Lexical Items
Variously glazed earthenware, mid-fire, and stoneware ceramics; paint. 2021-2022.
Installation of 429 pieces (plus shelving)
In Lexical Items linguistics and materiality converge, exploring concepts of interconnectedness and the relationship between individual parts and a greater whole. This installation consists of several hundred ceramic sculptures displayed on individual shelves across the gallery walls. Each individual piece performs as a ‘lexical item’, a basic abstract unit of meaning, a set of forms taken by a single root word. Here the root word is the material – clay – and its variations created through an intuitive process of hand-forming and experimental glaze treatments.
In this work Willcox’s fascination with written and spoken language, and the physical experience of matter, come together in the material of clay. Clay and language share a special historical and cultural relationship: it was clay, soft and malleable, that formed the first substrates into which the earliest forms of writing were embedded. For Willcox, this medium has enabled exploration of the possibilities of transposing ideas from linguistic theory onto a study of materiality, and the use of material to explore language. Language, itself a living, evolving form, is mirrored by theories of vibrant materiality and its emphasis on the liveliness of objects and the ever-changing nature of the material world.
The forms in this installation have evolved from a process-based studio practice and have their origins in Willcox’s personal glaze library, where simple clay shapes formed within a squeezed palm are used as substrates for glaze testing. Lexical Items draws from this practice and reconsiders these small forms as sculptures in their own right, incorporating a greater range of forms of varying complexity. In the process of creating these diminutive sculptures Willcox makes use of remembered and imagined images, collected objects and textures, often whatever is at hand in the studio, engaging in an intuitive making process akin to automatic writing, where one thought or form tumbles out after another, each influenced by what has gone before it, a random idea that pops up out of nowhere, an interruption, a tea break, a different mood.
Whilst distinct in character and able to be read and interpreted individually, each object both changes and is changed by the presence of others, inviting alternate readings between the individual and the mass. Simultaneously intimate and overwhelming, together they form a lexicon of material possibilities.
March 2022