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As I travel along familiar routes, I often find myself observing subtle changes in my surroundings. I see this as a source of enjoyment in day to day life. In life, many behaviors and natural processes are cyclical, much like how seasonal changes rein all living things into a cycle of habitual repetition. I find myself in such a cycle as well, a cycle of endless repetitions which I am powerless to break free from. Eventually, I ended up being addicted to movement and unable to break away from the fixed pattern of doing the same things, watching the same movie, and looping the same songs, time and again. This mode of life prompted me to seek the subtle variations in daily life and break out of the trappings of this repetitive cycle.
When I notice such subtle variations, I would first capture them through the making of photography. However, photography only manages to capture how my objects look, and fail to record my musings on them. To give my thoughts concrete form, I embody them through pottery clay, a material that can be preserved for millennia. This way, my fleeting thoughts are made concrete and permanent.
Through the writing of this creative discourse, I aim to discuss my conversion of repetitive subtle variations in day to day life into pottery art. These variations were observed during my time in my Master’s Program, and the scope was limited to occurrences in nature that spoke to me. The first chapter is the Introduction in which I will discuss the background and processes leading to this thesis as well as natural phenomena I had previously observed before describing the objective, scope, and methodology of the project. The second chapter is titled A Fleeting Moment, Repetition, and Eternity. It encompasses the inspiration I derived from subtle variations in daily life that had motivated me to delve deeper into the whys and wherefores, and also explores the effects that certain prominent objects have on me. The profound personal meaning behind repetitive patterns as well as my approaches toward beautification will also be discussed in this chapter. In the third chapter, Capture and Preserve - Cycles and Remnants, I discuss my choice of pottery clay as a medium for capturing and preserving my fleeting thoughts and musings through the use of various pottery techniques, and how they culminated in the creation of my Cycles and Remnants pottery collections. The fourth chapter, Subtleties and Variations, encompasses the discussion and analyses of three collections of works that are manifestations of my thoughts on the subtle variations in everyday life--the Remains collection and Uniform Ripples, the Leptocoris Augur collection, and the Invisible Road collection. The fifth chapter is my conclusion. Having discussed the use of repetitions in nature as subject matter for pottery art creations that aim to capture and preserve fleeting memories, I share my conclusion and suggestions for further exploring the relationship between fleeting moments and eternity.
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