Function often rests on what is not there. The space formed in the handle of a hot coffee cup allows us to hold it. Many small holes in a line allow us to rip a stamp out of its book. We often miss the importance of space, because we don’t see it. The built environment,from ceramics to interior design to architecture, is often concerned with adding material. We will explore the hole as a metaphor for the importance of empty space. This studio will explore the potential of complex systems of apertures, holes, and perforations to perform beyond the purely decorative. The course will engage the specifics of ceramic material and process to explore the engagement of the aesthetic and the functional. From the mug handle to a simple window, openings provide an entry point, physical or poetic, for human habitation and exchange. When understood as multiples, this negotiation of material ,space and natural forces offers many opportunities in our relationship with both object and space. Our inquiry will range in scale from the use of porous clay bodies to that of full-scale apertures. We will create new materials, new tools and new processes. Through an investigation of historic traditions and fabrication techniques and the design opportunities afforded by new production and fabrication technologies, we will locate the potential of hybridizing the analog and digital to produce a performance skin of exchange. The studio’s prototypical installations will be interfacing with the Backlot on the San Francisco campus.

Project Brief: The transformation of the chain link fence from property boundary to a threshold space of exchange.

Format: We will make extensive use of both CCA’s Oakland ceramics studios and San Francisco’s shop and rapid proto-typing facilities. Emphasis will be placed on exploring techniques such as slip cast and 3D analog printing that inherently engage the notion of multiples and aggregation. Digital and analog modeling and fabrication will be used to produce full-scale 3D vertical surfaces. The immediacy of ceramic exploration will allow us topoetics of a tactile material experience of material performance skins.

The prototypical installations for exCHAINge will directly respond to the SITE of cca’s Backlot chain link fence through the MATERIAL of ceramics. Through the lens of ceramics, this includes the geologic beginnings and the material science of clay/ceramics/glaze, informed through student research presentations and a lecture/guidance from Christine Metzger, CCA’s first tenure-track assistant professor of Earth and environmental science. In class, students will continue to explore the material through demonstrations on heat work, chemical transitions, vitrification levels, and time in respect to archival potential. We will also look at ceramics through the lens of Anthropology in order to connect the material with the human factor. Rosemary Joyce, Professor of Anthropology, University of California, Berkeley, will lecture on her research, which is concerned with questions about the ways people employ things in actively negotiating their place in society, the lives and itineraries of objects, and the re-framing of human engagement with the world in terms of materiality. By leveraging ceramics from both geologic and anthropological angles, students will be able to experiment with prototypical elements that explore material systems and the human factor.