In the Wake is an installation featuring over 100 ceramic vessels covering the floor of the entire Pottery Northwest Gallery. Rising and falling, these forms create an undulating wave with a path curving in the lull in between. A projected video glazes the forms with various figures and landscapes, creating a tension between the images and the waves. Viewers are invited to walk around and through the arrangement of forms, experiencing the sensations of being surrounded by mass and volume, as well as fragility and vulnerability.

Each form captures only part of the whole, creating the feeling of an echo of something that has already passed by. While navigating through the space, the viewer becomes a part of the wake, as well as a witness.  

From the balcony in the gallery, there is the opportunity of seeing the images whole, and the viewer becomes the observer instead of the participant. The dichotomy of a landscape projected upon the ocean. But the perspective gained from above is lost again when the viewer walks among the forms again. One cannot be a participant and observer simultaneously. Like buckets catching the rain, each contains a part, but not the entirety. This action is not futile however, because without the forms, nothing would be captured at all.

It occurs to me that time doesn’t exist at all, only various spaces interlocking… between which the living and the dead can move back and forth. And that only occasionally, in certain lights and atmospheric conditions, do we appear.

-Austerlitz

Special thanks goes to Jack Straw Productions Artist Assistance Program

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