You are on page 1of 1

Anton Cu Unjieng

Artist Statement:
I first learned pottery in the Philippines from Jon Pettyjohn, with whom I apprenticed, making
mugs, bowls, and other functional ware in his workshop. I continued to pursue making functional wares
throughout my bachelors at the Australian National Universitys School of Art, but also developed a
theoretical project of investigating the category of craft from the perspective of aesthetics. Informed by
formalist theories of art as well as the radical critiques of formalism by Marxism and variants of
reception theory, I began to develop an idea that what distinguishes studio crafts is an aesthetic that
functions through heteronomy. This can mean many things. It may refer to an aesthetic that is
embedded in life, rather than standing aloof from it; an art practice dedicated to the needs of the body;
an aesthetic practice that works by establishing relations between its objects and others or surrounding
spaces; or it can be a reminder of the inescapable accumulated history that both enables our practice
and threatens to stultify it. Of course, heteronomy is only tendential and relative it is a mode of
operation against which we push and pull. And for craftspeople as much as artist, working usually
involves guarding at least one kind of autonomy: the labour of the maker.
My approach to ceramics involves a theoretical and historical investigation of how this mode of
operation has played out in the works of the studio craft movement as well as a concerted attempt to
make objects that render this mode of operation visible. So my making practice remains fairly clearly
within the ambit of formalism it is an attempt to distill a principle which weakly determines (in
however contradictorily a way) the aesthetic functioning of craft objects. It differs, however from most
variants of formalism in one respect: it does not take this principle as part of the phenomenological
reality of a medium, but as a result of the social practice and institutionalization of the studio crafts and
the objects that come out of it. In my practice, therefore, I try not only to make objects which seem to
call for heteronomous aesthetic relations, but also to display them in ways that encourage the
establishment of such relations: usually in groupings or by interactions with their environment.

You might also like