Toni De Jesus

It has been common to describe craft’s position as a borderline area between fine art and design. I prefer to call this area an ‘intervening space’ or, to be more precise, the space between function and non-function, tradition and breaking with tradition, craftsmanship-based art and idea-based art.
 
In the modern and post-modern periods, the home has been both an important and an undervalued location for encountering art, particularly ceramics. Important because the domestic space is the traditional site for encountering it, and undervalued because of connotations of craft belonging to the female sphere, a place of utility, of low financial value, and small-scale to enable its display within the home.
 
Questions raised by this discourse resonate through my practice, a fusion of coil building and levels of flux cause the boundary of each form to literally oscillate as if in response to attempts at fixed definition.