Handstone Vessels
This body of work explores themes of communication, personal relationships and exchange between self and other. In Stanton's work these themes are deeply connected to the act of making.
These intimately handmade objects are tactile memories of their own making and at times personifications. Hands are used as sculptural tools, holding the clay while acting as its mould. Once fired the works are sanded until they feel like they want to be held -as comfort objects this is their functionality.
Making Conversations
This series of works explores the importance of discourse and the positions of speaker/writer and addressee/listener in the formation of relationships with the other, and in consequently developing an identity in relation to the other. Drawing from personal conversations and relationships, the work asserts the value of dialogue with the other but equally explores the difficulty of words, of making conversation, and of truly relating to the other.
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This body of work resulted in a final installation featuring works that focused on personal conversation, or rather attempts at conversation. These works highlight the paired and interchanging roles of speaker and listener, I and you. If an identity as I is defined by being a speaker, then do we lose our own identity in the absence of an other? The listener can be seen as giving another a voice and allowing another to have an identity.
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The mug is used as a familiar, personal object associated with conversations and with comfort. Using a slip casting method these mugs were remade from a personal mug collection, but altered. Closed, empty, broken, connected or missing essential parts (a handle), the mugs can be seen as personifications. The alterations that remove the mugs’ function as drinking vessels lessen their identity as mugs. They reflect the difficulties of making meaningful conversation and the lack of identity one has without this exchange.
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These alterations also highlight the other function of objects: as simply something to hold onto. This is emphasised even more in the handles and The Spaces Between, porcelain objects cast between the hands of two people, which make the space itself an object, something to hold onto. Like comfort objects, these mugs and porcelain forms suggest the presence of people and words while also emphasising their absence.