Clay jewellery exhibition opens at NCA

LAHORE
‘Earth, body and cycle’, a solo exhibition of clay jewellery by Shazia Mirza, opened at Zahoor-Ul-Akhlaq Gallery, NCA on Thursday.
The exhibition was inaugurated by Muhammad Arshad, finance adviser, and it is based on Shazia’s work as an A-I-R to Fuping Pottery Art Village in China in August 2015.
The artist while describing the details of her work said: “Today’s show is based on work that I did there (in China). Earth holds archaeological and physical residue of millions of lives lived before us, yet it is emotionally difficult to imagine our ultimate contact with it when the time comes. This work was initially conceived last month during an artist residency in Fuping, China, where I chose to work with clay from Xian region, similar to the one used to make Terra Cotta Warriors”.
The contextual value of this material and my perception of Chinese way of life resulted in this body of work. To me, fabricating wonders out of tiny multiples is “China”; Silks, Imperial Robes, Terracotta Warriors, Beijing city itself, Ai Wei Wei’s sunflowers or Nike, she explained.
“During residency, I worked on two different bodies of work, one of which is presented here. These objects are designs for limited mass production. Eight of my designs from this collection are being produced in Fuping, China for local tourist market. My end-of-residency solo is currently displayed in the Scandinavian Museum at FULE Ceramics Arts Museums, Fuping. A special thanks to I Chi Hsu, Kuo Hong Mei, Yang Xiao Xue, Rehan Rizvi and Kulsoom Mehmood for their loving support and help. For first body of work I press-molded thousands of tiny stoneware discs of different profiles and strung them in different sequences to create single-string necklaces. The idea was to create a fine body piece that vibrated a bit with body movement,” Shazia Mirza. Using local clay is really important for me in any new place, for I see earth/clay as a time machine of TGV quality. It takes you back in time and contextualizes your existence as mere one out of million similar beings (real De ja vu?). Holding a clay object in your hand guarantees a physical contact with multitude of minerals and metals, which have lived inside millions of biological and botanical life forms (that fed on each other ),absorbed their dead bodies and created new lives again, she said.
The artist believes that clay of warm colour is the only material that carries traces and histories from distance past.
If particles could somehow communicate, I think every gram of clay could be an epic starting right from the big bang!, she said and added: “I used local Xian clay for my neck strings, probably the same that was used to make terracotta warriors army”.
The second body of work is a small part of a bigger project that I am working on. I create hollow forms by following simple mathematical formulae dictating how many openings, decorative angles or separate cavities a certain hollow form must have. Strictly following the formulae allows me to create new forms without any inspiration from existing objects. I devise different formulae by combining three variables through a tri-axial system. My show opened in the Scandinavian museum on September 3. Eight of my designs are to be mass-produced in Fuping facility during 2015-16 for local tourist market, she concluded.