Portfolio

As I continued storyboarding and learning of my island, my work transformed into an act of preservation.  To learn from the greats, I began to try and imitate the lines and form of characters from the wooden boards onto my wheel-thrown vessels.  Due to the difference in mediums and shape of the canvas I created, other than the stories, not everything remained the same.  And as time passed, the stories even became more detailed.

 

Current Works and Stories:

I have always loved ceramics.  Since the age of 13.  What made me fall more in love with it though was its archeological significance.  It is the oldest record of human existence that we have today.  Examples like the rosetta stone, Native American pottery, petroglyphs.   It blew my mind.  To think that maybe, just maybe one day, a hundred or a thousand years from now, someone may find a piece of me in the ground.   Preserved in a shard of ceramics that I made during my life and that the person who found me could have the same magical feeling I get when I look at ceramics in a museum.  

The incomprehensible and beautiful idea that we as human beings, in every lifetime, share the same journey of trying to make something of ourselves with our short time on Earth.  

I think a heavy piece of that possibility is why I continue to storyboard in ceramics.  I imagine a distant Palauan hundreds of years from now finding a piece of themself.  When the island is underwater, and the wooden boards are slowly decomposing, they will find us within this faded pottery.  Perhaps inspired to make a new one from it.  I happen to be living today for that possible future.  My grandmother happened to live then for this possible present.

 

 

There is a saying in Palauan that my dear friend Souang taught me, “ Mengurs a Rasech.” Which means “The blood is pulling you.”  My blood pulls me to preserve not only myself, but my people.  Our history, our stories, our culture.  I will forever choose to remind my people of our strength, our resilience.  To remind them that there is an indestructible bridge that connects us.  To our earliest stories of creation.  To our Gods: the Earth and the Ocean.  To the other living beings sharing our sea and land.