The Ceramics of Tajul Shuhaizam Said

Abstract

After years of doing ceramics, which include the standard pieces of pottery with a bulbous body, a handle, a spout, incised, then glazed, fired and finally exhibited, I beginning to understand that there should be more than one way to appreciate forms. A teapot, or instance, is supposed to contain hot water into which to drop a tea bag: the form and function way of looking at things. Now, I see form as something separate from function: form as form, whose functions are unclear. I would rather insist that the function is purely visual. The object stands by itself, embodying its own objectness, celebrating its own uniqueness, inviting any number of interpretations as to what it is. Using sponge cut into shape, and then dipped in liquidized 'eco clay', I experiments with a variety of bulging forms that resemble things in nature: twisted trunk, deformed rock, petrified embryo, encrusted mushrooms, and enlarged human organ. When the viewer confers such resemblances, I have been lured into participating with nature, just as I have done, prior to, or as I create, these bulges and humps. Whatever narratives that follow henceforth enrich the viewer's appreciation of a form as a thing-in-itself, one in which ideas begat other ideas, familiar as well as unfamiliar ones, the ordinary and the sublime weaving themselves as part of the subtext, the implicit message. I wants to see whether this is one way to expand the boundaries of what is acceptable in an art I has been so long tamed in recognizable shapes, glazed, smooth, and when held on a pedestal, untouchable.