Nicole De Brabandere

This series of objects renders the felt memory of holding and using familiar objects with the weight and plasticity of clay. Through the process of rendering the memory of use out of clay, one quickly realizes that specific objects cannot be isolated from the context of the lived ecology or inhabited tendencies of perception – the past folds into the present in new ways as the form of familiar objects become very different as they emulate remembered feeling. Rendering the feeling of a damp piece of laundry hanging from the fingertips can be condensed into a block with the addition of two extensions of pinched clay; to render the feeling of holding an umbrella against the wind requires adding a mass of clay to one side to throw the weight of its handle off center; the dynamic force required to use a screwdriver requires a spiraled distribution of the clay form to activate friction against the surface of the table that mimics the rotational counter-force.