Saffron Albert Summerfield

‘Petrified Suckers’ are a series of ceramic sculptures whose origins belong to an unknown, disguised or forgotten point in time, where, through rapid advancements in technology, mass-produced objects have quickly become outdated at an astonishing pace, surpassing the human capacity for understanding and even documentation.

The memory of their function is stripped immediately after their creation, and they are left to remain as lifeless riddles for millions of years into the future. They have become misunderstood victims of malicious manufacture.

I’m interested in objects and their potential journey to redundancy, becoming obsolete and removed from their original function, like a signpost or fossil from a time when our primary interaction was with tangible form. The importance of using ceramic material lies within its long historical links to humankind: it evolved as one of the earliest mediums for sculpting utilitarian vessels…our first steps towards generating what is now a very human-made world.

The sculptures seek to evoke a sense of nostalgia for the tactile, the organic and the imperfect. By incorporating discarded mechanical objects and traditional craftsmanship (hand-building and mould-making techniques) I aim to highlight the tension between progress, loss, and preservation. 

The work provokes an aliveness to, and familiarity with, the organic, human form and the mechanical. However there also lurks the ‘threat horizon’ of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, in which the digital has begun to merge with biological and carbon entities, posing the unsettling emergence of the surreal and uncanny transmutations surrounding the alien logic of AI.'