| Like Ancient Pots spilled from a drowning ship, tube sponges bulge eerily... is a response to an image of underwater tube sponges found in National Geographic magazine. The image was accompanied by a descriptive text which compared the tube sponges with “ancient pots spilled from a drowned ship”.
Acting as a reference to lived experience (eg. having seen ancient pots in a museum) this metaphor informed my perceptions of the sponges and influenced the full-scale model, which I produced from the image. Placed in a dark and intimate room and illuminated with a light, which simulated moving water, the sponges could be viewed and contemplated from a bench in the corner of the room.
Two portholes in the front of the bench allowed the viewer to see the layer of “spilled ancient pots” which lay ‘below’ the room. The bench itself, thereby, acted as a metaphor for the structure of language on which we depend to describe the unknown or the inaccessible, worlds which seduce us with their unfamiliarity.
"…in Like Ancient Pots…we are literally and figuratively “submerged” between realities produced by language and images." Barbara Fischer
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