Rosie Elizabeth Pebbles Stonham
About
Following a BA in Product Design at Central Saint Martins, I designed for high-end homeware brands including for The Conran Shop before starting at the RCA. I had almost no previous experience with ceramics two years ago, and the last time I had touched clay was at school. Since coming to Ceramics and Glass I have been exploring a conceptual approach to creating functional objects. I use digital and hand-made techniques to explore personal narratives, mental health and the idea of embodiment. This installation features blown glass and 3D-printed ceramics, exploring a fantasy of the inside of the body, celebrating the imagined colours and surfaces within us which generate consciousness.
With huge thanks to -
The Worshipful Company of Grocers
The Eaton Fund
The Thomas Arno Fund, The Haberdasher's Company
& Sarah Scampton
Statement
Functional objects speak of those who use them and those who create them. Objects hold narratives,
flesh holds experience, my brain holds scars. I wonder at the processing power of human tissue and
the consciousness it generates. My works are an allegory; made up of layers of matter formed together
- holistic - to create something functional within society, as our flesh forms us, and governs our
functions within society. They are more than the sum of their parts but also fundamentally formed of
what they are, matter; matter organised into legible functional objects – jugs, bowls & vases, relics of
human existence. I, like thousands before me, make Ceramics and Glass.
3D printing processes something immaterial into material, similar to perception and digestion which
process the material into something immaterial, thought. Thousands of simultaneous bio-chemical
reactions, the culmination of which somehow organise into legible thought – the experience of
consciousness. Computer code is translated like DNA through a robotic arm describing hundreds of l
ayers of fragile clay, reflecting the fallible surfaces and folds of carbon atoms in the body. Our brains
govern our relationship with the world in ways we are never fully in control of, I am no more in charge of
my mind than I am the peristaltic waves which pass through my gut. I am my body.
I'm Still Processing It - Installation
The Brain — is wider than the Sky —
For — put them side by side —
The one the other will contain
With ease — and You — beside —
Emily Dickinson, Excerpt - 1862
This installation is a fantasy exploration of human flesh and it's role in processing the outside world. I have created 3D-printed pots depicting the intestines as a metaphor for perception. The brain and the gut are inexorably connected. Your brain is also the seat of 'you' (whatever that is). In this installation the pots representing our embodied flesh are depicted on surgical trollies and pedestals to represent the two ways we relate to our minds and bodies. One is interventional, surgical and critical; we see our brains as something to be controlled and pathologised. The other is reverential, we see our minds as superior to nature, and consider the human brain to be the most advanced and respected thing in existence. These pots hold many scars and wear their failures and errors with pride, describing how they are fallible, just as the flesh which tethers us to existence is.
Medium: Installation - Ceramics, Glass, Surgical Trollies
Final Images
Glass
Blown glass made using newspaper moulds
Behind the Scenes
These images show some of the work which goes on behind the scenes during the making process and visual research gained from the many hours I spent experimenting with the 3D-printing making process.
In the Digital Sphere
My objects have a metaphysical life in the digital sphere before they are downloaded and formed into objects, much as the ideas in your head often exist without words. The objects are translated through 3D-printing but before that they are sublime, etherial and scale-less, with never ending possible variations of size shape and colour.
Drawing and VR Drawing
I use drawing at many phases of the process for making work. Here you see drawings made on my phone, on the page and in VR. This pot was drawn directly in VR, using one continuous line and then converted into a 3D-printed pot, solidifying permanently my gestures.