Brent Pafford
Brent Pafford Ceramics
POPJCTs are my most recent body of work and investigate materiality in objects and identity. From disparate materials, contrary textures, and incompatible forms, POPJCTs are intended to manifest harmonious but revealing interactions. These interactions are of the individual with culture, and evoke the ephemerality, disposability, function, utility, value, and experiential worth found and lost in individuality. In developing this body of work, I found that I could create objects that solicit tactile interaction and satisfy physical touch, and at the same time elicit questioning and engender uncertainty. These experiences are contingent upon interaction between the object and the individual: they reject norms of instantaneous consumption consumption and immediate disposability, and expect contemplation and connectivity. They make use of the everyday – shapes that are familiar and register as practical – while undermining that comfort with inflected forms, unexpected surfaces, and insecure grasps. Where a maker’s mark had always been, a sheen of glitter now flows. As the presence of these revealing interactions has become more evident to me, I am becoming more attuned to the role of space in the interactions POPJCTs embody – the environment in which one’s life and moment intersect with an object in large part determines the potency of the interaction, and expressivity of the object. The next stage of my work is to develop spaces that project POPJCTs into sculpted, occupiable zones which permit encompassing intersection and interaction.
