Glazed ceramics, cob

☁☁☁☁song~xian☁☁☁☁ is an installation of eight glazed ceramic sculptures, interspersed throughout the gallery, each held aloft by mud. The form of each sculpture is inspired by the microorganisms that inhabit the pond of the artist’s family home in Edinburgh. Through partnership with a microbiologist working with samples of the pond, microscopic video and imagery has been generated of these life-forms, invisible to the naked eye. Song has then elaborated and reimagined them through the sculptural process, creating a series of entangled forms adorned with the symbols and iconography that are part of the artist’s broader visual language. These coalesce with faces, limbs and orifices, with each body becoming a site of possibility for multiplication, growth and new cycles of life.

The sculptures on view take influence from the Daoist tradition of kim sin, which translates from the Hokkien Chinese dialect as ‘golden body’ and refers to statues of deities often carved from wood that are gilded or painted to resemble gold. The images are considered to be spiritual presences, embodying a specific deity to which respects are paid as part of daily rituals in both temples and in homes. In Song’s exhibition, the ceramics stand as deities from the garden pond. In their sculpted form, they are at rest, inviting devotion, lying dormant before a future awakening.

Each sculpture sits atop a muddy construction. Rich in clay, this mud has a material ancestry shared with the ceramics it supports, but is in a different phase of transformation from soft to hard, solid to liquid, and back again. These constructions are loosely influenced by an illustration of Chinese vases from a 19th Century French illustrated encyclopaedia of the world history of costume, replete with exoticised stereotypes of other cultures seen from a Western perspective and colonial gaze. The shape of an ornamental ceramic vase from China has been reclaimed and returned to mud, transformed from a static, awkward textbook, into the domain of the living and life-sustaining. Over the course of the exhibition they will dry and harden, but retain the potential of returning to a malleable, soft, sticky state. In providing tall beds for Song’s pond deities, they also recall the fertile soil beds of the ecosystems that support the micro-organic life from which the statues have spawned.

Throughout Song’s elevation of the overlooked and microscopic into the sculpted, fantastical and corporeal, is a desire to acknowledge the entanglements with all other forms, living and not, which sustain us all.  Across the artist’s practice is an interest in the care and co-existence that underpins interspecies dependency, highlighting and connecting with that which is beyond the Self. Rooted in narratives of resilience, growth, survival and change, the artist’s work finds analogies for the immigrant experience. It envisions new ways of expressing identity by exploring ancestral journeys through speculative world-building. Song’s work encompasses and celebrates a multiplicity of perspectives, collapsing the boundaries between the microscopic and cosmic, human and non-human, the familiar and the other.