Jonah
Dichter

My practice is organized around ceramic objects and the questions they raise: about labor, about the body's involvement in making, about what happens when a familiar object is translated into a slow and resistant material.

Some pieces begin with culturally loaded objects. The brick builds cities and is thrown through windows. The baseball is handheld, throwable, sport and weapon at once. Making these in clay doesn't neutralize them. It adds another layer: the labor of construction, the fragility of fired stoneware, the glaze that signals completion. A glazed brick is a brick that has been told it's art. Whether that claim holds is the work's question.

The functional work asks related questions. A glazed stoneware vessel carries its making on its surface: the ridges where hands moved, the color variations that record temperature and chemistry, the line where a finger moved through wet slip and left its trace. I think of these as biographical objects, not designed so much as accumulated, each one shaped by conditions that cannot be exactly repeated.

I'm also interested in ceramic failure: objects dropped, crushed, partially destroyed. These aren't accidents to be hidden. A broken pot contains the intact pot; the shards record the moment of impact. Entropy is not the opposite of making. It is another kind of making, one the original object was always moving toward.