Festen, Handy-cam the soundscape of the cut and recording from one scene to another causing nostalgia. The crowded to the more calm. Reminds me of my grandma recording our home videos and the way it would cut from being for example at the zoo to being home in the living room with my family and the static and muffled sounds.

The works of Richard Shaw at first glance seem quite literal and to not allow imagination. What I find interesting is the scene of the classic still life in clay form and recreating a scene that becomes somewhat cinematic in its solid form.

"The human aspect of the still life or assemblage acts as a person memorializing their identity using the objects from their personal narrative. The narrative itself reveals their tastes, pastimes, intellectual pursuits, sins, habits good and bad, obsessions, etc."
Richard Shaw

This ties into my prior research on objects and the significance they have on forming us as people and what they can represent and what narratives they translate. They can also cause memory and taking us back to a moment in time. This state of nostalgia and the action of it really fascinates me.
There are of course positive memories as there are negative ones that can be triggered or associated with objects.

"In the world of contemporary ceramics, Richard Shaw is the master of trompe-l’oeil sculpture. He has developed an astonishing array of techniques, including perfectly cast porcelain objects and overglaze transfer decals. By combining the commonplace with the whimsical, the humorous with the mundane, Shaw captures the poetic and the surreal with the sensibility of a comedian."

Bruce Sherman-Eyes and hands are particularly frequent among his figurative sculptures. “The eye has a lot to do with being aware of oneself and seeing; I’m hoping to tell a story visually rather than be didactic,” he says. He gestures to a figure with a tiny pair of eyeglasses and a cap covered in eyes, a sculpture he describes as a scholar, deep in thought. The hands, he says, stress the importance of prayer. “Working in clay is almost like a way of praying.”

This is evidenced by Sherman’s take on the mythological goddesses The Three Graces, which sees a trio of sculptures of cleaning ladies (one holds a small broom, two have tiny spray bottles). Or a past series, for which he created ceramic pieces inspired by the works of Jean Arp, and attached them to gold poles and stones. “Arp is very elevated,” he says, “my idea was to bring it down to Earth, so it’s ‘Arp on a Rock.’”

Jean/Hans Arp Jean (Hans) Arp was a French-German artist and poet known as a founding member of Dadaism. His abstract collages, paintings, and sculptures of organic forms were motivated by an interest in harnessing unconscious thought and parodying established ideas. “A painting or sculpture not modeled on any real object is every bit as concrete and sensuous as a leaf or a stone,” he once remarked. “But it is an incomplete art which privileges the intellect to the detriment of the senses.” Born Hans Peter Wilhelm Arp on September 16, 1886 in Strasbourg, Germany (present-day France), his mother was French and his father German—thus he used the first name Jean in French-speaking countries and Hans in German-speaking countries. During the 1910s, he was briefly involved in the milieu of Wassily Kandinsky and other members of the Der Blaue Reiter group in Munich, but moved to Zürich to avoid conscription into the German army during World War I. Here, Arp befriended Hugo Ball and met his future wife Sophie Taueber. During these years, the three of them participated in the famed Cabaret Voltaire and composed the Dadaist manifesto. The couple later relocated to France, where they collaborated with the Dutch artist Theo van Doesburg. World War II necessitated the two artists flee again to Switzerland, where Sophie died unexpectedly of carbon monoxide poisoning. Arp died on June 7, 1966 in Basel, Switzerland. Today, the artist’s works are held in the collections of the Tate Gallery in London, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, and the Art Institute of Chicago, among others.