Susan Hobbs

Jeremy Laing’s recent exploration of ceramic casting and moulding is formulated as an analogy for being shaped and personified by inherited concepts like race, gender, and sexuality, and the ongoing material conditions of the world around us. Conceptually, the mould is a stand-in for the predetermined and determining conditions of social formations and identities, the structures we defer to, embody, grow into, and follow, or divert from and expand. Indeed, rather than represent a lack, or a hard limit, the contours of a mould’s void form the basis for new elaborations. Through queer social and material encounter, a moulds emptiness offers space for a new presence, iteration rather than precise replication.

Engaging material process as metaphor, at the European Ceramic Workcentre (EKWC) residency, in the Netherlands, this summer, Laing, turned to mould-making to subvert its normative, dualistic hierarchy, centred as it is around the positive and the negative, the cast and the casted, the ideal form and its faithful replication. Proposed, instead, is a pattern of cyclicality, shaping and being shaped in concurrent mutuality. No self, no other; no master, no replica.