The Still Series
Iris Wu
Advisor: Yuliya Parshina-Kottas
Rooted in analog materiality, the series questions the emotional and spatial relationship between handmade mediums and technology.
Project Description
In a fast world, how do we slow?
The Still Series is a collection of ceramic lamps that explores the quiet tension between light and form, stillness.
Each lamp in The Still Series is handcrafted from clay, an analog material that inherently requires slowness and patience.
The process begins with hand-building and shaping, followed by air-drying over a period of one to two weeks—depending on the form’s thickness and humidity.
In a tech-saturated society, where interaction often means speed, responsiveness, and data, I turned instead to clay—a medium that requires slowness, care, and presence. This project does not reject technology, but resists its pace.
The Still Series is an analog response to a digital world: lamps that do not compute, but accompany; objects that are not interactive, but present.
In a world where things are designed to respond, how do we understand the value of things that remain silent?
Technical Details
Each lamp in The Still Series is handcrafted from clay, an analog material that inherently requires slowness and patience.
The process begins with hand-building and shaping, followed by air-drying over a period of one to two weeks—depending on the form’s thickness and humidity.
Once bone-dry, the pieces are bisque fired, glazed, and fired again at high temperatures.
This time-intensive cycle—fragile, unpredictable, and irreducible—has profoundly trained my patience and deepened my respect for the material’s rhythm.