Celadon

A full moon behind a sheet of thin silk.

This one began with materials that seem to sit between solid and liquid: particles held in suspension, stone that might be moving too slowly to notice. Green cools into white the way light does through reeded glass onto concrete and steel.

Lettuce stands crisp and watery in glasshouse steam, with pepper cutting across it. Chalk and clay give a dry mineral edge, like crushed stone still holding the cool of morning. Elemi resin lifts it, then copaiba balsam and tonka bean absolute smooth everything into a pale glaze that musk keeps soft rather than sharp.

Powder held in a sunbeam, with the hum of air conditioning somewhere behind.

Clara Weale makes Early Modern by hand in Glasgow, Scotland, in batches small enough to count. The approach is playful.

The work is openly concerned with materiality. Materials are named for what they physically are rather than dressed up, and each release keeps paring itself back toward its most gestural form.

What she is after is recognition without a source, the sense of having smelled something before without being able to say where.