Archaeologic Vases (series 3 & 4)

Archaeological conservators repair broke artefacts with special techniques guided by their ethical sensibilities. For example, they might use transparent and reversible glues that are invisible to the naked eye, but become visible under ultraviolet light. The purpose is to represent their intervention honestly, and reversibly if needed, to interested colleagues and future researchers. Historically conservators have shifted their approaches to prior repairs. For example, glues and staples, were once deemed aesthetically objectionable and were removed in perplexing attempts to present ceramic objects as originally made. Nowadays, contemporary conservators tend to preserve such features as visual evidence of the human use and wear that objects experience. Archaeologic uses this context to present a speculative scenario for an ultra-low energy society; a scenario in which the material value of ceramics are appropriately valued in terms of the intense power need to fire and harden clay and glaze. Just as with traditional Japanese ceramic repair known as kintsugi, in this scenario cracks, fissures and the episodic life of shards are not rejected or hidden, but valorised as points of cultural compression. For kintsugi, this cultural compression indicates a concern for a way of life contingent to the experience of earthquakes and the perception of concussive forces shared by broken and repaired ceramics. In Archaeologic the crack is presented as illuminated warning for an imminent, existential environmental threat. The rebinding of shards is presented as concern for the repair of the social and material cultures required to manage this threat.