Icons
Ceramics, 2025
In Icons, extended conversations with ChatGPT are translated into simplified ceramic forms that echo the visual language of digital interface symbols. Each icon holds the residue of a longer dialogue, one that cannot be fully captured in its final form. By compressing these exchanges into symbolic, tangible objects, I do not resolve their complexity but suspend it. What remains is an invitation to consider what is gained, lost, or altered when meaning circulates through artificial intelligence, reduced to symbols that can be repeated, recognised, and shared.
Icons also share something with bureaucratic language: both flatten complex relationships into concise representations that allow systems to classify, process, and move on. What gets lost in that translation? Which details become invisible? The work uses this tension as both a subject of inquiry and a method of making. The conversations are not simply a means of generating ideas or images. They have become a space in which to linger with questions and follow unexpected associations. Beginning with cobalt, the dialogue moves across early ceramic technologies, industrialisation, energy systems, and contemporary computational infrastructures. Connections emerge between material histories and technological developments, sometimes revealing relationships I had not initially anticipated. The resulting ceramic forms give physical shape to fragments of these exchanges, while acknowledging that no single object can contain the full conversation. There is an intentional tension in their form. The icons resemble the clean, efficient, and optimised symbols of contemporary digital interfaces, yet they are slow objects, shaped by hand and fired over time. Their surfaces resist the uniformity and immediacy associated with digital imagery, interrupting the velocity of image circulation and asking for a different kind of attention.
Drawing on Hito Steyerl's examination of how images can obscure the conditions of their own production, Icons considers what happens when an image is returned to its material conditions. By embedding digital language in clay, the work gives weight and duration to forms that might otherwise appear immaterial. The ceramic objects point beyond their simplified surfaces to the mineral extraction, human labour, energy consumption, and computational infrastructure that make contemporary digital communication possible. Rather than attempting to represent these relationships in their entirety, the icons hold fragments of a dialogue that continues beyond the object. They leave open questions of what is represented, what is omitted, and what a system is permitted to leave behind.
Purchase
Icons is available through the Alberta Craft Council.
