CHRISTOPHER ST. JOHN

On the Openings in My Ceramic Animals

With my hands opened to you, the audience, I say that the openings in my ceramic sculptures represents death. It is an acknowledgement of mortality, in the capacity that I have as a being of this world, living an intentional life, to you, the audience, intelliglble, intelligent, but also reclaimed to this present moment in the creative act. I know nothing. 

I feel an extraordinary amount of guilt being able to do what I do. I feel like I waste time, and I have no time to waste. I feel like a tourist in the Hieronymus Bosch hotel, the concierge says take a seat, hit a deer, have the daemon speak through you in many flattering tongues. The hole in my forms persists, and I do not have a good answer as to why it needs to be there. I may not ever have a better answer than what the forms ask of me, which is to be flawed and open in a space between my ignorance, my desire to do good, and what others may find for themselves

This work in a time of transition is an admission that I feel lost in this time, and that I do not know what my art is supposed to be teaching, let alone speaking for others. I am required by that voice to present, to be present, to create and to exercise a will toward formation and to let that light and voice operate through that will and only at the last through me. Things happen, and I know nothing.

In this arrival at a will toward formation, this exhibition,

I reflect on loss again.

Reflecting on mortality and the character of life as a maquette, never finished,

On the loss of a deer I hit in July.

It happened in this place, where an immensity of concrete engineering and LED lights bisects the forests.

It happened here where the highway bottoms out before its long climb into the passes.

It happened on this road in West Virginia where I saw legs and guts torqued in space behind my silver rabbit speeding in the night.

In this place where an animal I revere was struck in an idiotic meeting of industrial expediency, fatigue, and naive trust…

I believe in the art object as a generator for life, the ultimate redemptive act, beauty immortalizing and capturing, 

But I am wise enough to know that it is never more than an effigy, a likeness, lifelike, 

In the sense of a boli object capturing

Nyama, lifeforce,

For the rest of us,

Magic,

Reclaiming loss and openly singing the power of life to shape our days and nights. 

I know nothing.