Show Statement
This latest body of work builds on Kasten’s continued fascination with deconstructed vessel forms and introduces a new series of sculptural works called ‘Debris Poems’. Kasten was attracted to exploring the idea of a visual poem in her ceramic work by creating sculptural compositions from fragments and debris. A poem shears away everything but the most essential, evoking an emotional response through the sparest communication, constructing concepts and feelings into a hewn verbal form, without engaging narrative or logic. Working within the concept of visual poems, Kasten employs the ceramic medium to reflect on issues weighing on all of our minds, such as environmental collapse, social collapse, and inner and outer strife. Earth materials like clay and rocks provide such a perfect metaphor for exploring these ideas, as working in clay is about the search for balance between the natural tendencies of the materials and the craft that is brought about by contact with the human hand. Faced with monumental forces of nature and entropy, a sadness and feeling of futility is provoked with the notion that human hubris seeks to create lasting structure and survival in the face of decimation by forces outside of our control—earthquakes, tsunamis, volcanoes, tornadoes, violence and war. In Kasten’s latest group of sculptural vessels, she reveals emerging structures and constructs under stress, made by the human hand but fighting against collapsing infrastructure. They delve into the cracking apart, warping and erosion that are natural expressions of the material, and explore the beauty and sadness in building from wreckage, such as a little Robot made from scavenged shards of something former, with two little ears made from fossilized hornets’ nests. In the act of scavenging, building and creating the visual poems, Kasten is searching for beauty and harmony in the act of piecing back together what may seem like meaningless detritus of a collapsing world, reclaiming a tenuous and fragile feeling of meaning and purpose.