Jeremy Laing: Mutuality

Engaging material process as metaphor at the European Ceramic Work Centre (EKWC) residency in the Netherlands this summer, Jeremy Laing turned to mould-making as a way of exploring and disrupting the normative and hierarchical structures of the ideal form and its faithful replication.
 
Conceptually, the mould is a stand-in for the predetermined and determining conditions of social formations and identities—the structures we defer to and grow into, or divert from and expand, or, perhaps, embody in a more complex way that is both accepting and resisting, identifying and disidentifying. Indeed, rather than representing a lack or hard limit, the contours of a mould’s void provide the basis for innumerable elaborations. Like our lives and identities, shaping and being shaped in concurrent mutuality, Laing’s new work emerges from a circular pattern of citation and manifestation. No self, no other; no master, no replica.