The Seventh Heterotopias, 2024
Yuko Fukuba Johnsson is a practicing ceramic artist based in Hong Kong, under the theme of Ceramics as Memory Container.
For her, memory means a combination of facts, including time and place, together with qualia, subjective experiences with the senses. She is fascinated by ceramics as a medium of “containment” with the long human history that people have been making and using ceramics not only for practical use but also symbolically to “contain” something within to materialise the invisible, like beliefs and wishes.
The flexible or fragile clay body and mixed minerals change its properties drastically into solid and permanent once it is fired. The long-making process gives her enough time to recollect the moment she is putting into the work. Ceramics is an accurate medium for her to create containers for ephemeral memories and future histories, coalescing her qualia into them to give the invisible a permanent form to preserve them.
The flexible or fragile clay body and mixed minerals change its properties drastically into solid and permanent once it is fired. The long-making process gives her enough time to recollect the moment she is putting into the work. Ceramics is an accurate medium for her to create containers for ephemeral memories and future histories, coalescing her qualia into them to give the invisible a permanent form to preserve them.