Jahouli: (IN)timacy

I was struggling to find my place in the project, needing to move forward from the porcelain and feeling like there was a danger of just reworking the same imagery over and over; there is a limit to what i can do with the porcelain and although I am very interested in depicting larger bones through porcelain, it becomes increasingly hard to work with, the bigger the pieces get. I was overthinking things and I remembered that thinking through my hands is often more effective for me than planning things, because being too caught up in my head means that I often plan things that are unrealistic and are more in line with a fantasy of the kind of work I want to see than the reality of what I actually enjoy making. So with this in mind I bought a bag of crank, knowing that soft materials suit me best and that I want there to be natural materials in this work, not artificial ones. This has birthed a whole new insight into the process of whatever this project is becoming. My thoughts are now in sensations and visualisations; referring to our organs in a way that is more intuitive, and based in a kind of connection that goes beyond anatomically correct images. I was also thinking about seed pods, fertility, genitalia. The phallic shape is really interesting to me right now, with its strong presence in so many fertility sculptures, particularly African ones, which I grew up around. My thinking is that I am creating some kind of 'body of work' as in- a body, handmade. Intuition and sensation are the most important things for me in creating these sculptures.