectual presence. It’s a “profoundly tricky spiritual fact,” Carson writes, describing Weil’s quandary. “I cannot go towards God in love without bringing myself along.” Being a writer compounds the dilemma: to articulate the desire to vanish is to reiterate the self.“

In relation to this paradoxical articulation of the desire to vanish, I have created multiple hand-built and wheel-thrown sculptures. They are decorated in cheesecloth, which is covered in black underglaze. During the kiln firing the cheesecloth burns out, or vanishes, while the record of this action in underglaze is left on the surface.