06-10-22 | Sketching The Clay Family

I sought to begin experimenting with clay, a material I trialled briefly earlier this year and hoped at the time to revisit in a more meaningful way. It was the work of Alice Rekab, whose use of dual colours sparked the idea of representing a family of objects in red and grey clay. So I began sketching the family. First ‘Mother’, then ‘Father’, followed by a series of five ‘Children’, each at different stages of growth development. I wanted to express certain characteristics of each via shape, hollowing-out, perforation, size. These felt to me to be as good as any other way of distinguishing one from the other, but also a tool for making connections between each. Then of course, as I had planned from the beginning, this series would make use of red and grey to determine a mixed race parentage: ‘Mother’ in red, ‘Father’ in grey, and the ‘Children’ in a combination of the two.

1. Pages from ‘Major Project’ sketchbook, Amanni Hassan Hollands, 2022